On the back wall of Dolores Mission Church in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles hangs a painting that depicts the assassination of the Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero.
"I remember me as a child crying and crying when I heard that he was killed," said Rosa Bonilla, who grew up in El Salvador and now lives in Los Angeles, as she gestured toward the image.
"My family and I just had just a little radio," said Bonilla, "and I remember my dad, and my mom and my grampa sitting around the table just listening to what he said. And that helped me to do what I am doing right now."
What she's doing now, and has done for more than two decades at Dolores Mission Church, is serve as a pastoral assistant: visiting the sick, planning worship, praying with congregation members. It's a paid position, but one that has no official authority within the Catholic church.
Now a series of conversations that began years ago could soon change that. And in these early weeks of Leo XIV's papacy, women who long to become Catholic deacons are hopeful.
New movement toward opening the diaconate to women
What's giving them hope is a document approved last year, under Pope Francis. Ellie Hidalgo points specifically to paragraph 60 in the final report of the Vatican's Synod on Synodality that took place in 2023 and 2024.
"There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the church. What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped," she reads aloud. "The question of women's access to the diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue."
Hidalgo, who lives in Miami, is co-director of Discerning Deacons, an organization that works to allow for women to serve as deacons in the Catholic church. Currently, deacons are men ordained to a ministry of service and preaching. But there has been a movement since Vatican II to expand the ministry to women.
"My hope is that Pope Leo has every intention of shepherding this teaching forward and that we get to have many additional conversations about women's participation in the church," said Hidalgo.
Women had served as deacons in the early church, but the church restricted the ministry to only men during the Medieval period. Over the centuries, the idea of permanent deacons fell away and became a transitional step in the process of men becoming priests.
Deacons are ordained to a ministry of word and service, which includes working in congregations and church-related charities with occasional preaching responsibilities. Priests, meanwhile, are ordained to a ministry of word and sacrament, meaning they are allowed to, among other things, hear confessions and preside at the Eucharist.
The Catholic Church re-instituted the permanent diaconate, which is open to married and single men, after the reforms of Vatican II in the mid-20th Century.
There was much hope for the possibility of women serving as deacons during years of church-wide listening sessions held in recent years the culminated in two Vatican meetings under Pope Francis referred to as the Synod on Synodality —meetings at which the man who is now Pope Leo was a voting member.
Hearing the call of the Holy Spirit
Pope Leo has been noncommittal on opening the diaconate to women, citing the church's "very significant and long tradition" of male-only clergy, but many women aspiring to be deacons are ready to work with the new pope to make their hope a reality.
It's work that Jazmin Jimenez is ready to do.
She gave a homily last year during the Feast of Saint Phoebe, a woman referred to as a deacon in the New Testament — in Paul's Letter to the Romans.
"The good news for us today is that the Holy Spirit has the ability to transform our discomfort into a quiet confidence," she preached to a crowded sanctuary at American Martyrs Catholic Church in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where she serves as the director of liturgy and worship for the more than 7,000 families who call the congregation their home.
Jimenez is part of an executive leadership team at the congregation, which consists of four women and three men.
"I am somebody who is providing space to break open the word, to celebrate sacraments and to be of service to the community," she said in describing the work she does there.
And over the years in this roll, Jimenez came to hear the call of the Holy Spirit.
"I thought, wow, something is stirring here," she said. "I want to continue to pay attention to that and what female deacons might look like for the Catholic Church."
For Jimenez it's about more than simply the title deacon.
"There's a sacramental grace that comes along with ordination to the diaconate," she said. "Some days are easy and joyful and other days are really hard, and to receive that grace and to have it sustain me in the work that I do would make a big difference."
Jimenez believes Pope Leo will recognize that grace is available to women too because of his experiences.
"When he studied theology, there were women in his classroom," she said of Pope Leo's time at Villanova University and the Catholic Theological Union. "Because here, there are men and women who get to study together. So that he has a lived experience of being partners in ministry with lay and religious women in our ongoing discernment."
Jimenez also points to the fact that prior to his election as pope, Leo included women on his staff in a Vatican office that vets and recommends people to serve as local bishops around the world.
The Vatican is doing some discerning of its own on the issue. Pope Francis asked a group of theologians there to study the possibility of expanding the diaconate to women. That committee is expected to issue a report later this year. In fact, Jimenez and Bonilla are two of 29 women from around the world who this February submitted to the Vatican testimonies about their discernment and sense of call to be deacons.
A long, hard path to official ministry
Back at Dolores Mission Church, Rosa Bonilla stands in the front of the sanctuary and points to a mural to the right of the altar. It's a depiction of Our Lady of the Way: The Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus while walking on a debris-cluttered path.
"Our community" said Bonilla, "was coming here in the 80s, and see how Mary walks with us on the road from the village to this city?"
The image of Mary walking from war-torn El Salvador to the promise of the U.S. reflects Bonilla's own journey— a journey she wants to continue, discerning a call to become a deacon of her church.
"My hope for Pope Leo that he continue 'todos, todos, todos,' all women and men," she said referring to Pope Francis's common three-fold repetition of the Spanish word everyone. "I have been praying for that."
Praying and working to become a deacon, Bonilla says, as a smile lights up her face. Being ordained a deacon, she believes, would confer the authority to speak words of grace and truth—just as her inspiration Oscar Romero did—to a community longing for good news.
"I just want to preach," she said. "For me to have this title is to feel more liberty to speak."
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