“No,” Pope Francis said.
He was answering Norah O’Donnell’s question about whether “a little girl growing up Catholic today” could “ever have the opportunity to be a deacon and participate as a clergy member in the Church.” Directly and tersely, the pope said, “No.”
It was a seemingly definitive response—and across the social media site X, a myriad of Catholics celebrated it as such.
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And yet Francis—to borrow a term from vaticanista Sandro Magister—has a history of pulling “u-turns.” That is, the pope has a habit of contradicting himself, especially by reversing a verbal “no” with his later actions.
Here is a history of different times when Francis initially seemed to thwart the agenda for female deacons—only to resurrect it, in practice, later on.
“The Door is Closed”
By the time of his first in-flight press conference, Francis had already apparently ruled out the ordination of women, saying: “That door is closed.” But that didn’t stop the pope from later opening a Pandora’s box on the issue of female deacons.
In 2016, Francis created a commission to study women deacons. A couple of years later, the working document for the Amazon synod said that the synod should identify “the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women.” Meanwhile, Bishop Erwin Kräutler, the principal author of the Amazon synod’s working document, admitted that the synod was “maybe a step to” women priests—even predicting that the event would secure “at least the female diaconate.”
Pope Francis ultimately had to report that the commission to study women deacons stopped working because of the “different positions” of everyone. Then, the Amazon synod’s final document declared: “In a large number of these consultations, the permanent diaconate for women was requested. This made it an important theme during the synod.”
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In response to the synod’s final document, Pope Francis announced: “I am going to take up the challenge … that you have put forward, that women be heard.” Soon, a second commission on women deacons, at the pope’s behest, was meeting.
“Reserved for Men”
In 2023, a Spanish book-length interview quoted Pope Francis as saying that holy orders, including the diaconate, “is reserved for men.” Yet later that year the synod on synodality discussed women deacons and suggested “more research” on the topic.
Soon, “the question of women’s possible access to the diaconate” was delegated to a study group under the auspices of the Vatican’s synod office. Meanwhile, nun and theologian Laura Pocher reported that Pope Francis was “very much in favor of the female diaconate”—even if he was “still trying to understand how to put it into practice.”
