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  Pope Francis mulls opening door to female clergy

Pope Francis mulls opening door to female clergy

AFP
Published : May 13, 2016, 5:00 am IST
Updated : May 13, 2016, 5:00 am IST

Pope Francis said on Thursday he would set up a commission to study the possibility of women entering the Catholic clergy in his latest potentially historic opening on a vexed issue for the Church.

Pope Francis said on Thursday he would set up a commission to study the possibility of women entering the Catholic clergy in his latest potentially historic opening on a vexed issue for the Church.

In apparently off-the-cuff remarks the 79-year-old pontiff promised to examine whether women could join the clergy at the rank of deacon, one below a priest.

The pledge came in a question and answer session with members of female religious orders during a meeting at the Vatican.

In the exchanges, Pope Francis said he had discussed the use of female deacons in the early centuries of the Church with experts on the subject but was not clear as to their exact role and status.

“I believe, yes, it would do good for the Church to clarify this point,” he said, in comments first reported by the National Catho-lic Reporter and confirmed by the Vatican’s own newspaper Osservat-ore Romano. “I am in agreement. I will speak (in favour of doing) something like this.” He later added: “It seems useful to me to have a commission that would clarify this.”

Progressives in the Catholic Church have long argued that women are pitifully under-represented in the hierarchy, despite the number of women in religious orders (7,00,000) far outweighing the number of priests and monks combined (4,70,000).

Although deacons cannot celebrate mass on their own or hear confessions, they are ordained and can carry out many tasks in place of a priest, while remaining free to marry and have a family.