Vote on female diaconate throws Australian plenary council into crisis
July 06, 2022
» Continue to this story on Catholic Weekly (Australia)
CWN Editor's Note: In 2018, Pope Francis approved the Australian bishops’ request to convoke their first plenary council (definition) since 1937.
Non-bishop participants in the plenary council have a consultative vote; bishops have a deliberative vote, with a two-thirds majority required for resolutions to pass. A resolution calling for the ordination of women to the diaconate (should the Vatican approve), after gaining the support of over 70% in the consultative vote, gained the support of the majority of bishops, but not the required two-thirds majority.
“This is not the way we were anticipating or hoping the process would go,” said Bishop Shane Mackinlay of Sandhurst, the plenary council’s vice president. “It is disappointing and a lot of people – women and men, priests and laypeople and bishops – were very distressed” at the failure of the resolution to pass.
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