VATICAN CITY (PerMariam) — The appointment of new members to a key Vatican theological body highlights the chaotic state of the Church, as some of the theologians hare directly argued against the Vatican office which they are now a part of.
On October 19, Leo XIV appointed a new roster of members to the International Theological Commission (ITC) – which operates under the auspices of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – thus forming the body of theologians who will serve there until the duration of their five-year term concludes in 2031. The 24 new members of the ITC are very much demonstrative of the style of the Church today, coming from a wide variety of countries and being both clerical and lay, male and female.
So also is their theological orthodoxy similarly mixed: while some are heralded as respected and even esteemed theologians, others have a history of dissenting from Catholic teaching and of activism against said teaching.
The irony now is that some of the ITC’s new members directly contradict what the ITC and the DDF have taught.
One such figure is Sara Parvis, who currently serves as an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh’ School of Divinity. She has joined the activist cause for female deacons, arguing in favour of ordaining women to the diaconate – which thus contradicts the Church’s infallible teaching on Holy Orders.
Writing in the UK’s “The Tablet” in 2024, Parvis opined “that an office in the Church called ‘deacon’ was filled by women from earliest times is not in doubt.” Such is a commonly utilised argument by advocates of the female diaconate, who attest that the Church would not be breaking with tradition by ordaining women, but rather returning to the practices of the early Church.
She added:
“Women deacons would strengthen the public witness of Catholic women, which in turn would strengthen the faith of other Christian women and men, and offer the light of faith in new ways to the world…
“The restoration of the diaconate to women would offer a new and particularly ecclesial vocation, whether or not it was coupled with the vocation to religious life.”
The Church teaches firmly and clearly that the three-fold sacrament of Holy Orders – bishop, priest, deacon – is reserved to men. In his 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II wrote, “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
Then in 2018, the prefect of the DDF, Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer S.J., defended the teaching of Ordinatio sacerdotalis as bearing the mark of “infallibility,” with John Paul II having “formally confirmed and made explicit, so as to remove all doubt, that which the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium has long considered throughout history as belonging to the deposit of faith.”
But even more than this, Parvis’ argument that the early Church had an ordained female diaconate has been firmly debunked by the very commission which she has just joined. In 2002, the International Theological Commission wrote after much study that:
The deaconesses mentioned in the tradition of the ancient Church – as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised – were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons;
The unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, in the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other, is strongly underlined by ecclesial tradition, especially in the teaching of the Magisterium.
Parvis’ inclusion in the ITC for the next five years is theologically bizarre and self-contradictory. The ITC is not a large organisation where all schools of thought can be found by virtue of its sheer size. It is a carefully selected group of no more than 30 people, who are on-tap to advise the DDF on theological matters. As such, there can be no room in its membership for those who question Church teaching – and yet that is the reality the Church now faces.
But Parvis is not alone in her dissent. There are more figures in the new intake whose theological positions are of concern to long-time Vatican analysts.
Claudia Leal Luna is a consulter at the DDF, and a professor at the Pontifical “John Paul II” Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences – which was famously gutted by Pope Francis, alongside the Pontifical Academy for Life, to undermine its pro-life and pro-family integrity. Luna will join Parvis at the ITC, despite her own record dissenting from documents which the DDF has published.
In March 2021, the DDF issued the famous Responsum which stated that the Church could not bless same-sex unions. The document caused an instant backlash among many of the more heterodox episcopal bodies, such as in Germany and Belgium, who had already broken with Church teaching on this point.
Luna was among the dissenters. The DDF’s text “has left a bitter taste in many people,” she said at the time.
Continuing her critique, Luna expressed the opinion that the Church’s moral theology must keep lockstep with society in order to remain relevant:
“The sexual morality of the Christian tradition needs to take some steps with philosophy, psychology, sociology, even with the biology of recent decades.
On the other hand, within institutions, there is always a core that protects the interpretation of the law and that tends to fight for a more exclusive interpretation.
What we as Catholics can demand is that we be told not only what is excluded, but also what is included. I have no doubt that the current sensitivity of Catholics in the world experiences an epistemological shock when reading this [the DDF’s Note prohibiting blessing of same-sex unions].”
Here, therefore, are two members of the ITC who directly contradict the teaching of the ITC and the DDF. (More could be named but these two are enough).
They have DDF prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández to thank for their new position, since it is he who presents the names to the Pontiff for approval. It is not known how much knowledge Leo had of their personal theological opinions when he gave his permission for them to join the ITC. Yet their membership of the commission is emblematic of the theological rot which has been allowed to take heart at the core of the Church and of the Roman Curia, and which must be exposed if an authentic evangelisation is to be hoped for.