On March 10, 2026, the General Secretariat of the Synod published a report on “the participation of women in the life and leadership of the church,” as part of its progressive release of study group and commission reports. The report comes from Study Group 5, which was established following the first general assembly of the Synod on Synodality. The group’s work during the synod’s second general assembly in October 2024 was the subject of significant contention, particularly because it addressed the question of women deacons. 

The question of women deacons, however, is not to be found in the report published on March 10. Instead, as was announced last October, the issue was referred to a reactivated papal study commission on women deacons formed in 2020. The study group report acknowledges this and says that “conclusions of this study were published on 4 December 2025 in a letter from Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, President of the Commission.”

Many media outlets reported on the publication of that letter (which was released solely in Italian) as what they termed a “decision” on women deacons. Cardinal Petrocchi was not available for questions at that time.

In fact, there was no “decision” in the Petrocchi letter. The commission was organized to study the question of women deacons, not to decide anything about it, and the conclusions that Cardinal Petrocchi’s letter reports are considerably more complicated than a simple decision for or against women deacons.

The publication of the Study Group 5 report is an opportune time to recall that the synod’s final document, adopted by Pope Francis into his magisterium, said “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.” The unavailability of the Pettrochi letter in languages other than Italian limited the possibility for that discernment. For that reason, a colleague and I undertook a complete translation of the letter, presented here as a downloadable PDF.

Summary of the Study Commission Report on the Female DiaconateDownload

Part of the reason the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open, of course, is that the church has never promulgated a doctrine that specifically forbids the ordination of women as deacons. In fact, the church has never issued a document that explicitly addresses the question.

In the Catholic Church, the question has been circling for half a century. In 1973, a few members of Pope Paul VI’s Commission on the Role of Women in Society and the Church struggled and failed to get it considered. During the following decades, the International Theological Commission made some attempts to consider the issue, with limited success in the face of Vatican reluctance to address the question. Eventually, in 2002, the sixth International Theological Commission held that the question was for the magisterium to decide. Neither Pope John Paul II nor his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, brought the issue forward. Then, in 2016, three years into his pontificate, Pope Francis reopened the discussion.

So, too, have the Eastern Orthodox churches shown signs of renewing their ancient tradition of ordaining women to the diaconate. For example, the Most Rev. Seraphim (Kykkotis), the Metropolitan of the Archdiocese of Zimbabwe in eastern Africa, part of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa, ordained a married woman named Angelique Phoebe a deaconess on May 4, 2024, using the same Greek Orthodox liturgy he uses for male deacons. 

Pope Francis’ Two Commissions

Pope Francis named two commissions on women deacons, one each in 2016 and 2020. The first was established at the request of the International Union of Superiors General, an ecclesial group of leaders of institutes of women religious. I served on that initial commission, which met four times between 2016 and 2018. 

In May 2019, Pope Francis gave a portion of the first commission report to the U.I.S.G. leadership. He said they could do with it what they wished and that he had more documents they could request. The U.I.S.G. has neither published what it received nor requested the rest of the first commission’s work.

Immediately following the October 2019 Amazon synod, Francis said he would recall that first commission, adding a few members. However, in April 2020, he named a new 10-member commission. The reports from the regular meetings of the second commission (Sept. 13-21, 2021, and July 11-16, 2022) remain unpublished.

Participants in the Synod on Synodality, called in October 2021, were told initially and throughout that they would not be discussing doctrinal matters. Both monthlong synod sessions included the question of women deacons in their working documents, affirming that the question was—and is—a matter of praxis, not of doctrine. However, the question was referred by the Vatican to Study Group 5, one of several established between the first (October 2023) and second (October 2024) synod assemblies.

The question of women deacons figured prominently in synod discussion inside and outside the assembly, and members of the Synod on Synodality twice requested the reports of each commission, since they had never been published after those commissions’ meetings—but those reports were not provided. Nevertheless, the synod’s final document states, “There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the church: what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped. Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue” (No. 60).

Both the Synod Office and Study Group 5 received additional comments and documentation. However, the question of women deacons was instead referred to the second Vatican commission, which was reactivated in February 2025.

The Petrocchi Letter

The Petrocchi letter from December presents a summary of votes by anonymous commissioners apparently taken during the second commission’s two regular meetings in 2021 and 2022, as well as during its additional Feb. 2-7, 2025, meeting. The letter’s vote tallies indicate that not all commissioners were present for all votes and, therefore, for discussions of all materials. While the names of the 10 commissioners (five men and five women) were published, one ill member was replaced before the first meeting, two missed the second meeting, and one member died before the 2025 session. The number of people voting fluctuates: 10 at the first meeting, eight at the second, and 10 at the third.

Presented as a report of the second commission’s work, the Petrocchi letter does not include historical, theological, or anthropological documentation or analysis of the question and digresses from the question of women deacons. It reports that the commission preferred to recommend “new ministries” for women, a preference seemingly reflected in Study Group 5’s report. Further, an early footnote in the Petrocchi letter links the theology of the diaconate and that of the priesthood—something not reflected in church teaching. Such a conflation of the diaconate and the priesthood is not found in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “Lumen Gentium,” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church or in Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 motu proprio, “Omnium in Mentem.” Instead, all three sources affirm that the diaconate is a ministry distinct from the priesthood.

History, Theology, Anthropology

The letter is rooted in a theory of “unicity of orders,” which links the diaconate to the priesthood and argues that because the church teaches that women cannot be ordained as priests, they therefore cannot be ordained as deacons. While women were ordained as deacons in the early church, throughout much of church history, no one could be ordained as a deacon unless he (and only he) expected to be ordained as a priest. The cursus honorum, the medieval steps or stages toward priestly ordination (tonsure, lector, porter, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest), solidified during the 12th century in Gratian’s Decretum, a canon law compendium. Four centuries later, the Council of Trent attempted to end that strict linkage, but only following Vatican II did the diaconate as a permanent vocation fully return to the Roman Catholic Church.

The Petrocchi letter quotes one sentence from the unpublished report of the first commission to support its historical analysis. It asserts “unanimous” agreement at the first meeting that the “female diaconate…does not appear to have possessed a sacramental character.” However, the vote reported from the second meeting of the Petrocchi commission included seven in favor of that proposition, with one abstention. Another vote reported from the second meeting, apparently attended by only eight members, asserts a “strong” assessment against women deacons. 

Having linked the priesthood and the diaconate, the Petrocchi letter proceeds to consider the question of how women can represent Christ (language also used for the priesthood). The 2002 International Theological Commission document on the diaconate had already used the term in persona Christi servi, “in the person of Christ the servant,” to describe deacons’ ministry. This term was used instead of the previously used “in the name of the Church” or of the hierarchy. 

But the letter does not recognize that the assumption and implied negative argument on which it relies—that women cannot represent Christ as priests, and therefore also not as deacons—restricts understandings of the humanity of women. While the letter asserts that creating new ministries for women in the church would “constitute a prophetic sign, especially where women still suffer situations of gender discrimination,” restricting women to non-ordained ministries could produce the opposite effect, as the document could be understood as stating that women are not made in the image and likeness of God.

Because the commission votes are not fully reported in the Petrocchi letter, and because the commission itself had uneven attendance, it is impossible to trace any development of the “thematic nuclei,” as the letter calls the key concepts under discussion. The letter also cites an additional document, the “Final Document of the Commission on the Diaconate of Women, 7 February 2025,” in support of its dismissive commentary on materials submitted to Study Group 5, but that document also remains unpublished.

The letter acknowledges, but appears to dismiss, what it calls “theological and cultural currents that support the opening of the diaconate to women,” because “they are often in conflict with the Tradition…of admitting only baptized men to the Sacrament of Orders” and some submissions to the synod argued for the inclusion of women in the ordained priesthood. These “currents” include: Gen 1:27 (which describes male and female as created in the image of God), Gal 3:28 (which states that all are one in Christ Jesus), the equal dignity of both genders and the importance of social development relative to the status of women. 

The letter also connects the “masculinity of Christ” with what it terms “the nuptial meaning of salvation,” arguing that “the masculinity of Christ and therefore the masculinity of those who receive Holy Orders, is not accidental, but an integral part of sacramental identity, preserving the divine order of salvation in Christ. Altering this reality would not be a simple adjustment of the ministry, but a rupture of the nuptial meaning of salvation.” Five of 10 commissioners voted to affirm this statement, and five voted to eliminate it at the final commission meeting in February 2025.

That “nuptial” language may be a reaction to some submissions arguing for the ordination of women to the priesthood, as the church’s theology of priesthood presents priests as representing Christ the bridegroom, with the church as the bride. Its appearance in the Petrocchi letter suggests once again that the diaconate and the priesthood were considered inextricably linked.

Among the final suggestions of the letter, presented as “a precondition for subsequent discernment,” is a critical examination of the diaconate itself, a task originally assigned to a different synod study group, Study Group 4. However, that study group has presented its report solely as a study of formation for the priesthood.

The Petrocchi letter calls for “evaluative freedom and discursive transparency.” Instead, it attempts to close the church’s discernment on the inclusion of women in the ordained diaconate.

Phyllis Zagano holds a research appointment at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, and is the author of several books and articles on the diaconate of women. Her book, The Vatican and Women Deacons (Orbis, 2026), is a study of six modern Vatican commissions on the topic.