The Deacon - Phoenix of Roman Catholic Clergy

The challenge is the Roman Catholic Church's need for a bit more aggiornamento in the ecclesiology of parochial ministry. The persistent priest shortage has been met with provisional solutions, harboring hopes that increased ordinations of new presbyters would replenish the altars now empty. The restoration of the deacon in the United States has resulted in ordination of nearly eighteen thousand older Caucasian men to a service more attuned to the subordinated liturgical diaconate that fell into extinction a millennium ago. Instead, I believe that the model of the first deacons called to serve by the apostles to steward the temporal administration of the church shows this order's true calling, as personified by the great service of their medieval archdeacon successors. The challenge is to draw from this history a theology intended for the diaconate, seek out its canonical limitations and establish a new ecclesiology ready for implementation in praxis today.

In this work I will first explore today's challenges to ministry in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and the circumstances surrounding the priest shortage. A brief quantitative analysis of the church and its ordained ministers will be contrasted to the sociological trends they paralleled. Then the historical church legislation and the leaders that influenced it will be examined to ferret out theological and canonical possibilities and limitations for the restored diaconate's service. Analyzing the ordination, approved diaconate functions, and possible roles in a parish where a priest is not serving as pastor will be addressed by investigating Vatican II Conciliar documents, the codes of canon law, and guidelines from both church wide universal law and the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops.

In examining this history of the origin of the diaconate, its greatest success came in serving the temporal works of the church. The diaconate in theological and canonical terms suffers no divine legal blockades from being populated by a truer more experientially matched cross section of God's people in the pews. The possibilities for the role of the deacon in the future are married to the seriousness of the commitment to the permanence of its restoration; it is here that I propose the church must seek the theological possibilities for a more fully evolved sphere of ministry for the deacon and a canonical approach to a new ecclesiology implementing an ecclesiastical role for the deacon in the parish reporting to his bishop. The prescriptive elements will then seek out these supportive structures in order to insure beneficial orthopraxis in diaconal ministry. My conclusion is that the deacon can once again, as a phoenix rise or fall to ashes, raised by the ecclesiology of the Apostle's first calling of the seven to serve or left to fall as a subordinated solely liturgical order.