Sister Linda Pocher, tasked by Pope Francis to help “demasculinize” the Church, calls fresh Vatican restriction on female diaconate “too quick” and rooted only in culture, not doctrine.
Newsroom (08/12/2025 Gaudium Press )Salesian theologian Sister Linda Pocher, the religious sister Pope Francis personally chose to address his council of cardinal advisors on ways to “demasculinize the Church,” has sharply criticized the Vatican’s latest pronouncement closing the door—for now—on the possibility of women deacons.
In an interview published December 7 by the Italian daily La Repubblica, Sister Pocher described the decision, contained in a document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, as arriving “too quickly.” She argued that “time will be the determining factor” in any future evolution on the question.
“I expected them to take a little more time,” she said, “because in my opinion, time will be the determining factor in this matter.”
The 49-year-old professor of Christology and Mariology at the Auxilium Faculty in Rome has emerged as one of the most prominent voices advocating greater female participation in ordained ministry. Pope Francis appointed her in 2023 to coordinate a series of closed-door reflections with the C9 council of cardinals explicitly dedicated to removing masculine traits from ecclesiastical structures and culture.
Sister Pocher told La Repubblica that the resistance to women deacons “is not theological, but cultural.” She insisted that the restored permanent diaconate introduced after the Second Vatican Council is essentially “service to the community,” and therefore has no intrinsic reason to remain reserved to men—especially since married men may already be ordained deacons.
“If such a diaconate exists, a service to the community, why shouldn’t women be able to access it?” she asked.
She further lamented that women who believe they are called to the diaconate are not granted the same discernment process afforded to men who feel called to the priesthood. “It is not considered appropriate for women something that is the normal form of discernment for a man: a man enters the seminary because he feels called,” she observed.
The theologian also pointed to the experience of Anglican communities that have ordained women priests and deacons for decades, claiming their example shows “it does not alter the functioning of the community.”
Looking ahead to the ongoing Synod on Synodality, Sister Pocher expressed hope that patient dialogue could produce “sufficient convergence” without either side simply capitulating. She praised Pope Francis for promoting “mutual and unbiased listening” rather than labeling opposing views as heretical, calling this approach “Francis’s great revolution.”
While acknowledging that change would likely require a generational shift in mentality, she remained optimistic that cultural evolution, rather than new theological arguments, would eventually open the diaconate to women.
The Vatican document to which she was responding reaffirms the Church’s current inability to admit women to any grade of holy orders, citing the need to preserve doctrinal continuity and the sacramental nature of the diaconate as participation in the one priesthood of Christ.
Sister Pocher’s public intervention underscores the continuing tension between those who see the reservation of ordained ministry to men as a mutable cultural inheritance and those who regard it as an unchangeable datum of divine revelation and apostolic tradition.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Infovaticana
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