Support La Croix International and high-quality journalism. Enjoy unlimited access to La Croix International. A Belgian court found the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and his predecessor guilty of discrimination for refusing to train a woman as a deacon.
While the Catholic Church in Belgium is open to the question of female diaconate, they deny sexism. The archdiocese has not yet appealed. Veer Dusauchoit, a Belgian Catholic woman from a parish near Leuven, was twice denied access to training to become a deacon. Believing this refusal to be contrary to the Belgian Constitution, Dusauchoit, who led some celebrations without a priest, took the matter to court. The diaconate—one of the three degrees of the sacrament of Holy Orders—alongside the priesthood and the episcopate, which respectively ordain priests and bishops—is currently open only to men in the Catholic Church.
The archdiocese is carefully studying the judgment before deciding whether to appeal. The bishops considered that since the person could not be ordained, it was inappropriate for her to undergo the training.
The situation is all the more uncomfortable because the church in Belgium is rather favorable to progress on the issue of the female diaconate. The next and final session will open in October this year. In France, as in Belgium, it is customary for wives to be associated with their husbands' journey towards the diaconate. Anne de C. Father Scholtes for Belgium shares this observation, explaining "that it is a pastoral training where the candidate—and his wife, if applicable—is integrated into a local community where he will serve as a deacon, and not just an academic training.
Will such a court decision set a precedent? According to his explanations, the judge rightly acknowledged that he could not intervene in the church's internal affairs due to religious freedom nor impose that the complainant be admitted to the desired training.
