Building resilience to stay the course

For this week’s reflection, I want to share about the experiences of two leaders in our network—we’ll call them Olympias and Nonna in honor of two historical women deacons—who have been doing their part to grow the conversation about women deacons in their local communities. I think their journeys in their communities have something to offer all of us as we prepare to share the good news of St. Phoebe and Paragraph 60 in our communities in September and beyond.

Olympias is an active member in a parish with a longstanding practice of inviting women ministers to break open the Word during Mass and where there is strong support for women deacons from the pulpit and pews alike. For many people in this parish, the question of whether the Holy Spirit is calling the Church to restore the practice of ordaining women as deacons is a no-brainer: “YES! How are we even still having this conversation?!” Though there is broad support for women deacons at the parish, Olympias has been finding that there’s also a growing sense of fatigue: “Pope Francis said no [in his 60 Minutes interview]; why are we still talking about this?” How should Olympias address this kind of fatigue in her community, she wondered?

Several hundred miles away, Nonna has been hard at work in her parish, where a change of pastors meant that they went from hosting a vibrant St. Phoebe Day celebration in 2023 to being told on the heels of Pope Francis’ 60 Minutes interview in 2024 that they could not host any sort of celebration. Where many of us would have been tempted to have thrown up our hands in defeat, Nonna continued to follow the discernment about women deacons and to cultivate a relationship with her pastor. This year, when she approached him again about celebrating St. Phoebe Day in September, he was open to the conversation, acknowledging that Paragraph 60 of the Synod’s Final Document did in fact indicate that this discernment remained open. Nonna’s commitment to staying the course—to staying in relationship, to listening to her pastor’s concerns and responding thoughtfully and creatively—has helped to open a window when she found herself before a shut door.

Inspired by Olympias’ and Nonna’s examples, we are tasked with the hard but invaluable work of building resilience in ourselves and in our communities to stay the course through the headwinds. And there will be headwinds! Pope Francis’ 60 Minutes interview was a significant headwind—which makes Paragraph 60 all the more of a miraculous tailwind! Paragraph 60 of the Synod’s Final Document, which belongs to the Church’s magisterium, is the most explicit permission we’ve had yet to have this conversation about women deacons—in public, with our clergy, with parrhesia. And we would not have gotten Paragraph 60 if we had given into despair at 60 Minutes. 

Whether our faith community more closely resembles that of Olympias or Nonna, the slow pace of change can tempt us to turn our backs on the Church’s process and do our own thing. “Why bother?” we might ask ourselves when we find that we can’t walk through a door we had assumed we’d find wide open.

Though it may not be open wide enough for us to walk our Church all the way through, with Paragraph 60 we know that the door to the discernment about women deacons is decidedly not closed. This is something worth celebrating! But it comes with great responsibility, because it asks us to be the ones to grow the conversation. Put another way, if we all start acting as though the door to the conversation about women deacons is closed, we risk making it so. Perhaps we, the Nonnas and Olympiases, are the ones holding the door open.

I hope you’ll join Discerning Deacons in just under a month at our virtual Feast of St. Phoebe Prayer and Celebration. Hundreds of people are already registered, with nearly 50 Catholic universities, associations, parishes, religious orders, and other organizations signed on as Participating Organizations. Together, we’ll pray for St. Phoebe’s intercession for our synodal church—and we’ll invite you to consider how you might be called to keep the door open on the discernment about women deacons. 

And when the headwinds come—because they always will—we will make it through them together, entrusting ourselves to the protagonism of the Holy Spirit and to the intercession of all the diaconal women who have gone before us.