Joshua announces his decision to serve the Lord in this Sunday’s first reading, but so do the people he leads. Lynne Mapes-Riordan of St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Evanston, Illinois hopes women will one day again serve the church as deacons. After 800 years, she could be one of the first.

Unlike the church's policy barring priestly ordination for women, the possibility of female ordination to the deaconate remains an open question. Some scholars say female deacons wouldn't be a novel idea but the restoration of a tradition abandoned centuries ago.

After meeting last winter with members of her parish, including Mapes-Riordan, Chicago Cardinal Francis George reportedly promised to raise the question in Rome during his visit this year. The idea of female deacons "is being talked about very slowly," George said earlier this year during a forum at Chicago's Union League Club in response to a question about the future likelihood of female priests. "The diaconate is a more open question."

"In a strange way, I don't see this being about women," said Mapes-Riordan, a lawyer, wife, mother of two, and longtime parishioner at St. Nicholas. "I see it as being about church and mission.”

Taking a perspective expressed in this Sunday’s selection from the Letter to the Ephesians, that “in reference to Christ and the church" "we are members of his body,” Mapes-Riordan said: “We have this part of a puzzle, this piece, that I'm not going to say is missing, but we could have a fuller picture if [letting women become deacons] was added. I don't see it as a women's issue. I see it as a matter for our church."

"It's a message of hope. It's a way to stay within the boundaries of Catholic teachings and have women with real preaching authority within the system," said Phyllis Zagano, one of the American church's leading researchers on the subject of female deacons.

Zagano and other scholars argue that the diaconate of the early church included both men and women. In fact, they say Saint Paul chose a female deacon, Phoebe, to deliver his most important epistle to the Romans, explaining the concept of salvation through Jesus Christ.

 

Source: An article by Manya A. Brachear for the Chicago Tribune