A Vatican statement said the pope chose to set up the commission, made of six men and six women members under a president who is a bishop, “after intense prayer and mature reflection”.
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A deacon is one position below a priest.
Married men who serve as deacons can preach and preside over weddings, baptisms and funerals.
“Once again, the pope is demonstrating a lamentable and unsafe ignorance of a subject that is literally a matter of life and death to some people”, Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, a group of LGBT Catholics, told the Washington Blade on Tuesday.
Francis and his predecessors have ruled out allowing women to become priests.
“God created man and woman; God created the world like this and we are doing the exact opposite”.
According to The Catholic Herald, Francis linked gender theory with human exploitation more broadly, saying that the common root of these issues is a failure to appreciate God’s design in humanity.
“Today, in schools they are teaching this to children-to children!-that everyone can choose their gender”, he said in the private meeting.
Most of the group are theologians and university professors.
With the Olympic Games 2016 getting underway in Rio Saturday, August 6th, Pope Francis told all those involved to “fight the good fight” and complete the race together.
Women as leaders in church.
While the commission might open the door to change, some analysts have said it is too early to conclude that Francis will permit women deacons, and have noted that the church has resisted the move in the past.
Scholars debate whether or not deaconesses were on par with male deacons, or if they were only ordained to tend to other women.
The Pope has created an worldwide commission to study the the theological arguments for women as deacons and to study the role of women as deacons in history during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries.
This won’t be the first time the Vatican has studied the possibility of women deacons in recent decades.
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“They take the grace of the altar to the streets and bring back the needs of the street to the altar”, he said, adding that deacons’ wives are collaborators with their husbands and are as involved in programs and projects.
