POPE FRANCIS has a habit of causing shock-waves with seemingly off-the-cuff remarks. It happened on May 12th when he was answering a question from an audience of 900 women who lead religious communities. The pontiff seemed open to the possibility of ordaining women to the rank of deacon: in other words to a form, at least in the loose sense, of priesthood. One of the nuns present asked him whether he would set up a new commission to study the role of female deacons in the early church. « I accept, » he replied, adding that the historic role of those women was « a bit obscure [and] it would do good for the church to clarify this point, I am in agreement. » The following day, a Vatican spokesman made clear the pope was not about to introduce women as deacons nor as priests. But liberal optimists were still pleased that the issue had been raised.

Neither the nun’s question nor the pope’s answer was as vague or innocent as it may have appeared. For a traditionalist Christian church that stresses unbroken continuity with the faith’s earliest days, any discussion of how things should be managed now has to be rooted in arguments about the distant past. If it can be shown that women were elevated to an important rank in early Christian times, that would strengthen the case for doing so now. And there are some open questions about how questions of gender were handled in the church’s first few generations. As the New Testament makes clear, the earliest Christians included people with the job of deacon (in Greek, diakonos) which included helping with worship, administration and charity. And as the questioner reminded Pope Francis, a woman named Phoebe is clearly described as a deacon, using the word diakonos with a feminine article.

In Christian texts over the next few centuries, we also find references to the role of « deaconess » (diakonissa), a female servant of the church whose jobs included assisting at the baptism or immersion of adult women. (It wouldn’t have been proper for male priests to be exposed to so much naked female flesh.) What is open to debate is how different the roles of diakonos and diakonissa were, and whether diakonos was often used as a gender-neutral term. That is a topical question, because in the modern Catholic church, especially in places where vocations to a celibate priesthood are drying up, an ever-greater role is played by male deacons, who can be married: they can conduct funerals and weddings, visit the sick and do many other « priestly » jobs, with the exception of consecrating bread and wine. If married men can become deacons, some ask, why can’t women, whether married or single, do the same?

But radical change in this area is unlikely, for the simple reason that the people at the Vatican charged with investigating such matters have a record of traditionalism. The current head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, tasked with keeping church doctrine pure, is Cardinal Gerhard Müller; he took part in an earlier study of clerical orders whose report, in 2002, was pretty conservative. It concluded that bishops, priests and deacons belonged in one, all-male category, and deaconesses in another. « The deaconess in the early church was not a woman who performed the ministry of a deacon…she did nothing done by priests or male deacons, » he told an interviewer in 2001. If anything mitigates this hard line, it will be the practical constraints of everyday life. In remote parts of Mexico or Brazil where priests are over-stretched, the chances are that women will do more and more of the church’s work, whatever titles they are given.