The “deaconess” deception

Tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, Ancient Faith Radio will host its “first special edition of Ancient Faith Today Live” in which Fr. Tom Soroka and John Maddex will “take a deep dive into the topic” of the “Orthodox Deaconess.” AFR states, “The story of the Orthodox Deaconess is largely unknown today. When did they exist, and what was their function? In recent decades, there has been a call for restoring the female diaconate, causing no small debate between Orthodox proponents and opponents.⁠”

It’s being advertised as “a full-length audio documentary, which will feature scholarly experts from both sides of the issue and reflect upon the views shared and what we can conclude about the Church’s wisdom on this issue today.” Although this live call-in show is being touted by proponents as “Oh, just Orthodox brothers and sisters coming together to have an important conversation,” or “a healthy and engaging dialog on history and patristic traditions,” or “just some ideas about how the Church should be more ‘relevant’ to modern Christians,” it is subterfuge at its finest (or worst, depending upon your perspective).

Dyer is 100% on point. This is feminist sleight of hand plain and simple, and the “deaconess” advocates are depending upon nice and uninformed people to play along, thereby codifying the “deaconess question” as valid and worthy of consideration which it is not. None of this is nice and none of it is about real history or rehabilitation or restoration; it’s about transformation and innovation.

It’s pretty darn blatant if you’re willing to take a gander and open your mind and heart to the sad fact that there are some people who call themselves Orthodox but don’t truly like or want to adhere to the Faith. You don’t need to be a Saint or a priest or an expert to grasp that – just a Christian who loves the Church.

In an email I received yesterday from an Orthodox lady in Texas, she wrote, “Am wondering what words of wisdom you might have about deaconesses. I noted that tomorrow night (Tuesday night), Ancient Faith is hosting a talk show featuring several speakers promoting deaconesses in the Orthodox Church. Considering the speakers, it seems to me like the camel’s nose getting under the tent. But I know so little about the intrigues going on in the Church, that I am seeking your knowledge. What’s up?”

So, here’s the deal: AFR’s featured panelists are part of what is known as the St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess: a “network” of activists whose aim is “revival,” er, I mean, revolution “of the ordained female diaconate” and whose supporters include plenty of well-known leftydox movers and shakers, such as the infamous Sarah Riccardi-Swartz aka “Hyphen Grrrl” and Fr. Christopher Calin who I’ve critiqued previously. In fact, lots of priests are listed, so be sure to make certain yours is NOT!

The Center just marked its 10-year anniversary, so all the grrrls and their willing male accomplices in the Church and in media have been chipping away at this for a long time. Below is an image from one of the breakout sessions from their November conference celebrating a decade of subversion.

The agitators’ basic strategy is emotivism, just like they use in their call for female altar servers. Women are “undervalued,” ya see, and need “healing” from the mean ol’ Church. Nothing destroys true, good, and beautiful things quicker and more effectively than muh feelz. But this long game requires altruistic chumps who fall for it and conflict-averse folks who know better but are too scared to speak up. Don’t be that guy or gal.

Another red flag about this whole “deaconess documentary” is that just a few month ago, AFR execs refused to allow their podcaster Elissa Bjeletich Davis host a conversation with St. Phoebe Center chair Dr. Carrie Frost, IF the two discussed the deaconesses. They assured folks that “Ancient Faith does not teach or lobby for the ordination of women,” but this was only after AFR got some normie push back. Obviously, AFR has altered course, so now it’s full steam ahead.

Also of note is that AFR host Davis is totally on the deaconess train and is quite adept at straw men. These grrrls may be relying on histrionics, but they aren’t dumb.

The real expert on the “deaconess” is Dr. Rev. Brian Patrick Mitchell, whose website is the aptly named “Brian Patrick Mitchell: On Church, State, Life, and Language.” In addition to being a protodeacon at St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C., he has Ph.D. in theology from the University of Winchester in the UK, and is a former soldier, journalist, corporate spokesman, and cabinet-level speechwriter, and author of “The Disappearing Deaconess: Why the Church Once Had Deaconesses and Then Stopped Having Them.”

In late summer and after having already been interviewed by AFR’s Fr. Tom Soroka (the same priest who’s hosting tonight’s event), Pdn. Patrick reached out to me about coming onto my podcast. I of course obliged.

Some big-picture topics we discussed were:

• the natural and economic order of male and female,
• the Christian vs the feminist understanding of “subjection,”
• hierarchy’s role in restraining evil,
• the real Church history of the “deaconess” and the etymology of the word,
• the anarchic spirit of the post-modern age,
• pro-deaconess advocates’ distortion of theology and their dependence on emotivism,
• the American sacred cow of “equality,”
• and the “continental drift between progressive and traditional Orthodoxy.”

On his website under the entry “Talking Gender with Dissident Mama,” he wrote:

“My talk with Rebecca was wider ranging than my interview with Fr. Tom, covering not just deaconesses but the fundamentals of male and female and the misery inflicted on people, especially young people, by the woke world’s demand that everyone ignore all differences between men and women.“

“An infamous Bolshevik is said to have said, ‘The worse, the better,’ or ‘The worse things get, the better things are.’ That’s true for anarchists struggling to overthrow the existing regime. In our case, it is at least true that the worse things get, the clearer things are. In our darkest days, God does often give us a clear choice of good or evil, even ultimately a good man or a bad man—Jesus of Nazareth or Barabbas.“

“These days, the consequences of denying the difference of male and female are more and more obvious, and more and more people are waking up to the evils of feminism and bearing witness against it. Rebecca is one of them, having been raised a feminist and then seen the light. We had a great time talking.“

On my show notes page for the episode, I included these links, which help connect the dots that the deaconesses hubbub isn’t a movement but is really an ideology:

• GOARCH Insanity: Female Servers, Readers & Deaconesses? – a good primer on Archbishop Elpidophoros’ thrust down the slippery slope;
• Why Christianity is ‘worth it’ for women: An interview with Carrie Frost – the author of “Church of Our Granddaughters” in her own words in an interview with the Catholic news site “Angelus;”
• Public Orthodoxy – as a professor of theology and religion, here are many of Carrie Frederick Frost’s highly political essays at the online leftydox zine of Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Study Center;
• Axia Women – In the interview with Pdn. Patick, I incorrectly stated that Frost was a contributor to the “network by, for, and about Orthodox women” whose values include “​​Advocacy for increasing women’s leadership in the Church,” but Frost is really a benefactor and was made “Woman of the Week” back in 2019, and here’s Rachel Contos’ glowing review of Frost’s book at the feminist site.

I think the most damning dots from the above “Angelus” interview are specifically three questions and her answers:

Q: “What are some of the ways in which the Orthodox Church has failed women?”
A: Frost addresses what she describes as “the Church’s major failings regarding women,” from “theological anthropology” and lacking “positions of leadership,” to languishing ordination “despite many recent calls to reinstitute this ordained office.”

I can just imagine Frost stomping her feet and screaming in her best Veruca Salt voice, “But Daddy, I want a female diaconate and I want it now!” I mean, for an Orthodox Christian to say that the Church “diminishes and demeans women” and sees her “worth” as a change agent, not that she is part of a healing Body that changes her, well, that’s just pride. Sad.

Q: “What should change? And how can the Orthodox Church implement change while staying true to its theological and scriptural foundations?”
A: The Church’s “failings can be addressed by the Orthodox Church because it is simply a matter of bringing our practices into alignment with our theological and scriptural foundations.”

Q: Are there other areas where you see that the Orthodox Church is in need of reform?
A: “Yes. The Orthodox Church ought to remove the antisemitic language that appears in some of our worship, especially during the week preceding Pascha/Easter.”

This broad really thinks she’s smarter than St. John Chrysostom, y’all, and that she and her fellow femmes are just the grrrls to invent a crisis and then implement whatever “reforms” they pedal as the cure. They keep telling us how much they just love men to pieces, so why not trust ’em? Oy vey.

Pdn. Patrick reviews Frost’s book “Church of Our Granddaughters,” which he describes as “a feminist manifesto telling us there is no end to their demands”:

“Frost does not explicitly call for ordaining women as priests and bishops, but she does admit that ordained deaconesses will lead inevitably to demands for women priests. She writes that ‘it is absolutely true that while ordaining women deaconesses today will not inevitably lead to female priests, it will inevitably lead to conversation about women in the priesthood.’” [95, her emphasis]

“She then writes: ‘If women are priests in the Orthodox Church at some point in the future, it will be because it arrived at this conclusion through a thoughtful process and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We ought to welcome this conversation about women in the priesthood (and the episcopate).'” [95, her parenthesis]

“This might be the best thing about ‘Church of Our Granddaughters’: It removes all doubt about where the advocates of altar girls, lectresses, and deaconesses are headed—without telling us where their revolution will end. In closing, Frost writes: ‘A friend recently asked how the Orthodox Church will change when women are fully welcomed. My answer was that we cannot possibly know—this is something that we have never experienced.’” [102]

“I am reminded of the closing words of another book about welcoming people in church, Eve Tushnet’s ‘Gay and Catholic’: ‘The churches won’t be exactly the same as before, only with more people. The churches themselves will change: new concepts of vocation, new questions, new challenges. Things will get weird. If you welcome someone, be ready for them to change you.'”

Click on the above image to view a succinct slide presentation that Pdn. Patrick posted in August. In it, he effectively and convincingly puts “the issue of deaconesses into its proper patristic context, which is what advocates of deaconesses do not do because they don’t like what the Fathers say about male and female.”

Six years ago, the good Protodeacon collaborated with Fathers Peter Heers and Alexander Webster to draft the “A Public Statement on Orthodox Deaconesses by Concerned Clergy and Laity,” which was signed by nearly 60 Orthodox clerics and scholars, and garnered nearly 300 additional signatures when it was originally published in 2018.

Being “besieged” with requests for more info on deaconesses since the innovation is being shoved down our throats (a tried and true tactic of leftists), Pdn. Patrick republished the statement along with the following insights:

“I suppose it’s because I’m in ROCOR [the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia] that I am not terribly bothered by the push now on in the Greek Archdiocese to make women deaconesses. Many of us in ROCOR tend to assume the Greeks have become unhinged and now feel themselves free to do as they please as the master race of the Orthodox world. Making women deaconesses will be just another step toward freeing them from the burden of having to respect the traditions of the Fathers and the opinions of other Orthodox churches, with the ultimate and unavoidable result being not the collapse of traditional, apostolic Orthodoxy but a permanent schism ridding the Orthodox Church of the world-worshipping wokesters who only pretend to be Orthodox.”

“But many Greeks are much more faithful and not at all happy about having clergy women forced upon them, and many other Orthodox are also afraid that if the Greeks start ordaining women, their own jurisdictions will feel obliged to follow suit.”

A recent guest on the Orthodox Ethos with old friend Fr. Peter Heers, here were Pdn. Patrick’s key takeaways in his own words:

• History is not tradition; history only becomes tradition when it is handed down; deaconesses have not been handed down to us, for good reason.
• The whole Church has never had a tradition of deaconesses, but it has had a longstanding tradition of not having deaconesses.
• Advocates of deaconesses today did not intend a revival of the ancient order but something entirely new—clergy women with rank and status comparable to today’s deacons.
• Orthodox priests need to do a better job of explaining what the Church has always taught about men and women.
• Pdn. Patrick outlines a better way based on the Holy Apostle Paul’s analogy of the man and the woman to the Father and the Son (1 Cor 11) and of husbands and wives to Christ and the Church (Eph 5).
• The analogy can be extended to clergy and laity: “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11), just as husbands are to “love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph 5:25).

In an incredibly pithy yet prolific post entitled “Talking Points on Deaconesses,” Pdn. Patrick said:

“The argument over deaconesses in the Orthodox Church tends to center around past history and present needs, but the history of deaconesses is obscure, easily distorted, and not always relevant. After all, history is not tradition; it only becomes tradition when it is … kept alive.“

“There are also important principles at stake that must be preached if we are to remain faithful Orthodox Christians. We cannot expect to win the argument while keeping silent about a fundamental truth for fear of offending women.” Amen.

If you’re still not convinced that the deaconess movement is a feminist sham and that its supporters are either dupes or partisans of liberal ecclesiology, please check out the following conversations:

• Pdn. Patrick on According to John with host Ioannis Nusias and Fathers Lawrence Farley in British Columbia and Patrick Ramsey in the UK
• Jim Jatras on World War Now
• Fr. John Whiteford on Jay Dyer

“You have a healthy church when men are running the show, but it doesn’t mean that women aren’t doing anything,” explained Fr. John Whiteford, noting that unhealthy churches are run by women. This really is basic logic, gang. As my teenage sons like to say, “That’s day-one stuff.” So don’t be swayed by the touchy-feelies.

The Church isn’t pro-woman, but it is pro-people. The Church isn’t anti-woman, but it is anti-feminist (since feminism is a selfish ideology which is anathema to the selfless Faith). The Church is hierarchical, but we all play a role in that beautiful and eternal symbiotic relationship. The Church is the Bride of Christ and it doesn’t need reform or restoration: we do!

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