Court fines Belgian Cardinal, Archbishop for Denying Woman Admission to Diaconate

“We received the verdict yesterday afternoon, are now studying it, and will then decide how to proceed,” a spokesman for the archdiocese said in response to a request from the website katholisch.de on Wednesday. 

The Catholic Church teaches that holy orders — of which there are three degrees of diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate — is the sacrament of apostolic ministry and is reserved to baptized men.

Pope Francis has reiterated numerous times that holy orders are “reserved to men.”  

Dusauchoit, 62, has served at her parish church in a Flemish part of Belgium for years, according to De Morgen. As her parish no longer has a priest, Dusauchoit got involved with arranging funerals and scriptural readings, katholish.de reported. 

In an April 22 op-ed, Dusauchoit described herself as a “religious, socially committed, feminist, and ecologically inspired woman.” She claimed that as late as the 1970s in Belgium, wives of deacons were required to attend deacon training together with their husbands. 

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“Women in the Church are still not fully appreciated and given their equal place,” she wrote. 

“Out of that frustration, from the conviction that training as a deacon can help the Church grow further and at the same time from the determination not to break with the Church, I decided to register for training as a deacon,” she wrote.

In Belgium, the state pays the salaries of ministers of recognized religions, which include Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, and Islam. 

The bishops of Belgium, since the 2023 refusals to admit Dusauchoit, have since expressed support for the ordination of women to the diaconate. 

Jonah McKeown is a staff writer and assistant podcast producer for Catholic News Agency. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and in the past has worked as a writer, as a producer for public radio, and as a videographer.