Vatican's Rejection of Female Deacons Contradicts Jesus Example of a Love that Embraces All by Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP

 The Vatican’s recent declaration that women cannot be ordained as deacons—and that the priesthood is “definitively closed to women”—rests on the deeply disturbing claim that Christ’s masculinity is essential to ordained ministry. This argument is not only theologically weak; it reveals a profound failure to recognize the Divine shining through women’s lives, bodies, gifts, and Spirit-filled callings. It reduces the Incarnation to biology rather than proclaiming the Gospel truth that God became human—not male—to reveal a love that embraces all. This decree makes women second class-citizens in a male-dominant clerical Church. 

From the beginning, Jesus shattered the boundaries of patriarchal religion. He entrusted the first proclamation of Resurrection to Mary Magdalene, commissioned women as preachers and leaders, and formed a community of equals grounded not in gender hierarchy but in mutuality, justice, and love. To deny women’s full inclusion in sacramental ministry is to deny the very pattern of discipleship Jesus lived and taught. It is not women who are diminished by this exclusion—it is the Church itself, which shrinks its own sacramental imagination and silences the Spirit still speaking through the baptized.

All people are created in the full image and likeness of God. When the Church refuses to recognize women’s sacramental authority, it wounds its own credibility, distorts the Gospel, and turns away from the living Christ breaking bread in women’s hands around open tables across the world. This moment calls the Church not to double down on fear, but to rise into courageous fidelity to the radical inclusivity of Jesus, who never once excluded women from God’s call.