The commission in charge of the elaboration of the Amazonian Rite will include in its final proposition a request for the ordination of women deacons, a new document shows. Source: Crux.
The text, a seven-page summary of a longer document released in 2024 – which contains most of the suggestions for the new rite and theological debates about them – was published on the website of the Latin American Ecclesial Council on April 5.
It also includes two other controversial ideas that emerged during the preparation of the 2019 Synod for the Pan-Amazon region: the ordination of married men who have leadership roles in Amazonian communities, the so-called viri probati, and that priests who left the clergy to get married can resume their ministries.
“That text summarises the landmark document we released last year. The idea is that the dioceses will now revise it, so the commissions can finalise the work within a few months,” Brazilian-born Fr Agenor Brighenti, in charge of the commissions’ work, said.
Those propositions appear in the fourth part of the document, which deals with the configuration of the Church in the Amazonian Rite.
The text says that “a rite has an underlying ecclesiology” and that the Amazonian Church wants to be a Church “that is integrated to the life and the struggles of the peoples” and that “knows the culture and the history of its peoples,” learning their “languages, chants, instruments, rites, and costumes.”
The text says that the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia discusses the need to rethink the profiles of the ministries in each particular Church in order to “express the protagonistic role of lay people, especially the women.”
“Among the vital challenges that the Church faces in the Amazon is the impossibility of the communities celebrating the Eucharist every week. That’s why the Amazonian Rite suggests the ordination of viri probati … It also suggests that the priests who left their ministry to get married can, if they wish, resume their ministry,” the document states.
Those suggestions have provoked controversy in the Vatican since the Synod of the Amazon in 2019. In regard to the possibility of ordaining women deacons, Pope Francis directly ruled it out in May 2024.
FULL STORY
Amazonian Rite’s proposition will include suggestion for ordination of women deacons and married men (By Eduardo Campos Lima, Crux)
