CV NEWS FEED // At the U.S. bishops’ plenary assembly this week, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego proposed that the bishops’ conference set up a task force to study and implement “synodality” throughout the Church in America.
The Cardinal made the proposal on Tuesday during the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) meeting in Baltimore. Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark supported it. Cardinal McElroy said that Bishop Daniel Flores, who attended the Synod on Synodality in Rome, should be in charge of the task force.
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Cardinals McElroy and Cupich first floated the idea in an October 27 interview with National Catholic Reporter (NCR), just hours after the final Papal Mass concluding the Synod on Synodality in Rome.
“This has to come in at the top of the list,” Cardinal Cupich said in the interview, maintaining that the American bishops’ conference must hold itself “accountable for building a synodal, missionary church.”
In that interview, both cardinals voiced support for ordaining women to the diaconate, a position Pope John Paul II definitively ruled out in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which states that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women to the priesthood.
According to NCR, the San Diego cardinal emphasized that, per the Synod’s final document, the question of a female diaconate remains, to him, an open question.
“I myself am in favor of women being ordained to the diaconate, and I hope to see that happen,” Cardinal McElroy told NCR.
The Reporter also stated that, according to Cardinal Cupich, because Pope Francis signed the Synod’s final document and made it his own and the document states that ordination of women to the diaconate needs further “discernment”, this means the Pope favors keeping the question open.
“No one should try to mischaracterize this,” the Chicago cardinal said, according to NCR.
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Cardinal McElroy has long voiced public support of a female diaconate. In a 2019 interview with NCR, he said he hoped the pope’s revival of the study commission on women at the end of the Amazon Synod would lead to “a conclusion that it is not prohibited to ordain women to the diaconate.”
Asked his own opinion on the question of women deacons, Cardinal McElroy said, “I’m in favor of it,” according to NCR.
Vatican analyst and papal biographer George Weigel criticized the progressive agenda that he said was plainly manifest at the Synod on Synodality, including the question of ordaining women to the diaconate. According to Weigel, expectations were artificially raised around the topic.
In an article for First Things titled “Overhyped, Overmanaged, Underwhelming—and Providentially Heartening,” he called a female diaconate “a non-starter theologically,” referring to Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
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Weigel further criticized what he called “the Catholic Lite agenda at Synod-2024 — the affirmation of the teaching authority of national bishops’ conferences, the endorsement of a female diaconate understood as part of Holy Orders, the LGBTQ+ program, proportionalist moral theology that dumbs down the moral life.”
The Catholic theologian wrote that he was encouraged by the fact that this agenda of progressive voices in the Church “did not gain anything resembling consensus, even in a Synod as carefully arranged and managed as this one,” which he attributed to “the work of the Holy Spirit.”
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