The issue of women priests may be a settled matter, but that doesn’t mean a woman can’t serve the church as a deacon.

Celebrating the opening of the archives of her work on women in the diaconate at Loyola University Chicago’s Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, scholar Phyllis Zagano minced no words about the topic that has been her life’s project: “Women as deacons is not a concept for the future. Women as deacons is a concept for the present, for today.”

With women’s ordination being a sensitive topic in Catholic circles, Zagano carefully lays out her argument for restoring what for many centuries was an official role of women in the ancient church, rejecting a “slippery slope” argument that claims women deacons would mean eventual women priests. “We have this misunderstanding that the diaconate is only a step on the way to priesthood,” she says. “The diaconate is a separate vocation, and one doesn’t imply the other.”

Despite her advocacy Zagano doesn’t think every bishop needs to ordain women as deacons tomorrow, noting that some dioceses still don’t ordain men to the permanent diaconate. “One bishop may feel he needs women deacons; another bishop may feel he doesn’t,” she says. “But if the archbishop of Chicago thought he needed women as deacons, why would he not be allowed to have them?”

If anything, Zagano says, women deacons are worth a try. “As I said to [New York] Cardinal John O’Connor 20 years ago, ‘I’ll give you my life as an experiment. Just see what happens.’ ”

What obstacles are there in current church teaching or law that would prevent the ordination of a woman as a deacon?

The principal obstacle is that women have not been ordained as deacons in the Western church for at least 800 years. In current canon law women cannot be ordained as anything. It’s as simple as that.

There is a collision between the tradition of the church and the law of the church on this question. What is admitted by all sides—both those for and against it—is that it’s an open question.

I’m confident in saying that because the most recent discussion coming from the Vatican about this topic is a 72-page study document by the International Theological Commission, which had one conclusion: It’s up to the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church, to decide.

In New York in the late 1980s I was at a meeting with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and discussed the issue with him briefly. He said, “It’s under study.”

To my mind the study has just gone on too long. So I think the biggest obstacle is inertia, and perhaps a misunderstanding of the diaconate and how women in the diaconate could further the objective need for greater evangelization.

Some say that if women can’t be ordained priests, they can’t be ordained deacons. What’s the connection between those two?

What used to be called the “progression of orders”—deacon, priest, and bishop—developed late in the history of the church, and it isn’t helpful today. It’s better to understand the deacon as one of the arms of the bishop; the other arm is the priest. They are separate orders in the church.

One doesn’t imply the other. When you ordain a man a permanent deacon today, there’s no expectation that he would become a priest. A deacon is not a priest. The diaconate is a separate vocation, one that was lived by men and women in the ancient church, and is lived today by men.

But isn’t there a fear that if you ordained a woman as a deacon, you could ordain her a priest, too?

I wrote a book called Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate (Crossroad) at the request of my old boss, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York. I brought my outline to him, and I think I had six points.

He said, “Phyllis, if you’ve proved a woman can be ordained a deacon, you’ve proved she can be ordained a priest.” I said, “Eminence, I’m not allowed to talk about women priests. Why are you bringing that up?” He said, “Oh, that’s very good. Make that point three.”

The cardinal was very clear in that discussion that the slippery slope was a fear of Rome. I simply say ordaining women as priests is just not the teaching of our church. But that doesn’t mean a woman isn’t ordainable.

To say that a woman is not ordainable and cannot serve in persona Christi—as a deacon, in the person of Christ the servant—is to argue against the incarnation. The important thing is not that Christ became male. It’s that Christ became human. If we say that a woman cannot live in persona Christi, I think we’re making a terribly negative comment about the female gender.

That is the so-called iconic argument against women in the priesthood: You have to be male to represent Jesus. That argument is no longer used. The argument church teaching uses today is the argument from authority, which is that Christ called forth only men as apostles.

That is what Pope John Paul II said in 1994, that the church does not have the authority to ordain a woman as a priest, because Christ did not choose women for membership among the Twelve.

And that doesn’t apply to women deacons?

The argument from authority doesn’t hold for women deacons because in Acts the first seven who are generally understood as the first deacons were called forth by the apostles, not by Christ. They were put forward by the people of the church and received a laying on of hands from the apostles. Further, the only person in all of scripture who has the job title “deacon” is Phoebe, a woman.

The argument from authority against ordaining women as priests is actually an argument for ordaining women as deacons. I don’t think you can accept one and not the other.

How do bishops respond when you suggest ordaining women as deacons?

When I ask them to ordain me, they always say they want to keep their jobs. That’s a change in the response. It used to be, “That can’t happen.”

I think it’s more important to look through the eyes of the bishop as he looks at the needs of the diocese and how they are being fulfilled by whatever cadre of ordained or other ministers he calls forth. That, to me, is the bottom line on the need for women to be ordained: the needs of the church.

We have in the United States 35,000 lay ecclesial ministers, of whom something like 80 or 85 percent are women. We have in the United States about 16,500 permanent deacons, most of whom are married men.

But of the women who minister in the church, none has the particular relationship between herself and her ministry and the bishop. So she’s not exactly an arm of the bishop. She’s literally at arm’s length from the bishop as a lay ecclesial minister.

Many dioceses have wonderful programs of certifying lay ecclesial ministers. But with the diaconate, there’s a specific progression of formation—the spiritual, the human, the intellectual, and the pastoral—that is under the control of the bishop. So if a woman is then trained by the bishop in his program and is formed spiritually, humanly, intellectually, and pastorally, then in ordaining her the bishop is certifying, in a way, that he trusts her.