Don't Like the Permanent Diaconate!

I never did like it: not in 1968 when it was restored in our country, not over the subsequent half century and not now. I have been biting my tonque all these years: trying to be duly submissive to the Church. But I am done! Don't care who knows or what anyone thinks: I don't like the permanent diaconate. In the post-Council euphoria of 1968 I, like many, attributed a high degree of infallibility to that Council. I deferred. They must know what they are doing. It is an ancient, revered institution! So I kept biting my tongue. But now, over 50 years later, I am coming out. One of the contrarian benefits of the Francis pontificate is that its startling incoherence and fallibilty have shaken me out of my quasi-ultramontanism, my exaggerated trust of Pope and Counci, so that I can think critically about pope, priests and Council.

The permanent diaconate is not a tragedy. Actually, it is fairly harmless. But it is annoying: like a mosqito buzzing around your ears in the middle of the night, like high humidity, like a close-talker who has bad breath. This is what is so annoying:

First, the early talk was of the ordained deacon as a "servant" ... a kind of personalization of our faith as service of each other as did the original seven in distribution of the bread. Now that was SO annoying: we are all of us...each and every baptised/confirmed Catholics destined for a life of service, of one shape or another. To designate them as somehow special servants was SO irritating.

Secondly, they have always appeared to me as glorified altar boys up on the altar. They are not essential to the Eucharist, but an additional "frill" like incense or organ music. In my day I was a dutiful altar boy but was never really comfortable in vestments on the altar. Maybe it is my personal hangup?

By the way: this is not about the men themselves who are deacons. It is about the institution. Deacons I have known are predictably solid, mature, reliable, devout Catholics; accomplished but humble men devoted to marriage, family and service of the Church and community. They are fine even exemplary. Not very often inspiring from the pulpit, but nor are priests.

Lastly, and most importantly, they obscure the state-of-life contrast: marriage or ordination/vows. One lecture on the Theology of the Diaconate dismissed a question from a layman: "Who are you...one of us or one of them?" The question was disparaged as invalid, but it cuts to the heart of the matter: are you lay/married or ordained/vowed? There is a binary quality to this. There are two states of life in the Church and they both involve a final vow and they are best when pure and undiluted. The married deacon is first and foremost married, committed to wife and family, and should be lay not clerical. The ordained priest/bishop is "married" to the Church; as the vowed virgin is "married" to Christ and emblematic as the Church as bride. When there is a mixture, a merging of the two they both lose a quality of purity, clarity and integrity.

The pragmatic argument is, of course, that with shortages of priests around the globe there is need for assistance to priests in things like marrages, baptisms, funerals, communion services, and so forth. But there is no need for ordination to these tasks. It is theologically coherent that lay people, men and women equally, be designated to perform these functions when necessary, in mission or emergency circumstances. It would not have to be a life-time, sacrosanct "sealed" sacrament.

In the more robust renewal movements since the Council we have seen the emergence of inspired lay leadership, unordained, spontaeous, fluid, guided by the Holy Spirit but not institutionalized. Even the new Vatican guidelines about Catechists seem to me an unnecessary "institutionalization" that is restrictive and repressive, even as it obscures the fundamental sacramental nature of ordination including its masculine and vowed nature.

We will do well to quietly put away the permanent diaconate. We do well to highlight the primacy of the marrage vow in ordinary lay life. We do well to clarify the spousal nature of ordination and the vowed evangelical life.