The Emerging Diaconate: Servant Leaders in a Servant Church (review)

With his ministerial experience, past work as a director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops secretariat for the diaconate, and current position as a theology professor, Deacon William T. Ditewig focuses on the crucial difference between the Church’s experience of diaconate as a transitory stage in the preparation for priestly ordination and a permanent deacon’s service to the Church community in virtue of his ordination, not to the sacerdotal ministry of a priest but as a servant in leadership for the Church.

Within an overview of the experience of deacons during the first millennium of Church history to the past forty years since the restoration of the permanent diaconate, Ditewig discusses the confusion that exists between the roles of deacons and priests. The distinction was clearly articulated about 215 AD in the apostolic tradition of Hippolytus of Rome—namely, that the deacon “is not ordained to the priesthood but to serve the bishop”(p. 70). To a Church that has identified ordination almost exclusively with priesthood and sacramental ministry, Ditewig insists on the need to realize anew that deacons share in the episkopē of the bishop in a way different from priests.

Speaking of “theologies” for the diaconate, Ditewig notes a need to reflect on “the mutuality and interdependence of matrimony and orders,” (p. 217) since 93 percent of permanent deacons are married men, but he also writes: “A theology of the celibate [permanent] diaconate that is distinct from a celibate presbyterate is also needed” (p. 217). Ditewig may be wrong if he implies that the “theology of the diaconate” is different for married deacons as opposed to celibate permanent deacons; yet, in the differing experience of these two categories of deacons, some echo can be heard of an ancient Roman preponderance for electing a chief deacon of the city to be the next bishop of Rome, or of the actual practice in the Orthodox Churches that select their bishops from a celibate corps of monks.

Precise information does not exist about their ecclesiastical status at the time of their election to the episcopacy of Rome for fifty-one of the first eightytwo successors of St. Peter, but the ministries of thirty-one others are known. Eleven were priests when elected, but twenty were in the diaconal order. As late as 701 AD, when Christians still experienced a permanency in office for some of the deacons in their midst, the real possibility existed that the Church community and those involved in a bishop’s election could find in deacons the qualities of life and faith crucial to episkopē. Given forty years with permanent deacons, is such a fact still startling?

Deacons as preachers as well as ordinary ministers at Baptism, for the Eucharist, and in the proclamation of the Gospel will always have their own proper liturgical roles. However, the center of gravity for the permanent diaconate should not be altar service, since deacons are to be evangelizers who, by their lives and works, are constantly reaching outward to bring the Good News to those in need. Ditewig is, moreover, onto something important with his stress upon the kenotic—self-emptying—dimension within a deacon’s service. He suggests “that sacra potestas may be reflected in two ways: sacerdotal and kenotic” (p. 155). He sees sacramental grace (a grace of order/office) and a sacramental character for permanent deacons chiefly in a “self-emptying love of Christ on behalf of others to which the entire community of disciples is called” but which the permanent deacon himself embodies, in virtue of ordination, in a particular, active, and attractive way (p. 155).