Benedict XVI Weighs In About Female Diaconate In A Weird Footnote
He mentions as “great figures of the Council” people like Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner and as "important theologians" Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heinz Schürmann, Rudolf Schnackenburg, and Johannes Feiner, although they had a ruinous influence on the Church.
Rahner and Feiner even left the Theological Commission because the Catholic Church did not become a member of the ecumenical World Council of Churches which at the time was heavily influenced by the Soviet KGB.
Benedict XVI mentions the anti-Church German Cardinal Karl Lehmann (+2018) positively as a “new generation” of theologians in the Commission, and presents him on the same level as the Italian Carlo Caffarra (+2017) who later formulated the Dubia directed at Francis.
On the other side he calls the truly Catholic Moral theologian William May (+2014), a father of many children, a supporter of "the most rigorous ancient conception," a disparaging judgment he also reserves for the great moral theologian John Finnis, 79.
”Female Deacons Are Decided”
In a footnote, Benedict mentions the Commission’s 2003 document about female deacons, claiming that it concluded that a "purely historical perspective" did not allow to reach a "definitive certainty," but that the question had to be decided "on a doctrinal level."
However, this assessment is incorrect. The document clearly opposes female deacons and argues that early Church deaconesses were not ordained but only acted as social workers. It therefore re-affirms the unity of deacon, priest and bishop as one sacrament.
Back then general secretary of the Theological Commission, Father George Cottier OP, was asked by La Croix if after this document the female diaconate was still an option. Cottier replied that the document “tends to support the exclusion of this possibility.”
In a second footnote, Benedict reveals human considerations admitting that as the Commission's President he once skipped the meeting of the Plenary Session because of his personal friend Father Juan Alfaro SJ.
Alfaro had become a passionate supporter of the heretical Liberation Theology but Cardinal Ratzinger did not want to confront him and "to lose his friendship.”
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