In four recent articles, Phyllis Zagano has renewed her long-standing argument for admitting women to the ordained diaconate. Writing in America, The Tablet, Religion News Service, and Commonweal, she presses a consistent claim: the historical evidence for women deacons is substantial, the Church has never definitively prohibited their ordination to the diaconate, and the non-sacerdotal character of the diaconate leaves the question open despite the Church’s definitive teaching on priestly ordination.
This article is offered as a respectful response. Zagano’s scholarship deserves serious engagement, but I believe her argument gives historical reconstruction a theological weight it cannot bear and treats the diaconate with insufficient attention to the unity of Holy Orders.
The issue is clearest in her July Commonweal essay, where Zagano writes that the question “is not now, and never really has been, whether women can be ordained as deacons. The question is whether they should be so ordained.” That formulation moves too quickly. Before the Church can ask whether she should confer diaconal ordination on women, she must first determine whether she has received from Christ the authority to do so. Sacraments are not ecclesial instruments whose essential form the Church creates. They are gifts received, guarded, celebrated, and authoritatively interpreted within the apostolic Tradition.
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