WOMEN AND DIACONAL MINISTRY. A POSSIBLE MINISTRY FOR A NEW CHURCH

Sa？etak The twofold question of the possibility and the opportunity to order women deacons in the Catholic Church has been dealt with frequently in the last two years, both on the pages of newspapers and high-disclosure Catholic journals; it has been relaunched on blogs interested in feminine and feminist issues, Christian and not; it is of interest to theologians of various Christian confessions, both men and women, and it involves historians and scholars of ancient Christian literature, as well as experts in sociology of religions and cultural anthropology. The intervention of Msgr. J.P. Durocher in the Synod on the Family, in October 2015, helped hasten the resumption of this question, but it were the request made by a religious sister from the International Union of Superiors General to pope Francis the following May and the manifest willingness shown by the pope to confront the theme that have actually brought the discussion on women deacons / deaconesses back in public context. A Study Commission on the Women’s diaconate, appointed by the pope and set up on August 2nd, 2016, was entrusted with an uneasy task to provide contributions and identify orientations on the subject. In fact, the historical, patristic and theological-systematic research on the subject is already rich with hundreds of contributions, many of which are wide-ranging; from the first post-conciliar time onwards, proposals of reflection from bishops originating in different countries have joined the requests coming from the base of the Church, although in the last two decades the confrontation undoubtedly remained confined to restricted groups of theologians and pastors, more aware of the present ecclesiastic challenges and more informed of the chances offered by the ecclesiastical Tradition. Rebuilding the trajectories of the post-conciliar debate on ministerial ordination of women helps identifying the paradigms and the theological categories adopted to think about the female diaconate and allows to understand the open questions around which the positions of different authors have polarized. The novelty of the teaching of Vatican II on the theological reason of the ordained ministry and on the reinterpretation of the specificity of ministerial figures of bishops, priests and deacons appears, starting precisely from the post-conciliar confrontation, as an indispensable reference horizon in order to propose the figure of “women deacons” as possible and necessary