Deacons Male and Female

It is ordination season again. And among the many men being ordained will be those being ordained to the permanent diaconate. The order of deacon is one of the three grades in the sacramental hierarchy of Holy Orders. It has existed in the Church since apostolic times. But over the centuries the functions of deacons were gradually assumed by others. In particular, priests increasingly performed more of the activities deacons had performed in the liturgy, even as the priesthood became the culmination of progression per gradum through a series of minor and major orders.  That was the way it was in the Latin Church until the Second Vatican Council provided for the possibility once again of ordaining men as deacons without any intention of their advancing to the priesthood. The reinstitution of the permanent diaconate has been particularly successful in the United States which has at least half of all such ordained permanent deacons in the entire world.

Meanwhile, along with abundant theological and other discussions about the exact meaning of the order of deacon, there has been some resurgent interest in the question of female deacons. And last week Pope Francis himself, in response to a question, suggested the possibility of further study of the subject.

I remember it was a topic that interested me somewhat when I would come to Rome for meetings and stay at the Domus Paulus VI; there was a Syrian theologian there, a good man, who did the critical edition and translation of the hymns of St. Ephrem, the Syrian. And one day I asked him about this, and he explained to me that in the early days of the Church there were some “deaconesses.”

But what are these deaconesses? Were they ordained or not? The Council of Chalcedon (451) speaks about it, but it is somewhat obscure. What was the role of deaconesses at that time? It seems — that man told me, who is dead; he was a good professor, wise, erudite — it seems that the role of the deaconesses was to help with the baptisms of women, the immersion, they were baptizing them, for the sake of decorum; also to anoint the bodies of women in baptism. And also something curious: when there was a marriage trial, because the husband was beating his wife, and she went to the bishop to complain, the deaconesses were charged with looking at the bruises left on the body of the woman from her husband’s beatings and informing the bishop.

This, I remember. There are a number of publications on the diaconate in the Church, but it is unclear what it was like. I think that I will ask the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to inform me about the studies on this topic, because I have responded to you based only on what I heard from this priest — who was a scholarly and true researcher — about the permanent diaconate. And also I would like to set up an official commission to study the issue: I think that it will be good for the Church to clarify this point; I agree, and I will speak, to do something of this kind.

In fact, the question has already been studied and considered at considerable length. In 2002, for example, the International Theological Commission published the results of its study of the diaconate, From the Diaknoia of Christ to the Diakonia of the Apostles. (That document was approved in forma specifica and its publication authorized by the Prefect of the CDF, at that time Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.)

The document is somewhat on the long side, but well worth reading. It is a comprehensive treatment of the diaconate at various stages in the history of the Church and of the reestablishment of the permanent diaconate in the 20th century. This study of the diaconate showed that historically "a ministry of deaconesses did indeed exist, and that this developed unevenly in different parts of the Church. It seems clear that this ministry was not perceived as simply the feminine equivalent of the masculine diaconate." This study also examined "how the Church through her theology and Magisterium has become more conscious of the sacramental reality of Holy Orders and its three grades."

It concluded that the ancient deaconesses "as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised were not purely and simply equivalent to the [male] deacons." And it also stressed "the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other." With those two important points in mind, it concluded that "it pertains to the ministry of discernment which the Lord established in his Church to pronounce authoritatively" regarding the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate.

Assuming the facts already established and the parameters set by those facts, what might a recreated female diaconal order in the Church actually look like?

Questions of sacramentality aside, it would seem that some form of the ministry of deaconess has survived in at least some Eastern Churches. (The photo above purports to be that of a 19th-century Armenian deaconess in Constantinople.) In the West, it would appear that the ministries originally associated with female deacons are either no longer needed in the Church (because of changes in the way we celebrate the sacraments of initiation) or (as apparently also happened with the ministries of male deacons) have simply been assumed by others (e.g., women Religious, some of whom in the past have at times been associated with the ancient image of deaconess). In the case of male deacons, an order which admittedly had at least recognizably survived into modern times if only as a transitional step to the priesthood, a permanent diaconate was still deemed worth reestablishing in the Church because of the distinctive sacramental character of diaconal ordination. In the different but comparable case of female deacons, could a similar argument be made for reestablishing some such order, one which would perhaps play a somewhat similar but also distinctly different role in the Church's organization?

Just as there is obviously a place for women Religious alongside men Religious, simultaneously sharing in the charism of religious life but also exercising obviously different charisms, can we stretch our imaginations similarly with regard to the diaconate?

In this era which seems so obsessed with minimizing the significance of sexual differentiation, would a distinct female diaconate be too counter-cultural? Whom would that satisfy, and whom would it not? And where would that leave the debate?

Ordinary Time

We sang the Regina Coeli at Mass for the last time in 2016 yesterday. And so now we are back to Ordinary Time!

Whenever I am required to use that unimaginative, modern liturgical neologism Ordinary Time, I immediately find myself pulled to counter-images, both religious (e.g., the traditional terms that used to be used to describe this season) or secular, such as the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful 1994 book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt - The Home Front in World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995.

The amazing couple and the era which Goodwin recalled in her book were indeed anything but ordinary. In fact, one would be hard pressed to identify what era in modern history has really been ordinary. If Goodwin's era of the "Greatest Generation" was extraordinary in a heroic kind of way, then the dissolution of their cultural world, that in my lifetime recognizably began in the 1960s, has surely likewise been "no ordinary time." In fact, secular time is seldom if ever ordinary.

But then neither is sacred time.

Yesterday, on Pentecost, I called Ordinary Time "the time of fulfillment, the time of the Church, when the promise of Christ’s resurrection should be reflected in our ordinary lives." Pentecost, I suggested, "ritualizes annually what happens weekly with the transition from Sunday to Monday. From our Sunday celebration around the unleavened bread which has become the body of our Risen Lord, we are sent forth, filled with the Holy Spirit, to renew the face of the earth as the Risen Christ’s permanent presence in the leavened bread of our daily lives in our ordinary world."

That connection may have been more obvious back when this season was labelled "Time After Pentecost" and its Sundays numbered accordingly. However that may be, the connection remains.

Someone recently referred to Ordinary Time as "our long slog toward Advent." If Pentecost points us back to the beginning of our communal life as the Church in the world, Advent points us ahead to the finality for which we claim to await with joyful hope and which in any case challenges us by its sheer inevitability to make the most  of the present, however long or short it turns out to be.

As Saint Irenaeus (130-202) taught (Adversus Haereses): "Now, through the Spirit, the image and inscription of the Father and the Son have been given to us, and it is our duty to use the coin committed to our charge and make it yield a rich profit for the Lord." 

The Last Day of the Feast (cf. Jn. 7:37)

Until modern times, Pentecost was observed very grandly. It was celebrated as one of the greatest festivals of the Church’s calendar - on a par with Easter. It had an octave equal to Easter’s and even had its own Saturday morning vigil (complete with a blessing of baptismal water like at Easter). At one time, Kings and Queens were required to wear their crowns publicly on Pentecost. About all that’s left of that now in Europe is a 3-day holiday weekend. And here in the United States we don’t even have that!

“Pentecost” is a Greek word referring to the 50th day – originally the 50th day after Passover. Its Hebrew name, Shavuot, means “weeks,” a reference to the “week” of seven weeks that began with Passover. It originated as a kind of thanksgiving festival for the late spring, early summer harvest (which is why the Book of Ruth, which culminates during the wheat harvest, is read in the synagogue on Shavuot). Whereas at Passover, seven weeks earlier, only unleavened bread had been used, at Pentecost ordinary bread was offered in the form of fully leavened loaves. It was to celebrate this festival that devout Jews from every nation under heaven came as pilgrims to Jerusalem, in the familiar story in the Acts of the Apostles.

By then, Pentecost had become a commemoration of the covenant at Mount Sinai, the giving of the 10 commandments, which (according to Exodus) had happened just about seven weeks after the exodus from Egypt.  Just as summer fulfills the promise of spring, the covenant at Mount Sinai fulfilled the promise of Israelite nationhood of which the exodus had been but the beginning. Likewise, the coming of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the promise of the resurrection, transforming the disciples from fearful followers of a now absent Jesus into faith-filled witnesses empowered transform the whole world.

In our current calendar, Pentecost marks the transition from Easter to Ordinary Time, the time of fulfillment, the time of the Church, when the promise of Christ’s resurrection should be reflected in our ordinary lives. As his Church, we worship the Risen Lord, now ascended to heaven and seated at his Father’s right hand. Meanwhile, as his Church here on earth, we continue Christ’s work in the world.

We do this empowered by the Risen Lord’s parting gift of the Holy spirit to his Church. Years ago, when most of us were preparing for Confirmation, we memorized the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit – wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and the fear of the Lord. We call them the gifts of the Holy Spirit, because we don’t produce them on our own. They are given to us – to transform us into true children of God and to enable us to live in a new way. The results of that transformation, the visible effects we experience of the Holy Spirit active in our lives are what we call the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We memorized them too - charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.

As a young man growing up in New York the Jacksonian era, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, the future founder of the Paulist Fathers gravitated first to politics as the vehicle for the renewal of society. By his mid-20s, however, Hecker had become a Catholic and cam to envision the renewal of society in religious terms 0 in terms of openness to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the effects of the Holy Spirit’s gifts in all aspects of life. “The radical and adequate remedy for all the evils of our age, and the source of all true progress,” Hecker confidently claimed, “consist in increased attention and fidelity to the action of the Holy spirit in the soul.” [The Church and the Age].

That’s how the promise of the resurrection is fulfilled and expresses its effect in our ordinary lives. Pentecost ritualizes annually what happens weekly with the transition from Sunday to Monday. From our Sunday celebration around the unleavened bread which has become the body of our Risen Lord, we are sent forth, filled with the Holy Spirit, to renew the face of the earth as the Risen Christ’s permanent presence in the leavened bread of our daily lives in the world.

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 15, 2016.

To the Ends of the Earth

This 1913 folk-art rendering of the Ascension is one of 3 historic ceiling paintings at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN.

When I was a boy, one of the things that struck me as unattractive about a religious vocation was the likelihood of having to move periodically from place to place, the way that priests in religious communities were transferred and reassigned with some regularity. As a child, I had a strong craving for stability, and I dreaded the prospect of ever having to move myself or say good-bye to someone I cared about who was moving. I admired – but did not envy – my grandparents, who had left behind in southern Italy all that was familiar and dear to them to cross the Atlantic as immigrants in America. And I admired – but again did not envy or desire to imitate – missionaries, who dutifully left their homelands for faraway places to fulfill the Risen Christ’s final command to his disciples.

Since then, of course, my life has taken all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, and I have moved around a lot more than I had ever expected. Meanwhile, modern technologies have made separation somewhat less final – and certainly much more manageable – than it was for my immigrant grandparents or past generations of heroic missionaries. But I still find farewells and departures – whether my own or that of some friend or colleague - extremely stressful. So I can easily imagine how distressed Jesus’ disciples must have been at the prospect of his departure. The fact that they kept looking intently at the sky as he was going, until two men dressed in white garments appeared to tell them to stop – that, I think, tells us how they felt. If saying good-bye is, in fact, one of the most stressful of human activities, then this was the good-bye to end all good-byes!

Some of us are old enough to remember when, after the Gospel on Ascension Day, the Easter Candle – our very visible symbol of the presence of the Risen Christ – was ceremonially extinguished. Even more dramatically, in certain places the Easter Candle (or sometimes an image of the Risen Lord himself) might be hoisted up into the Church’s roof until it disappeared. The point of such customs, of course, was to dramatize that Jesus is now gone, and that we are left behind.

Historically speaking, the Ascension commemorates the end of the short period when the Risen Christ appeared periodically to his disciples after the resurrection. After the Ascension, those appearances ended. And the disciples were left behind to continue what he had started. But not quite alone, since Christ continues in his Church through his promised gift of the Holy Spirit. “I am sending the promise of my Father upon you,” the departing Jesus said to his disciples, “so stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high [Luke 24:49]. So the break is not so complete as it seemed, our separation not so definitive. Jesus may have moved away, but somehow we are still connected. In fact the Ascension, the going away, is a sort of prerequisite for the next act, the history of the Church.

Of course, one obvious question is where has he gone?  He is, as we say Sunday after Sunday in the Creed, seated at the right hand of the Father. The Ascension is the prerequisite for Jesus’ enthronement, where again we remain connected. On the one hand, while ascended and seated above, he is still really with us here, through the power of the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments we celebrate. On the other hand, we too are also in some sense with him there. As we say in today’s Eucharistic Prayer, we celebrate the most sacred day on which your Only begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself. In having his Son’s human nature enthroned at his side in heaven, God now has at his side in some sense the whole human world which his Son embraced in himself and experienced to the full – the human world of our lives, our loves, our work, our play, our successes, our failures. And so now, having experienced our world with us (and in the process having invested it with more meaning that it would ever otherwise have had), God in turn now shares his world with us. For where Christ has gone, there we hope to follow. Where he is now, there we hope to be.

So the Ascension is about us, as well as about Jesus – and not just about our being left behind, but about what’s now in store for us, thanks to Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and about what goes on in the meantime. The Ascension sets the stage for that hoped-for future, which we get a glimpse of already in Jesus, who, although already ascended, invites us to approach him – as the epistle says with a sincere heart and in absolute trust [Hebrews 10:22]. Confident that he lives forever to intercede on our behalf [Hebrews 7:25] and will in due time return again, we remain behind to continue what he started, to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth [Acts 1:1-11].

Homily for the Ascension of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 8, 2016.

Charlemagne 2016

Yesterday, Pope Francis became the latest recipient of the Charlemagne Prize. That is the EU's annual exercise in self-promotion, which was once awarded to European statesmen like Robert Schuman, Paul Henri Spaak, Alcide deGasperi, and Konrad Adenauer, but more recently has actually been awarded (in 2002) to the euro! 

Charlemagne, whose Frankish-Roman empire corresponded more or less to the original 6-nation European Common Market is as good a patron as any for the "European Project." Charlemagne's empire fell apart after his death, but the old idea of a Western Latin "Roman" empire outlasted him - in part because, while Charlemagne himself had reigned in Aachen and his successors as Holy Roman Emperors reigned from various other northern and central European cities, that earlier version of the "European Project" had a spiritual partner in Rome, the heart of Western Christendom, which was more than a partner but in a real sense the soul of that "European Project."

The Holy Roman Empire ended 210 years ago. Since then, the modern, secularized "European Project" has had three very different incarnations - first, Napoleon's military and cultural conquest of Europe, second, Hitler's military conquest combined with a much more ambitious and lethal attempt at cultural conquest (which fortunately failed completely), and, third, the post-war Christian-Democratic European integration that has evolved into the present post-Christian and increasingly post-democratic EU. The original leaders of the post-war "European Project" were motivated by Christian Democratic values and a common desire to end Europe's history of fratricidal conflicts. (In fact, of course, it was the Cold War  and a common enemy that accomplished the latter goal. And, as soon as the Cold War was over, fratricidal conflict resumed in full ferocity in the Balkans!)

Receiving the award in the Sala Regia, in the presence of various European statesmen (and the King of Spain), Pope Francis spoke eloquently about Europe, with obvious references to the plight of contemporary migrants in Europe. I dream of a Europe where being a migrant is not a crime but a summons to greater commitment on behalf of the dignity of every human being. Diagnosing the symptoms of European malaise, he challenged his hearers with a call for a new humanism based on three capacities: the capacity to integrate, the capacity for dialogue and the capacity to generate.

In his diagnosis, Pope Francis referenced his earlier use of the image of Europe as a "grandmother" and a growing impression that Europe is weary, aging, no longer fertile and vital, that the great ideals that inspired Europe seem to have lost their appeal. There is an impression that Europe is declining, that it has lost its ability to be innovative and creative, and that it is more concerned with preserving and dominating spaces than with generating processes of inclusion and change. There is an impression that Europe is tending to become increasingly “entrenched”, rather than open to initiating new social processes capable of engaging all individuals and groups in the search for new and productive solutions to current problems. 

The only thing missing from that otherwise on-target analysis was any consideration of how the post-Christian, post-democratic EU itself may be one of the major contributing causes of Europe's malaise!