The Feminising Synod of the Pachamama Church – On the Female Diaconate
Guest Post: Mr James Hunjan analyses the Synodal final report on 'Women's participation in the life and leadership of the Church.'
Guest Post: Mr James Hunjan analyses the Synodal final report on ‘Women’s participation in the life and leadership of the Church.’
Editor’s Notes
We are pleased to present a guest article by Mr James Hunjan, on the Synod on Synodality’s ‘Study Group Five’ and its final report.
The report is titled Women’s participation in the life and leadership of the Church. Mr Hunjan analyses the document, and what he calls “its heretical spirit.”
Readers may recognise Mr Hunjan’s name from the livestreams of the Most Holy Trinity Seminary and Roman Catholic Media, as his amusing comments are a regular feature there. Readers may also notice that his style is quite different to that usually employed at The WM Review – and we hope they enjoy his tour de force accordingly.
Pachamama Church: The Feminising Synod
Mr James Hunjan
Introduction
Following on the heels of the declaration regarding the study into the female diaconate within the Novus Ordo, The Synodal Dicastery, or Study Group Five released its final report, titled Women’s participation in the life and leadership of the Church.1 Hearkening back to the discussion of the female diaconate of 2025 it is quite clear that that Leo, like his predecessor, has an agenda to feminise the internal structures of the Church.
As one would expect of modernists, despite receiving the consensus that (liberal though they be), Novus Ordo prelates by and large do not want women deacons, or deaconesses, they nonetheless left the question open pending further investigation. What this means in the practical order is that it was not deemed prudent or expedient at this time to approve of the practice.
The pretence that further investigation needs to be carried out is, of course, farcical. Even John Paul II rejected the idea that Holy Orders could be bestowed upon women in his Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of 1994,2 and seemingly no new historical evidence from the apostolic Church has come to light to counteract this view in the intervening period.3 So why this almost immediate visitation of a closed chapter?
Modernists and Truth
Well, Modernist in Chief, Mr. Bob Prevost, aka, Pope Leo XIV said it best when asked about the Church’s teaching concerning homosexuals:
“[W]e have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.”4
To the modernist, there is no fixed, immutable truth. Truth evolves, and so must dogma according to the prevailing mood or taste consensus of society. It is mankind who dictates to God what the former wishes to believe; we cannot be so arrogant as to impose antiquated concepts antithetical to the mind of modern man, or woman, as is the case here.
There is no tradition or justification for a female diakonia, beyond assisting at baptisms of their fellow members of the fairer sex in the early Church (for reasons of modesty and avoidance of sin when anointing), and this has been admitted by the Novus Ordo itself.5 But this doesn’t seem to deter a portion of these pitiful modernists from returning to the subject every few years.
And while the repeated negative decision is met with applause by the conservative wing of the Novus Ordo, they overlook that reluctance to approve the Diakonia stems just as much from consideration of future ecumenism with schismatics as it does from preservation of tradition.
After all, if women want to be deacons and since other “Churches” of the separated brethren possess them, why not introduce them? Given the rapidly-dwindling vocations to the Novus Ordo priesthood, there’s certainly a logistical argument to be made. Moreover, women in the Novus Ordo can already act as altar servers, lectors and, even more importantly, “Extraordinary Ministers”, distributing what purports to be the sacred species: a role exclusively reserved for those in Holy Orders prior to Vatican II.6 At this point, anointing these empowered pseudo-priestesses would, arguably, be a mere formality.
However, to maintain the guise of sincere investigation arising from the “signs of times” and being the “pilgrim church”, the Vatican has undertaken these Study Groups, resulting in this final document to edify us all with female empowerment found throughout Holy Scripture and Church history.
You see, we’ve always been inclusive here in Rome; You just didn’t notice!
I would encourage all – if they have time – to read this document in full, in order to realise the full extent of the rot. For the sake of brevity, I will confine our examination to a few salient points, which speak to not only the utterly banal nature of this latest exercise in futility, but also – much more importantly – its heretical spirit.
The document itself
On its face, this final document is simply listing women’s roles in the Novus Ordo hierarchy, and successful attempts to include them more in the administration of Church affairs, since they have (surprise, surprise) a “shared dignity” with men through a common baptism. However, as suggested above, this is a thinly veiled pretext for continuing the Vatican II revolution, and dismantling what is left of the outward appearance of Roman Catholicism by destroying what feminists would call its inherently patriarchal structure.
Naturally, the first stumbling block to such an agenda is the Gospel itself, which must be explained away. This agenda is spelled out clearly in the following paragraph:
“It should be kept in mind that readers of the Bible may encounter expressions that appear particularly ‘strong’ when compared with contemporary sensibilities. Certain pericopes, if read literally and without the necessary hermeneutical filter, may convey a severity of judgment toward women that can easily scandalize.
“Moreover, it is important to remember that sacred texts never aim at idealization or abstraction; for this reason, no ideal female profile is presented (just as there is none for men). There is no singular ‘woman’ but rather a series of women, each retaining distinctive characteristics, attitudes, styles, behaviours, and feelings, which the hagiographer presents while preserving their individuality.”7
This paragraph is replete with the rationalism and relativism inherent in critical approaches to Scripture, advanced by Protestants and condemned modernist heretics such as Fr. Alfred Loisy.
One need not dissect this too thoroughly, as the meaning is clear enough – once one decodes the usual modernistic bloviating, employing confusing vocabulary and Greek to sugarcoat heterodoxy. What they are effectively saying is that certain passages, such as those found in Genesis, or among the Epistles of St. Paul’s, such as his injunction that women keep silent in Church,8 are offensive to modern sensibilities and, therefore, must be historically relativised and dismissed. In other words, “Those things were true at the time Paul was writing to the Church in Corinth, but he clearly didn’t intend them to be the norm. And even if he did, we cannot think this way today.”
The document’s treatment of women in the Gospels
The notion that Holy Scripture provides no ideal profile according to gender, is equally as ludicrous as it is profane. Our Lord Jesus Christ and our Lady are, of course, models of perfection. The Apostles are exemplars to us men, just as the martyrs of the early church are to both genders.
But according to the profound scriptural exegetes at this Synodal banquet, the Bible doesn’t present ideals or abstracts for mankind. This is but one more nail in the coffin for the notion that Holy Scripture is divinely inspired, which Modernist and “critical” scholarship has been attacking ever since the floodgates were opened by John XXIII and Paul VI.
Having dismissed what might be alarming or offensive in Sacred Scripture to contemporary, secular women, the authors attempt to repurpose certain passages for their ideological agenda. The woman caught in adultery isn’t shown mercy and forgiveness for her objective mortal sin, rather our Lord protects her because he saw her inherent dignity:
“Jesus… restores to the woman under accusation her true dignity, her worth as a beloved person, and her value as a human being.”9
In other words, our Lord Jesus Christ protected this woman so as to help her achieve self-realisation as a human being worthy of love. Gone are any overtones of sin and forgiveness, encapsulated in our Lord’s final words to this woman, “Go, and now sin no more.”10 The Gospel narrative becomes one of social justice.
The story of Our Lord meeting the adulteress, Samaritan women at the Well suffers a similar fate:
“A conversation begins between the two, a dialogue woven with irony. When the disciples return, they are surprised to see Jesus talking to a woman, but Jesus’s reaction does not suggest any kind of annoyance at talking to the Samaritan woman. The rest of the conversation focuses on the true God, the only true ‘husband’ for the woman… alongside this sensitivity and openness to dialogue, the Master’s attitudes of welcome, closeness, and hope toward the woman’s human experience are remarkable.”11
Perhaps, with the Vatican’s desire to remove the stigma surrounding adultery following Amoris Laetitia – “Pope” Francis’s Encyclical permitting Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried – our Lord’s explicit shaming of this woman’s impure life would present an uncomfortable reality and would likewise require the “necessary hermeneutical filter.”
The subtext is clear: our Lord wasn’t scandalised by this woman, unlike the ignorant disciples (read: rigid, old-fashioned Catholic male clerics),12 but instead dialogued with her, expressing hope about her “human experience” (read: fornication). There is no acknowledgement of the divine omniscience of our Lord, which stunned and provoked contrition in the Samaritan woman. Instead, what’s important is that “… the woman is able to engage her fellow villagers, bringing them to meet Jesus…”13 She’s exercising leadership in the presence of our Lord. Girl bosses: They’re divinely approved.
Reference to a ‘Gnostic Gospel’
Seemingly unsatisfied with the evidence for an elevated status of women within the canonical scriptures, the authors curiously reference the Gnostic Apocrypha of Nag Hammadi. Before quoting what the composers of this truly synodal document have to say, one will provide a brief overview of Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism.
This heretical bundle of papyri known as the “Nag Hammadi library” was discovered by a young boy, Muhammad Ali, in an Egyptian cave in 1945, in a district whence the documents derive their name. This codex contained many heretical writings previously only known from indirect quotations from the Church Fathers.
The Gnostics were not one, unified group but rather a collection of sects emerging in the early centuries following the Apostles who attempted to incorporate Hellenic, pagan ideas into the Christian faith. Many proposed, like Marcion, that the God of the Old Testament was in fact not the same as that of Jesus Christ, but instead a false, lesser being or “archon” (ruler) known as the Demiurge or Yaldabaoth. He had sought to enslave mankind into worshipping him and wished to prevent them from achieving true knowledge of themselves which would set them free.
A selection of human beings had a spark of the divine in them, a secret knowledge or Gnosis, which Jesus Christ as the Saviour came to liberate by way of his hidden teachings. For the Gnostics, our Lord was first and foremost a teacher of wisdom, or Sophia.
Needless to say, Gnosticism was a most pernicious heresy, and St. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote of their texts:
“They possess an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious writings which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men.”14
That the Novus Ordo would cite such writings to bolster their viewpoint is, even in principle, disturbing. But let’s allow the report to speak for itself:
“In the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, she [Mary Magdalene] is described as Jesus’ favourite, and as a result of this preferential love, the disciples suffered from envy. Such predilection is present not only in the so-called Gospel of Philip, but also in the text that bears her name, the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene was entrusted with a unique teaching that no other apostle was given… The apocryphal texts return to the theme of a special choice of Mary of Magdala by Jesus, a theme that has often given rise to misleading interpretations.”15
The justification for citing this is to reinforce St. Mary Magdalene’s prominence among the disciples, following her being chosen to be the first witness to our Lord’s resurrection, as recorded in the Gospels.16 However, lest we forget, this is not some work of secular, academic scholarship, outlining thoughts on the sacred feminine in early Christianity. This study is supposed to have emanated from the Roman Catholic Church, which has a duty to preserve and protect the deposit of the faith. Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to substantiate a basis for female involvement in Church governance.
Why are these explicitly heretical texts referenced at all with little to no correction? Even oblique references made to the spurious nature of these texts are hardly noticeable apart from the prefix, “so-called”, which only serves to underline dubious authorship. The contention that Mary Magdalene was singled out as pre-eminent among the disciples, being above that even of St. Peter, is casually cited as though it did not require any correction, which naturally could lead one to believe that it could be at least partially true.17 Levi chastises Peter as being quick to anger and jealous of Mary, whom our Lord loved more than any other woman, in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary.18
The Synodal, Vatican-approved authors merely allude to the intimacy between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene as “misleading” in these Gnostic Gospels, but don’t see fit to correct the aforesaid pre-eminence, nor that the latter was privy to secret teachings; rather they advance these myths as being potentially true in a general sense. In this way, the authority vested by Our Lord in the person of St. Peter, and the Petrine Supremacy is undermined.19
If this isn’t what the authors intended, then it most certainly is not made clear.
The document’s treatment of women in the history of the Church
Indeed, in answer to the question, “Do women have jurisdiction to teach, or to correct the teachers?”, the report provides the following answer in the affirmative:
“…when communicating the great Paschal announcement to the Apostles, Christ chose a woman: Mary Magdalene; the Apostles themselves received this proclamation from her. It is therefore possible to think that this fact carries concrete implications for the participation of women in the Church. The history of the Church provides numerous examples confirming this intuition, including historical cases in which women exercised de facto authority even over clerics, such as the abbesses of Las Huelgas (Burgos, Spain)…”20
The report elaborates further on this case of the Cistercian Abbey of Santa Maria Regina in Las Huelgas:
“…founded in 1180, whose abbess had responsibility for several villages and exercised genuine canonical jurisdiction. For example, she received the solemn professions of the monks who owed her obedience; she gave permission for the celebration of sacraments and for preaching in the churches and parishes subject to her…she could impose canonical censures, pass judgment on priests, and even appoint parish priests. Such jurisdiction was exercised until the mid-19th century.”21
This might indeed shock some more traditionally minded Catholics, given to thinking that such occurrences could not have happened in the Middle Ages. However, it is important to remember that in the controversies that waged between Church and state, once was lay appointment or election of clerics.22 Since many kings and emperors granted lands and wealth to the Church, they assumed the privilege of nomination to both Episcopal and Abbatial Sees, but this was, in truth, always an abuse. Las Huelgas received its benefice from the Castilian Kings, and it then sought protection from the Holy See, who confirmed these prerogatives.
However, the report only makes passing reference to the fact these privileges were done away with by the Holy See. It was Pope Pius IX’s Papal Bull, Quae Diversa, that effectively ended the independence of these monasteries from the local Ordinary, rather than some accident of history. What the authors of the report are contending is that if these privileges were granted in special cases, then they should be resurrected and given universal application.
The logical response to this is that the Abbess was not a lay woman, but a female religious, still under the direct oversight of the Holy See. Moreover, it was an exception by accident of history, and not the norm; and, crucially, that Pope Pius IX retracted these privileges for good reason, as stated above. As ever, modernists are apt to reach back into history (which they normally abhor) whenever a precedent can be found (or abused) to support radical change.
Cherry-picking from history
While researching this matter, it was curious to find that another organisation likes to make good use of this historical exception, namely the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, a Dutch society promoting the ordination of women to the priesthood inside of the Novus Ordo. As their Mission Statement reads: “Gender Equality in the Catholic Church.”23
It is quite clear where this dangerous cherry-picking from history for ideological reasons ultimately leads, and it undoubtedly offers us an insight into the minds of the people who composed this document. Proof of which: within the same month of the release of this document, Belgian “Bishop” Johan Bonny of Antwerp publicly announced (alongside his intention to ordain married men) that arguments against women’s ordination were “theologically weak and anthropologically outdated.”24
One might think that the document would necessarily focus on Our Lady. Indeed, the report concludes meditating on the application of the “Marian” principle of the Church, as opposed to the “Petrine”: a theory forged in the mind of the Swiss arch-modernist theologian, Hans von Balthazarr, well-known for his concoction of nonsense terminology and endorsed by all the conciliar “pontiffs”.25
What could be described as theological poetry at best, and pseudo-intellectual babble at worst, this idea suggests that there are two symbolic principles at work in the Church: one belonging to Mary and one St. Peter. However, the Church is primarily hierarchical and juridical, not symbolic. Christ gave the apostolic Mission to His Apostles, not to His Blessed Mother. Von Balthasar’s imprecise language undermines traditional ecclesiology: if the Church can be said to have a Marian typology, then women must necessarily have a wider role to play within her structures.
And, indeed, this is exactly what the modernists are getting at, although they claim that they’ve drawn the line at allowing women into the priesthood, as Francis in one of his thought-free speeches, explained:
“Women have a capacity for theological reflection that is different from that of us men… The Church is woman… One of the great sins we have committed is to ‘masculinize’ the Church. And this cannot be resolved through the ministerial route; that is something else. It can be resolved through the mystical route, through the real route. Balthasar’s thinking has given me a lot of insight: The Petrine Principle and the Marian Principle.
“This can be debated, but the two principles exist. The Marian Principle is more important than the Petrine Principle… And you may ask yourselves: where is this argument leading? Not only to tell you to have more women here—that is one thing—but to help you reflect. The Church as woman, the Church as bride.”26
There follows further appreciation of Balthasar’s X/Y Church from Leo XIV, who offers but more of the same inane nonsense.
Welcome to the Novus Ordo religion: Where Our Blessed Mother is deprived of her titles of Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces, but is readily leveraged in the crusade for feminine inclusivity.
Conclusion
As stated at the beginning of this article, the Novus Ordo under Leo XIV, governed by the Heraclitean river of Vatican II, is paving the way for a feminisation of the structures of the Catholic Church. This report stands as concrete proof. There are no more doctrinal boundaries restraining it, so the “hierarchy” can pursue their priorities of gender theory/homosexual inclusion, ecological preservation and world peace. It is a matter of when, not if.
And when it does comes to fruition (or more accurately, full decomposition) Paul VI’s dream of the Church as spiritual United Nations will then be complete, with equal gender, racial and class representation from across the globe. And just like the UN, it will be a bloated fortress of ineptitude, perpetually engaging in aimless dialogue – a dialogue that no one will take seriously.
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On women’s participation in the life and leadership of the Church. Hereafter abbreviated to W.P.
See, International Theological Commission, “From the Diakonia of Christ to the Diakonia of the Apostles”(2002); From the Diakonia of Christ to the Diakonia of the Apostles (2002)
Ibid; Francis Xavier Funk (ed.), Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum, 2 vols, (Paderborn: Ferdinand Sch: 1905/1906), Vol I., pp. 209-210.
Council of Trent, Session XXII, Chapter VIII, On the Sacrifice of the Mass
W.P., Appendix I, p. 21.
1 Corinthians 14:34-35
W.P., p.31.
John 8:11
W.P., pp. 30-31.
If the reader regards this as presumptuous or an exaggeration, I’d advise them to read the report’s glowing praise of “Pope” Francis’s condemnation of clericalism and chauvinism; Cf. W.P., pp.67-69.
W.P., p.31.
St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I.20.1
W.P., p. 30.
Mark 16:9; John 20:11-18
As a side note, the same cryptic Valentinian Gospel of Philip, calls the Holy Spirit feminine, and mocks the doctrine of the Virgin Birth because of it, Cf. The Apocryphal Gospels, trans. by Simon Gathercole, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 365
Ibid. pp.255-58.
Matthew 16:18
W.P., p.18.
Ibid, p.36.
One only need examine the “Investiture Controversy” or St. Thomas Becket’s battle against the mendacious and avaricious King Henry II, which ultimately led to his martyrdom.
W.P., pp. 50-56; Cf. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. by Andrée Emery (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986)
W.P., p.53.
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