According to Wikipedia (see
here):
The official position of the Roman Catholic Church, as expressed in the current canon law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is that: “Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination.”[3] Insofar as priestly and episcopal ordination are concerned, the Church teaches that this requirement is a matter of divine law, and thus doctrinal.[4]
The requirement that only males can receive ordination to the permanent diaconate has not been promulgated as doctrinal by the Church’s magisterium, though it is clearly at least a requirement according to canon law.[5][6]
The ordination of females to the diaconate is a matter of some controversy among Roman Catholic historians and theologians. At issue are two distinct but interrelated questions: whether some deaconesses in the early Church received true sacramental ordination, or whether all were merely so called for functional or honorific purposes; and, whether the prohibition against ordaining women to the diaconate is also a matter of unchangeable divine law, or potentially changeable ecclesiastical law. If some deaconesses did receive true sacramental ordination, then the current prohibition would be ecclesiastical rather than divine law. If not, then it could be either ecclesiastical or divine.
It can be verified that the term deaconesses was employed in antiquity; the word, like “deacon,” comes from the Greek word diakonos (διάκονος), meaning “one who serves.” Deaconesses mainly assisted the priest in receiving women into the Church for baptism by full immersion (which is still practiced by the Eastern Catholic Churches and by some parishes in the Western or Latin rite as well), and did not perform any of the duties associated with male deacons. In this sense “deaconess” implied a title of honour and respect. Whether or not “deaconess” in some instances implied sacramental ordination is disputed.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote in 1977 that the historical nature of deaconesses was “a question that must be taken up fully by direct study of the texts, without preconceived ideas.”[24] The position that deaconesses received true sacramental ordination (in certain times and places) is given by Roger Gryson,[25] and the position that deaconesses never received true sacramental ordination is given by Aimé Georges Martimort.[26] Both Gryson and Martimort argued from the same historical evidence, which is mixed. For example, the ecumenical First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) stated that deaconesses: “do not receive any imposition of hands, so that they are in all respects to be numbered among the laity.”[27] However, 126 years later, the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) decreed: “A woman shall not receive the laying on of hands as a deaconess under forty years of age, and then only after searching examination.”[28] Martimort argues that the “laying on of hands” in the latter case referred only to a special blessing. Against this, “Gryson argues that the use of the verb cheirotonein and of the substantive cheirothesia clearly indicate that deaconesses were ordained by the laying on of hands.”[29]
