El Ignaciano/ December 2025

Expanding the Diaconate is Essential for a Church Accompanying Migrants, Families, and the Poor

Ellie Hidalgo

While participating in the Jubilee of Deacons in Rome earlier this year, I spoke with the wife of a deacon who was intrigued to learn about the discernment taking place in our Catholic Church about women and the diaconate. We were discussing how the Final Synod Document of 2024 had affirmed in Paragraph 60 that “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.”

However, she candidly told me that this discernment made her pause. In her Latin American country, her deacon husband was encountering resistance from both the pastor and the parishioners in accepting his vocation. The permanent diaconate for married men is not well understood in her country, she said. She couldn’t imagine engaging in conversations about the possibility of women deacons. She worried it would only increase the resistance to his vocation. 

Her concerns are understandable. It takes much effort to restore a practice that was lost to Catholics for some 800 years. The practice of the permanent diaconate for men and women was ended in the Middle Ages (about 1150 a.d.). It was not restored for men until 1967 by Pope Paul VI, following the recommendation of his bishops during Vatican II. 

The restored permanent diaconate for men found fertile ground in the U.S. where nearly 40 percent of the world’s deacons reside. There are many deacons in Europe where deacons helped communities recover from the horrors of World War II. However, on other continents like Africa and Asia, bishops have largely not restored the practice. The establishment of the permanent diaconate in the Philippines was only recently approved in 2023. 

Pope Leo and the diaconate

Pope Leo XIV has indicated his intention to continue to steward the synod process which his predecessor Pope Francis initiated. In taking the name Leo, he also signaled his interest in renewing the Catholic Church’s social teaching on justice and dignity which Pope Leo XIII did much to articulate in response to exploitation of workers during the Industrial Revolution. 

There is every reason to believe that deacons could come to the aid of Pope Leo in defense of the Church’s beliefs on matters of justice and dignity. After all, the Final Synod Document lays out the vision of the diaconate which centers on ministry that makes real the connection between the Gospel and lives lived in service to others: “Deacons respond to the specific needs of each local Church, particularly reawakening and sustaining everyone’s attention to the poorest in a Church which is synodal, missionary and merciful” (par. 73).

However, the deacon is not a one-person charity operation. The deacon aims to facilitate a faith community to see and reflect on the pastoral needs in their community and to discern how the Holy Spirit is calling forth their response. The ministry of the deacon involves listening, discernment, animating and calling forth the giftedness of others. 

Yet even as the need for deacons grows in war-torn countries or communities frayed by polarization, the Synod acknowledged that the ministry of the deacon remains unknown in many parts of the world. Its Final Document, which belongs to the Church’s ordinary magisterium, encourages local Churches to deepen their understanding of the vocation of the diaconate and to review the lived experience of the diaconate thus far. 

Women and the renewal of the diaconate

Having listened to many women share their vocational stories of being called to the order of deacon, I wonder what it will take for this ministry to be welcomed more fully and to stir hope in our communities. Is part of the reason permanent deacons are not better accepted is that half of the deacons are missing? 

After all, the experience of the early church is male and female deacons. St. Stephen is named as the Church’s first martyr, and our tradition remembers him as our first deacon. The origin story of the diaconate is told in Acts of the Apostles as a ministry that is called forth when Greek-speaking widows were being left out of the daily distribution. The vulnerable other, speaking another language and lacking the safety net of a husband or family, was being discriminated against. The diaconate is a response to the need to animate the community to attend to those most at risk of being excluded and mistreated. It is an expression of our Catholic faith in the human dignity of all. 

St. Phoebe is named in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans as a deacon and a ministerial leader in Cenchreae, Greece. St. Olympias is among the more well-documented women deacons in our Church’s history, and her statue stands atop the colonnade surrounding St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. The early Church had male and female deacons to incarnate Christ’s service to those most in need. Among the duties of early Christian women deacons were tending to sick women, advocating for abused women and assisting with the baptisms of women and children. 

Can a fuller understanding of the rich history of male and female deacons help bishops and the faithful develop a better imagination for the potential of a renewed diaconate today? Women already exercise many deacon-like ministries in the Church, something which Pope Francis himself acknowledged in his May 2024 interview on 60 Minutes. However, without clear and authorized pathways for ministry, women must often navigate multiple barriers to answer to their vocational call to serve the People of God. Imagine if women had their hands untied to more freely serve women in crisis pregnancies, students in campus ministry, tend to sick and dying women in our hospitals and places of hospice, and respond to the needs of families currently being ripped apart by policies of mass deportation — and to do so with the authority of the Church behind them, bestowed by ordination? 

Standing with the most vulnerable today

Today, our Eucharistic belief in the body of Christ and the human dignity of every person is being contested. U.S. policies now justify racial profiling and deny due process in order to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of people. Nearly half a million people stand to lose their previously legal temporary protective status by the end of this year, many in Florida. These are our neighbors, colleagues, friends, parishioners, even family members.

In response, Catholics are mobilizing to stand with the vulnerable others – many of whom speak another language and lack the safety net of citizenship. They are attending to the needs of women with young children whose husbands have been deported. They are accompanying asylum seekers to court, writing to their bishops asking them to speak out, and organizing their communities to show up in prayer vigils. 

Thousands of Catholics in scores of U.S. cities participated in the One Church | One Family Catholic Public Witness for Immigrants on November 13th to defend the human dignity of migrants and to call attention to the government’s inhumane immigration policies. In Miami, Catholics gathered at Gesú Catholic Church for Mass, followed by a prayerful procession and a prayer service outside of Miami’s immigration court. 

November 13th was chosen as a day for national Catholic witness to commemorate the feast day of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, who toiled in the slums of New York City in the 1890s tending to immigrant Italian orphans. She encountered many obstacles from secular and religious authorities, but to watch the film Cabrini is to get a glimpse of what is possible when a woman of faith is undeterred. “We have to show America we are all people of dignity.” And she does. Her faithful persistence continues to inspire us today. 

We are now in the Implementation Phase of the Synod during which the faithful are invited to deepen our understanding of the vocation of the permanent diaconate and to continue the discernment about women’s access to diaconal ministry. Understanding women’s contributions to diaconal ministry could in fact help with the reception and the renewal of this order overall. 

Despite numerous obstacles, religious and lay women with a vocational call to the diaconate strive to live their charism as collaborators – with parishioners, male deacons, priests, bishops, civic authorities, and community members. We need the diaconal gifts of Catholic women for mission to be unleashed sooner rather than later. The world needs deacons. The diaconate needs women.  

Ellie Hidalgo is based in Miami and serves as co-director of Discerning Deacons, an organization that forms Catholic women for preaching, synodal leadership and diaconal ministry. Previously, she worked for 12 years on the leadership team of Dolores Mission Catholic Church in Los Angeles.