By Aisha S. Taylor

Recent scholarship has provided evidence that women served as deacons, priests and bishops in the early church. The evidence is strong that from at least the 3rd to the 9th centuries, women were ordained as deacons in the Catholic Church. While this is not the linchpin in the case for women’s ordination, it provides tangible proof that women are capable of receiving holy orders.

Citing this scholarship, some Catholic reform groups advocate for the restoration of women deacons as a first, doable step toward women's full equality in the church. While it is true that many strategies are needed in order to bring about full justice and equality for women in the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to keep the larger picture in view. Although the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC) supports organizations that work for women deacons, we continue our 33-year tradition of calling for women to be admitted to all ordained ministries and for the creation of a church that is fully inclusive, participatory, and accountable to its members.

In the past forty years, women’s roles in the church have greatly expanded. As of 2005, women comprise roughly 80% of U.S. lay ministers. They are doing much of the work that used to be the exclusive domain of priests, such as parish administration, liturgical planning, catechesis, faith formation, and more. Women are eucharistic ministers and girls are altar servers in every U.S. diocese except Lincoln, Nebraska. Certainly this is progress for women in the church. If women were ordained as deacons, this would be a sign of progress as well.

To make a parallel to the secular women’s movement, in 1920, suffragists rightly celebrated the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. However, the reality was that women of color in most places in the country were still not able to vote. In addition, the Equal Rights Amendment had not even been written, and the U.S. Constitution still does not guarantee that equal rights will not be denied on account of sex. Does this mean that the 19th Amendment should not have been passed until all women were equal in every aspect of society? No, but it does mean that there were many more protests to organize, complicated issues to discuss, and strategies to develop. There was much work to be done.

In the same way, if women were ordained to the diaconate today, women would still be regarded as second class citizens in the church, the structures would continue to be stifling and exclusionary, and a powerful group of men would continue to run one of the most influential religious institutions in the world. There would still be much work to be done.

Since the diaconate is a permanent office, women deacons would not be able to seek priesthood. This would be fine for some women, but many other women experience the call to priesthood and other offices in church leadership. Would the ordination of women as deacons portend an unequal servanthood for women? Would this "first step" actually become a stumbling block for further activism? Would it take another thousand years to ordain women as priests? Does it seem like begging for crumbs to ask to be admitted to the diaconate? And finally, what would women's ordination to the diaconate actually do to change the disfunctional structure of the church?

These questions are essential to consider and discuss.

A major part of my concern -- and a concern of the women's ordination movment for many years -- is the lack of structural change that the success of this strategy would bring. Women deacons would be at the bottom rung of the hierarchy. We want to create justice and equality for Catholic women. Women should be able to follow their calls from God and their community to be ministers in a renewed and inclusive church. The church needs to change so that an elite minority of ordained, celibate men are not making decisions for the majority of the world’s one billion Catholics.

Those of us who want women's full humanity to be respected and honored in the church need to support the goals of admitting women to all ordained ministries and of renewing the church. But until women have an equal place at the decision-making table in the church—indeed, until all members have a place—WOC will work to change the church to reflect Jesus' values, specifically his radical views on women and his taboo-breaking actions to empower women as leaders. There is much work to be done.

Aisha S. Taylor served as WOC's Executive Director from December 2005 until June 2009.