A Numerical Necessity
I appreciated the symposium on women and the priesthood in the May 2024 issue. Regarding Charlotte Allen’s response in the September 2024 issue (“A Such-As-It-Was Church”), I suggest that the Pew Research Center survey results about openness to women priests among Catholics would likely be different in a diocese that was in the process of closing parishes and very different in a parish that was about to close. To me, women who are discerning a religious vocation would serve the Church well by being able to officiate at weddings, baptisms, or funerals. Whether as a deaconess, a catechist, a parish-life coordinator, or with some other title is of less interest to me. What is important is that each diocese have a serious conversation about the number of available priests in 2034 and work to reduce the number of otherwise viable parishes that are closed. Restructuring plans that don’t involve women simply will not work as well as more inclusive plans.
Joe Bruno
Indianapolis, Ind.
Yes in the Grassroots
Support, Charlotte Allen writes, is “not in the grassroots.” I strongly, but respectfully, disagree. There is growing grassroots support for ordination of women to the diaconate. From Amazonia, where bishops send unordained women to do diaconal work because there is no one else. From leaders of religious communities of women. In global reports of synodal conversations with ordinary Catholics, because someone asked their dreams for our Church and gave them a safe space to answer. From synod delegates who listened widely, pondered prayerfully, and labeled the matter “urgent.”
What is missing (because no one asks) are voices of “grassroots” women aching to do more than is now allowed to them—not only in parishes, but in hospitals, care facilities, prisons, and the military, where women do not have the institutional standing that diaconal orders would provide. These are women of vision and practical imagination: “Your daughters will see visions and dream dreams.” They understand the times, the Church, and those at its margins, including our youth, but do not typically weigh in on the public debate. It is not always safe to do so, and they are busy serving.
When asked in listening sessions, “What difference would it make to our Church and this parish if women were ordained deacons?” parishioners’ deep desires are not ideological. They hunger for ministry and the Word lovingly preached by those who see them and their lives, without regard to gender. Not members of academe or activists, these are ordinary Catholics rooted in the Gospel who lack words when their children and grandchildren resist a Church that looks and acts as it does. Curious about St. Phoebe and women’s early diaconal service, what they learn dispels antiquated cultural blinders.
Grassroots movement? Yes—for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It comes in the Spirit’s whisper, “Receive her in the Lord.”
Suzanne Gagné Bregman
Lafayette, Calif.
More than a Stepping Stone
Charlotte Allen’s disappointing approach to the question of women’s ordination misrepresents the diaconate as solely “a stepping stone to the priesthood that includes preaching and administering some sacraments.” The Second Vatican Council partially restored the diaconate as a permanent order and, as Lumen gentium points out, deacons are ordained “not unto the priesthood, but to the ministry.” Despite requests from Council Fathers, the restoration of women to the ordained diaconate was delayed for further study. While the International Theological Commission had looked favorably at the question in the early 1970s, and again during its 1992 to 1997 session, it finally published an inconclusive opinion in 2002 stating that the question was up to “the Magisterium” to determine. The clear distinction between the priesthood and the diaconate is presented in the Catechism, and in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI codified the diaconate as a permanent and distinct order with his Apostolic letter Omnium in mentem (2009). Pope Francis called two commissions, one from 2016 to 2018 and a second from 2020 to 2022, but even the commissioners have not seen the final documents he received. Allen’s conclusion that “few women sitting in the pews seem to care that much” belies the fact that Commonweal and so many others have devoted so much space to the issue.
Phyllis Zagano, PhD
Senior Research Associate-in-Residence
Department of Religion
Hofstra University
Hempstead, N.Y.
Glorious Pools
Jordan Burke’s article on Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma (“Hard Swerves,” September) and its words on swimming brought to mind a favorite writer of mine. Kate Jennings’s “Pools, Pools, Glorious Pools” (Bad Manners, 1993) links swimming with “our aspirations—material and spiritual,” which “are writ large in our pools.” Below is an extract:
“Some people can describe meals they have had in minute detail; I am that way with pools. On the top of my list is the Boy Charlton Pool in my hometown of Sydney, wedged between the Botanic Gardens and the harbour. The Royal Australian Navy parks its fleet next to it, or did the last time I was there, so you swim in shadows cast by battleships. Unlike most American pools, it isn’t heated, so the water is bracing. I am not as keen on that aspect as I once was; living in the United States has made me softer than sponge cake. I will say this: cold water gets you moving….
“Joan Didion has written that people in the rain-starved American West regard swimming pools not as ‘a symbol of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye.’ Australians would view an explanation like that with suspicion—a little cerebral—but that doesn’t mean our attitude is any less exalted. With even higher temperatures and less rain than the West, we think of pools, along with football ovals and cricket grounds, as cornerstones of civilisation.”
Pam Connor
Belconnen, Australia
Crackle & Clarity
What Jared Marcel Pollen (“‘Out of the Vortex,’” September 2024) missed is the sheer crackle, strength, persistence, rhythm, and humble, cutting clarity of David Jones’s language as he accompanies a soldier, Ball, through the circumstances and legendary and historical levels of the war. In Parenthesis is a book that, once picked up, picks you up, as the sound of its language carries you through so much that you don’t—can’t ever—understand. Nevertheless, you stand with that unfolding, breathing, coughing, spitting, even silent language that takes you to a place where Eliot, Auden, even Yeats, had to take off their shoes. Critic Pollen leads us there, but the book takes us further into territory Jones burned his feet to go to. These sentences I lay out in tribute to Commonweal for bringing Jones round again to our attention.
Peter Bonneville DuBrul
Bethlehem, Palestine
