Study says deacons vital in American church - Catholic Church - Ministries

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 24, 1997 by Ray R. Noll

It's been 27 years since the restoration and renewal of the diaconate, open to both married and celibate men, as a permanent order in the Catholic church. Today, U.S. Catholic deacons number more than 11,000, nearly twice the number in the rest of the world combined. If numbers constitute success, then the U.S. diaconate is one of the great success stories of the contemporary church.

Many U.S. bishops welcome this mushrooming new group. But some bishops and many priests, for a number of reasons, hesitate to be too welcoming. New groups in any tradition as ancient as Catholicism are usually suspect until they have truly proven themselves, and for many the diaconate is still too young for that.

Last year a new national study on the U.S. diaconate was published. Funded by the NCCB and the Catholic Extension Society, it gathered data from four sources: the experience of the deacons themselves; the deacons' wives; deacons' supervisors (diaconate directors and pastors); parish and diocesan lay leaders. The central finding was that the diaconate, largely parish-based over the last 25 years, has been successful and is increasingly important for the life of the American church.

The study found that the primary challenges of the diaconate for the future are to broaden its ministries beyond its largely successful and increasingly indispensable adaptation to parish life and to emphasize more strongly that deacons, through ordination, are called to be model, animator and facilitator of ministries of charity and justice within the local church.

According to the study, enthusiastic acceptance of deacons by parish lay leaders is widespread. The majority foresaw a growth in the diaconate in the context of declining numbers of parish priests. Fifty-two percent of lay leaders rated deacons' preaching as about the same in quality as their priests, while 51 percent did not think that ordination was necessary for most of the ministries performed by deacons in their parishes.

Wives of deacons said that being a part of the diaconate community brought many enriching experiences. The study showed the median age of U.S. deacons is 60. The majority are Caucasian, married and college educated, deeply spiritual and highly motivated toward service. About one-fifth have minority backgrounds and about half of those describe themselves as Hispanic-Latino. The largest numbers are in Texas (987), Illinois (955) and New York (903), followed by New Jersey (673), California (584) and Ohio (525).

Deacons are able

Supervisors of deacons, primarily their pastors, describe their deacons as able in performing their duties. Ninety-four percent rated their deacons as very effective to somewhat effective in sacramental service such as baptisms, marriages and liturgies. Eighty-eight percent rated their deacons as very effective to somewhat effective in the pastoral care of the sick, and 86 percent as very effective to somewhat effective in preparing and giving homilies. Only 53 percent of the pastors rated their deacons as very effective to somewhat effective in promoting human and civil rights. This latter area appears to be the one that most calls out for deacons' attention.

While the study indicates that deacons are an asset, opinion is evenly divided over whether their ordination is important for the actual ministries they perform.

Over the past 15 years, my wife, Jean, and I have had an opportunity to meet hundreds of these deacons and their wives at annual retreats we have been invited to conduct from San Francisco to San Antonio to Honolulu to our home diocese of Santa Rosa, Calif. One thing that strikes us repeatedly is the enormous diversity in both the deacons and their wives. The wide variety of cultures, age, work experience and talents for ministry is evident in the vibrant, multidimensional and supportive diaconate communities in many of these dioceses.

As individuals and couples, their lives reflect a kind of grounded realism rooted in the care of families and coping with the daily pressures of work in the market place.

Back in 1986. shortly after the U.S. bishops gathered at Collegeville, Minn., to discuss vocations and future church leadership, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin reported the four major concerns of bishops regarding the diaconate: the identity of the deacon; his effective incorporation into the pastoral ministries of the diocese and its parishes; the danger of elitism and clericalism; and the need for better screening and training.

While these concerns are still very much around in 1996, the new national study suggests that there has been a definite improvement in all four of these areas. Deacons today are much more widely accepted by bishops, priests and lay leaders than they were in 1981, when the previous national study on deacons was done. And they are being much more effectively incorporated into the pastoral ministries of the parish and diocese, especially in care of the sick, preaching and sacra mental service. This acceptance has meant less talk about the identity of the deacon.