Women Deacons: The View of “Canon of the Mass” Cipriano Vagaggini

I’m currently in the middle of a series on ancient (and a couple of modern) anaphorae, taken from Cipriano Vagaggini’s The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform.

It seems that Dom Vagaggini wasn’t afraid of controversial topics.  Consider this, from a 2003 article on Catholic women deacons:

The question of women deacons has been before the commission for at least 20 years. The original study on women deacons, requested by Pope Paul VI, was suppressed. While that document remains unpublished, an article published in Orientalia Christiana Periodica in 1974 by then-commission member Cipriano Vagaggini concluded that the ordination of women deacons in the early church was sacramental. What the church had done in the past, he suggested, the church may do again. Other scholars, before and after Vagaggini, have reached similar conclusions, but the current document only refers to the debate and strenuously avoids concluding that women ever received the sacrament of holy orders…