Celebrating the opening of the archives of her work on women in the diaconate at Loyola University Chicago’s Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, scholar Phyllis Zagano minced no words about the topic that has been her life’s project: “Women as deacons is not a concept for the future. Women as deacons is a concept for the present, for today.”
With women’s ordination being a sensitive topic in Catholic circles, Zagano carefully lays out her argument for restoring what for many centuries was an official role of women in the ancient church, rejecting a “slippery slope” argument that claims women deacons would mean eventual women priests. “We have this misunderstanding that the diaconate is only a step on the way to priesthood,” she says. “The diaconate is a separate vocation, and one doesn’t imply the other.”
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