German theologian Margit Eckholt sees Vatican commission’s cautious report on female diaconate as an open door rather than a closure, urges Pope Leo XIV to continue synodal reflection.
Newsroom (11/12/2025 Gaudium Press) The publication of the final report of the Vatican study commission on the female diaconate has provoked sharp disappointment among women’s organizations and reform-minded Catholics in Germany. Yet one of the country’s most prominent dogmatic theologians, Prof. Margit Eckholt of the University of Osnabrück, rejects the widespread interpretation that the document slams the door on women deacons.
In an exclusive interview with katholisch.de, Eckholt insisted the text must be read “very carefully” and described it as “remarkable” rather than definitive. Far from erecting a stop sign, she argued, the report keeps the theological question open and even invites further work.
The commission, originally convened by Pope Francis in 2016 and continued under Pope Leo XIV, examined historical evidence and theological arguments over three sessions. Its concluding text states that, “in the light of Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and the Church’s Magisterium,” it is not possible to progress “towards the admission of women to the diaconate as a stage of the sacrament of Holy Orders.” That formulation has been hailed by some as an unequivocal “no.”
Eckholt, however, draws attention to the sentence that immediately follows: the commission acknowledges that no “definitive judgment” on the matter is yet possible—unlike the question of women’s priestly ordination, which Rome considers closed since John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis.
“This is crucial,” Eckholt said. “The votes taken inside the commission on various theses show there was no clear majority either for or against understanding a possible female diaconate as the third degree of Holy Orders. The result is that we are still dealing with an open theological question that requires further work.”
The Osnabrück professor, who herself contributed to the German Synodal Path’s texts calling for the restoration of women deacons, stressed that the report for the first time publishes voting results from the commission’s deliberations. Those numbers reveal significant support for continuing the discussion, even on a sacramental female diaconate.
Eckholt highlighted two competing visions now explicitly placed side by side in an official Vatican document: the traditional view of the diaconate as one of the three grades of the sacrament of Orders, and an alternative understanding of the diaconate as a sacramental ministry of service that could be detached from the hierarchical three-tier structure.
“By presenting both perspectives without resolving them, the report itself opens the door to deeper reflection on the sacramental form of the Church in connection with diakonia,” she said.
Asked whether the suggestion to strengthen lay ministries—such as the newly instituted offices of lector, acolyte, and catechist, now formally open to women—could be a realistic substitute, Eckholt was uncompromising: “Today no one will understand why men can receive a sacramental diaconate while women would only receive a non-sacramental office of service. That is not a coherent perspective.”
Looking toward Pope Leo XIV, to whom the report has been submitted, Eckholt expressed hope that Rome will launch a new phase of worldwide theological consultation. She called for the direct involvement of permanent deacons, women already exercising diaconal ministries, and theologians from every continent in order to examine “the sacramental quality of the diaconate and its relationship to gender-anthropological questions.”
Only such a broadly synodal process, she argued, can overcome what she called the “gendered fixation and exclusion regarding ordination, which is no longer appropriate in our time.”
In his preface to the report, commission president Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi invoked the need for “evangelical parresia”—Gospel boldness. Eckholt said she hopes Pope Leo XIV will take that call to heart and ensure that women who already live out a diaconal vocation in parishes, hospitals, prisons, and refugee centers around the world are given a decisive voice in whatever comes next.
For Eckholt and many German Catholics, the publication of the commission’s findings—with all their internal tensions and open questions—marks not an endpoint but a new beginning in the long-discussed restoration of the ordained female diaconate.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from katholisch.de
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