I READ this article in the UK magazine The Tablet.
Francis gave an interview of 4,000 words on March 9 to some reporters in Germany. He said: “In many communities at the moment, committed women are preserving Sunday as a day of worship by holding services of the Word but a Church without the Eucharist has no strength.
Francis admitted that the lack of vocations in the priesthood was an “enormous problem, which ordaining proven married men might help to solve.”
Francis said he would explain in detail what had happened. At his meeting with the International Union of Superiors, in May 2016, one Superior had suggested that a commission be set up to study the women’s diaconate in the Early Church in order to find out whether women deacons were ordained or not and what sort of work they did.
Francis had agreed that this would be a good opportunity to study the subject. He had then chosen people for the commission from two lists, one from the Superior who had made the suggestion and the other from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Muller. “I chose people who I thought were the most open and the most competent. It is a matter of studying the subject and not of opening a door”. the Pope underlined.
Up to now, he went on, the commission had found that in the Early Church women deacons had helped at baptisms, at the anointing of women who were sick and “if a woman complained to her bishop that she had been beaten by her husband, the bishop sent a woman deacon to examine the woman’s bruises”. Francis said he planned to call in on the next commission meeting and inform himself on how the matter stood.
Francis also explained that he did not consider Cardinal Raymond Burke an adversary.
Earlier this year, the Pope sidelined Burke as patron of the Knights of Malta by re-instating a Grand Chancellor whose removal Burke had supported.
“I have not taken away his title of Patron. It is a matter of clearing things in the Order up a little and that is why I sent a delegate who has a different charism to Burke.
The bishops’ conference president Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said he thought Francis was thinking of ordaining proven married men for remote areas like the Amazon Rain Forest where the priest shortage was “extreme” and Catholics could only receive the Eucharist once a year or so.
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