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When interviewer Norah O’Donnell asked whether a woman could ever become a deacon, the Pope answered simply: “No.” He went on to say:

If it is deacons with Holy Orders, no. But women have always had, I would say, the function of deaconesses without being deacons, right? Women are of great service as women, not as ministers, as ministers in this regard, within the Holy Orders.

The Pope’s clear response to the question came in an extended version of the 60 Minutes interview that was broadcast on Monday night, May 20, following the regular broadcast on Sunday evening.

The prelate’s resignation comes eight months after his installation, and just two days after he exhorted civic leaders to “listen to the heartbeat of the geographical and existential peripheries” at a commemoration of the nation’s May Revolution.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1997 and appointed bishop of Mar del Plata in 2017, Mestre was president of the Argentine bishops’ Commission for Catechesis, Animation and Biblical Pastoral Ministry when the Pontiff appointed him archbishop of La Plata last July. He was installed as archbishop two months later.

Although the Vatican announcement did not disclose the reason for the resignation, the prelate said he resigned at the Pontiff’s request “after confronting some different perceptions with what happened in the Diocese of Mar del Plata from November 2023 to the present.” (Two bishops resigned before their installations.)

Each Vatican dicastery is led by a prefect and secretary; the members of dicasteries are appointed to five-year terms and meet at least every two years for discussion of “matters and questions of greater importance,” according to Praedicate Evangelium, the Pope’s apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia.

All three of the new members “have defended the Church’s moral teaching and marriage between a man and a woman,” writes Edward Pentin, senior correspondent of the National Catholic Register.

The 14 Christians, “many very young,” were “killed with pangas [machetes] and Kalashnikovs [rifles]” in the town of Eringeti, the Vatican newspaper reported.

Lorenzo Caruso wrote to the Pontiff after his application was turned down, complaining that the policy reflected “a toxic and elective clericalism.” In a written response—made public by the daily Il Messagero—Pope Francis replied: “You know that clericalism is a plague? It’s an ugly ‘worldliness’ and as a great theologian said, ‘worldliness is the worst that can happen to the Church, even worse than the era of concubinary popes.”