Should Shia LaBeouf Become a Deacon Before Literally Any Woman?
A deep dive into a complex theological question
“I've got thick skin and an elastic heart.”
-Saint Bartholomew the Apostle (final words)
It feels very trite to open an essay with “The church is at a crossroads”, but the church is, indeed, at a crossroads. The time has come for the church to respond to a complex theological question whose answer will have implications for millennia. That question is: who is more qualified for the ministry of the diaconate? One the one hand: a woman, literally any woman, you can pick, we can make sure we find a really good and really qualified woman, literally any woman, there has to be at least one woman out of the like four billion on Earth? Or: the guy who played Will Smith's sidekick in the 2004 adaptation of I, Robot?
Let me back up. On New Years's Eve, actor and guy who was in the music video for “Elastic Heart” Shia LaBeouf was confirmed and thus made a full adult member of the Catholic church. As LaBeouf tells it, he was moved to join the Catholic church after spending the past few years working on a biopic of Padre Pio, in which he played the title character. Sadly, in LaBeouf’s conversion story, he still makes no mention of his work playing Keanu Reeves’ Catholic demon-hunting sidekick in the 2005 comic book adaptation Constantine, which I MAINTAIN TO THIS DAY WAS PRETTY GOOD. But whatever, I suppose that's fine, welcome aboard Shia; I think Catholicism makes me a better person and I hope it makes you one too.
In all seriousness, I do hope LaBeouf finds some good community and comfort in Catholicism; if you remember the news stories about this guy, he’s definitely seen some darkness in his life and he’s been unwell in the past. In the story on his conversion from the EWTN-owned Catholic News Agency, we get some of that background:
“Despite his successes as an actor in big-screen films such as “Transformers,” “Fury,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and “Holes,”
Ok let’s hang on a second, artistically speaking at most one of those titles could be considerably called a “success”. Sorry, let’s continue:
“Despite his successes as an actor in big-screen films such as “Transformers,” “Fury,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and “Holes,” [LaBeouf’s] life was in turmoil. In trouble with the law multiple times, LaBeouf currently faces a lawsuit filed by his ex-girlfriend accusing him of being physically abusive. Estranged from his mother because of his downward spiral, LaBeouf told [Bishop Robert] Barron he had reached the point where he despaired of living, saying: “I don’t want to be here anymore.””
LaBeouf became a star early in his life, and that’s not an easy path to take, and I’m glad he’s found a faith to call home. Hey, sorry, did you say lawsuit for being physically abusive? That sounds very bad, and if I look at the story on LaBeouf’s conversion from the Hollywood Reporter it actually sounds even worse because they describe it as “a December 2020 lawsuit filed by former girlfriend [British recording artist] FKA Twigs, who accused LaBeouf of “relentless abuse,” sexual battery, assault and emotional distress.” That’s obviously very dark, but we are a church of sinners, and this is long in his past, so I wish him well as he begins his new chapter ah sorry wait I just read that Hollywood Reporter article again and this is actually not very far in his past at all and in fact the lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in mid-October of this year, and I’m not really sure if any additional information is going to come out about just how bad this is, although two of the things that Twigs alleges are that LaBeouf tried to strangle her and knowingly infected her with an STD.
I really believe, sincerely, that none of this disqualifies you from entering the Catholic church if you are sincerely willing to change your life, and I honestly hope LaBeouf finds peace and healing, and I'm glad he thinks he can find that in the church. I really do think that! I also think that we should maybe put the breaks on fawning stories in Catholic media like CNA describing how LaBeouf likes Latin mass and masculine Jesus, knowing the risk that those stories could look incredibly stupid and callous in ten months, if the trial doesn’t go well for LaBeouf (and, honestly, even if it does go well). If I were, say, the bishop who confirmed LaBeouf, I'd likely just maintain a nice private correspondence with him, and not loudly and repeatedly broadcast our friendship to get social media engagement, knowing that this could all bite me in the ass later if a court finds him liable for sexual battery in October. Let me just check on the bishop who confirmed LaBeouf and see if he knew to display this level of tact, or if he was, once again, a dollar store squishmallow doll who somehow achieved sentience:
I had already talked about this in 2022 when Barron did his fawning interview with LaBeouf while LaBeouf was actually getting much tougher questions about his past from other non-Catholic outlets. And maybe Barron didn't think it was his place to really grill LaBeouf on all of that, and I can maybe understand the thinking there. But something else came up in his interview with Barron, and with other interviews LaBeouf did while plugging the Padre Pio film: LaBeouf’s main mentor in Catholicism is Mel Gibson, famous hard-right Catholic and star of the smash hit romantic comedy What Women Want. LaBeouf even talked with Barron about how Gibson was helping point him to the right pre-1962 Latin Masses to attend, after the Vatican had restricted the pre-1962 Latin Mass because too many weirdos were using it to organize opposition to the Second Vatican Council. Gibson is still bankrolling his own traditionalist chapel in southern California, and apparently does not think the Pope is real. It also appears very possible that Gibson still hates Jewish people. LaBeouf learned about Catholicism from the man who said this in 2021:
“If anyone’s familiar with the missives of Archbishop Vigano, he says that the seeds of erosion of the Church were sown with the reforms of Vatican II. And I agree with him, he suggests even that we scrap the whole thing and go back and do it the way it was before…I think that the vast majority of these bishops are just a bunch of hirelings. And my question is, who’s hiring them. I don’t think it’s Jesus. Is it Francis? Who’s hiring Francis? Is it, is it Pachamama? I mean, I think you need to look at the whole institution, and you know, I’ll quote Archbishop Viganò again in saying that he believes that there was a parallel counterfeit church set up to eclipse the real one.”
When I said that an upcoming trial for sexual battery doesn’t disqualify you for joining the Catholic church, I meant that. We are a church of sinners, and if LaBeouf finds peace and growth and healing in the Catholic church, that’s good for him and good for the church. But learning everything you know about Catholicism from Mel Gibson is disqualifying for joining the Catholic church, because while we’re a church of sinners, we should at least try not to be a church of fucking idiots. Also, Robert Barron not batting an eye when his interview subject said how close he was with Gibson and how much Gibson taught him about Catholicism - and leaving that in the interview! Barron could have just cut that! - is also disqualifying for being a Catholic bishop. “Hey, Mel Gibson is, like, a bad role model for Catholicism, right?” is the easiest IQ test for a Catholic bishop to pass, and Barron failed. But that’s not a surprise, Barron fails every test you give him: IQ (dumb), marshmallow (eats the marshmallow), mirror (thinks there’s another bishop who looks exactly like him), and pH (body is made mostly of whole milk).
There’s another piece to this, though: LaBeouf doesn’t just want to join the Catholic church as a lay member, he wants to be ordained. He apparently expressed to his confirmation sponsor that he wanted to become a deacon, dedicated to service and preaching. EWTN/CNA considered LaBeouf’s comment about the diaconate newsworthy enough to not only include in their story, but include in the headline:
If LaBeouf actually said that to his sponsor, I don’t doubt he was sincere, but I do doubt that LaBeouf will be able to be an effective deacon and high-profile working actor simultaneously. Maybe he will, he’s done hard things before (gotten sober, worked with Lars von Trier, et cetera), but it takes years of study to become a deacon and it’s a significant time commitment once you are one. And as much as “sexual battery lawsuit” may not be disqualifying for joining the church, I kind of feel that it should be disqualifying for becoming a clergyman. It turns out - and I’m sorry if you’re just finding out about this now - that sexually abusive clergy have been a problem in the Catholic church in the past, and we don’t seem to have gotten around to fixing that problem yet. Someone who was accused of sexual battery, of intentionally giving a woman a sexually transmitted disease, of trying to strangle that woman, all recently enough that the trial hasn’t even happened yet, does not strike me as a strong candidate for the diaconate at this point in the life of the church.
But, as it turns out, none of that, on paper, is officially disqualifying for the diaconate. In theory, you actually can become a deacon even if you straight-up get convicted of sexual battery, or say you think that Jewish people started all of the wars in world history, there's not like an actual formal rule that disqualifies you from getting ordained because of those things. There is something that actually is formally disqualifying for the diaconate, of course; something that, in the eyes of the Catholic church, is far more appalling than sexual battery or anti-Semitism. It's called “being a woman”, and it's currently practiced by roughly half of the world's population.
Let’s back up again. Depending on how you define the formal Catholic priesthood, the diaconate predates the actual presbyterate. Deacons, for centuries, were ordained to directly serve the people of God through “liturgy, word, and charity”; they didn’t have all of the same sacramental faculties as priests, but could perform some of the rituals, lead prayers, and were important leaders and servants in the church. Today, men serve as deacons before becoming fully ordained as priests, and other men, including married men, can be ordained as “permanent deacons” to serve in their parish or community for life.
The other thing about deacons in the early church was that they likely included women; Saint Phoebe was a contemporary of Paul and is explicitly referred to as a deacon in Romans 16. So, groups like Discerning Deacons or Women’s Ordination Conference, women who believe they are called to serve in greater roles in church leadership, have worked to organize themselves and put pressure on the Vatican to once again open the diaconate to women. We’re not there yet, obviously. But as we’re still in the middle of The Big Synod and church leadership discusses questions of new structures and decision-makers in the church, the question of the women’s diaconate has started to come up. Heidi Schlumpf, who normally writes for NCR, recently wrote a long piece for US Catholic titled “Has the synod on synodality changed anything?”, which goes pretty thoroughly through each of the “hot-button” issues that came up in the Synod so far to see where the discussion has gone and what action, if any, the church has taken. As for the women’s diaconate:
“Although the current synod synthesis document falls short of putting forth a proposal on women deacons, it includes several paragraphs that summarize the discussion, both pro and con, and call for further study. It says some synod members considered ordaining women deacons “unacceptable” because they consider it a “discontinuity with Tradition.” “For others, however, opening access for women to the diaconate would restore the practice of the Early Church. Others still, discern it as an appropriate and necessary response to the signs of the times, faithful to the Tradition, and one that would find an echo in the hearts of many who seek new energy and vitality in the Church,” the document says. The report also calls for more inclusive language and floats the idea of “new ministries” that could provide more ministerial opportunities for women.”
So, there’s some interesting stuff there, but I was overjoyed to see some significant movement when Pope Francis announced that he was finally forming a commission to formally study the question of opening the diaconate to women. The Synod process, and especially the monthlong meeting at the Vatican last October, allowed these questions to surface, and now with a commission in place it is possible that in the next year or two we could ah crap wait a second I’m sorry I just checked the date on that article, Pope Francis didn’t form a commission on women deacons after the October Synod meeting. He actually formed that commission seven and a half years ago and their report was never published. Thankfully, he’s now formed a new commission on women deacons, and I think with a renewed sense of seriousness around this issue he is sure to ah crap hang on that second commission is actually four years old, they also have already written a report, and it also was never published. One of the notes in the final report of the October Synod meeting was “hey it’s weird that we haven’t seen either of those reports, can we actually release those reports please?” That was two months ago, the reports are still collecting dust somewhere. How seriously do you think the Vatican takes the diaconate?
Women have been discerning the diaconate for, if we are to believe St. Phoebe, millennia. Pope Francis got some good headlines when he announced his commission to study the question, which was formed all the way back when people still cared about Game of Thrones, and the Vatican appears to have done nothing with their work, or the work of the commission that replaced them. In the Synod meeting, “some synod members considered ordaining women deacons “unacceptable” because they consider it a “discontinuity with Tradition”,” so maybe if the women are patient enough to wait one more millennium, the men might feel more comfortable and they can get it taken care of next time. In the meantime, we have a great talent pool for the diaconate, have you heard about this guy Shia? I mean, yeah maybe he’s about to be found liable for sexual battery, and he learned everything he knows about Catholicism from a sedevacantist that might still be extremely anti-Semitic, but he also played Sam in a movie where a giant robot says “Sam put the cube in my chest”1!
I feel like one of the reasons I get told for the church not doing things that seem reasonable, or fair, or compassionate, is that the church is trying very hard not to create “confusion” among the faithful. If we start blessing gay people, straight people will go feral, that sort of thing. Of course, that’s the actual reason why the church refuses to ordain women as priests, and I’ve written about that before, a couple of times - the church actually teaches that if someone saw a woman (who apparently never looks like Jesus) instead of a man (who apparently always looks like Jesus) at the altar saying the Eucharistic prayers, they’d be confused, because the person at the altar has to look like Jesus. It’s confusing, it’s difficult to understand, so we can’t do it.
Well, I happen to be a member of the faithful myself, so let me tell you what I’m confused about right now. I’m confused that our church can actually be in a position to ask the question “should Shia LaBeouf become a deacon before literally any woman?”. That is not actually a complex theological question, nor is it really confusing at all; that question should be, in fact, the dumbest shit you've ever heard. I have some other fairly simple questions. To EWTN and Robert Barron: do you think that rolling out the red carpet for LaBeouf and putting his discernment to the diaconate in your headlines might be a massive insult to every Catholic woman who has ever felt shut out of a leadership position? To bishops, priests, media, Synod members: is “discontinuity with tradition” really the best you’ve got as a reason not to let women be deacons? To literally anyone: if no woman can be a deacon and Shia LaBeouf can, is the “tradition” with which we risk discontinuity in any way good, meaningful, or useful? I await your answers, any time in the next seven and a half years.
It had that hot lady in it! She was in the video for “Love the Way You Lie”!