LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #3

Special Diaconate Issue

The Synod’s October 2 afternoon working session was devoted to a lengthy series of reports from the various extra-synodal “study groups,” created by Pope Francis to ponder numerous “hot-button issues” as these are defined by the media and much of the Catholic blogosphere. The tedium felt by many that afternoon was broken by a report from the study group that explored the question of whether women might be ordained to the diaconate; the report was delivered by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. To what was undoubtedly the shock of some (given the messenger) and the consternation of others (given the message), Cardinal Fernández got straight to the point: 

We would like to share from the outset that, based on the analysis conducted so far—which also takes into account the work done by the two commissions established by Pope Francis on the female diaconate—the dicastery judges that there is still no room for a positive decision by the magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate, understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

While it may be argued by some that this “judgment” leaves open a millimeter of possibility for further debate on this matter (“still no room” might imply the possibility of some room later, as does “analysis thus far”), the reference to the diaconate “understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders” would seem to settle the matter. For if, as John Paul II taught definitively in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” and if, as the cardinal reaffirmed, the priesthood is one part of the one sacrament of Holy Orders, then, as many have already argued, the ordination of women to the diaconate and the episcopate, the two other “degrees” of Holy Orders, is precluded by the impossibility of the Church’s ordaining women to the priesthood.      

The question may now turn to the consideration of some sort of “diaconate” for women that is not “understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.” However, it is unlikely that any such discussion will satisfy those who have been leading the campaign for the ordination of women to the diaconate, for the point of that campaign has always seemed to be one of opening the sacramental wedge to the ordination of women as priests and ultimately as bishops, on the Anglican model. That was, of course, the development that ultimately sent the once-promising Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue crashing onto the rocks, even as it distorted the entire discussion of ordained ministry by the ubiquitous use of the term “empowerment.” 

It was arguably providential that Cardinal Fernández’s intervention came the day before the ordination of fifteen American seminarians to the diaconate: another factor prompting this Special Diaconate Issue of LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD-2024, which includes a masterful homily about the Order of Deacons, a related and bracing edition of Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary, and a reflection on what that ordination ceremony signified at a moment of deep concern about the Catholic future among many Catholics. XR II   

“It’s Not About You . . .”

The Most Reverend Alexander K. Sample, Archbishop of Portland in Oregon
Homily at the Mass for the Ordination of Deacons
Altar of the Chair, The Papal Basilica of St. Peter, October 3, 2024

I sincerely echo the welcoming words of the rector of the Pontifical North American College, Monsignor Powers, when I say that “it is indeed good for us to be here.” It's not a Sunday, but this is the day the Lord has made, and we rejoice and are glad in it. And I want to begin by thanking a very special group of people here today—and it’s not my pilgrimage group! They are special, but it’s the families and the parents of these men who are about to be ordained. I want to begin by thanking you for the gift of your sons, who are now given to the Church to serve us as deacons and, God willing and soon, one day as priests. Thank you. Never underestimate the importance and impact of the witness of your faith in helping shape and form these men into the men, and soon to be the deacons, that they are. So, God bless your generosity.

When people start talking about the deaconate and deacons, one of the things that a lot of people ask is, “Well, what can a deacon do?” We get this all the time and sometimes pastors will explain what a priest can do that a deacon can’t, or what things a priest and deacon can both do—and then they go further and ask what a bishop can do! So, there’s a lot of talk about what a deacon does versus who he is. And we make the same mistake sometimes in the priesthood; what does a priest do versus who is the priest? Who? 

To ask “What does a deacon do?” is to ask the wrong question. The question should be “Who is the deacon?” Who is this man who comes forward, whom the Church dedicates to the sacred ministry as a deacon? Because everything a deacon does, everything a priest does, and everything a bishop does flows from who he is. That's the primary reality we celebrate today. 

So: Who is the deacon? The deacon is an icon of Christ the servant—the servant. These men today are going to be sacramentally configured to Christ as servants. It’s not a sacramental configuration unto the priesthood of Christ, other than what they have already received in their baptism. Rather, the deacon is configured to Christ in his identity as servant. Jesus is the servant. He is the servant. We might even say, from the prophecies, the suffering servant: the son of the Father, the eternal son of God made flesh. 

And what does he serve? He “serves” us the great gift of salvation. He has come for that, and the Lord himself speaks to us of this in the Gospel reading we’ve just heard [Matt. 20:25b–28]. The apostles were weak men, just like all of us, so they argue among themselves from time to time about who is more important: Who’s the greatest, who does Jesus love more? (I know that never happens anymore!) I’m sure Peter, James, and John got in a lot of trouble from the others when Jesus would go off with them by themselves. But Jesus calls the apostles on this, he calls them out. We heard this in the Gospel reading a few weekends ago. And Jesus says, “You guys don’t get it, even though you know how those in authority usually lord it over those under them; they make their importance felt. Haven’t you ever been in the room with someone who makes their importance felt? The minute they walk into the room like, whoa. This is not the way it can be with you.” 

And men, he’s speaking especially to you today. He speaks to all of us, but today he speaks in a special way to you who are about to be ordained. Whoever wishes to be the first among you must be the servant of all. A slave. A slave. And then he refers to himself: “For the Son of Man has not come to be served but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many.” This is the image that you take upon yourselves today in ordination to the diaconate. You are taking on the identity of Christ who comes to serve, to be a slave, to lay down his life as a ransom for the salvation of the world. As I said to you last night, it’s not about you. It's not about you. 

You know, it’s kind of hard not to think it’s about you in this setting, right? Here we are in St. Peter’s Basilica. I mean, how often does this happen? And you’ve been preparing for this day, you’ve been excited for this day, you’ve watched older brothers go through this ceremony here, your family is here, your friends are here, your fellow parishioners are here making diocesan pilgrimage. So it’s kind of easy to start thinking, “Wow, this is really special.” So I am here to remind you: It’s not about you. Sorry. It’s about him, but him whom you love, who loves you, who’s been calling you. As we heard a moment ago from the book of Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”  

He’s known you from all eternity, men: Every one of you has been in the mind and the heart of God from all eternity. And from all eternity he has known you and loved you and he’s been calling you to this day. You’re not here because you want to be here. You’re here because he wants you to be here. That’s whom you serve. Give yourselves to Christ and the Church; lay down your life for his bride as men destined to the priesthood, and that spousal relationship will one day take on great meaning for you. 

This diakonia continues into your priesthood. That's why the Church is very wise in making sure that the men who are ordained priests spend time as deacons: to remind you that first and foremost it’s about servanthood. It’s about service to the People of God and to Christ the Lord. As your diaconate continues into your priesthood, you will always be a deacon.

In the past, at a solemn high Mass, a priest would serve as the deacon as a reminder that the priest is always a deacon. In the College of Cardinals, we have the “cardinal deacons.” The bishop is always a deacon, and that’s why on solemn occasions such as ordinations, the bishop wears the dalmatic that you will soon be vested in. This is the deacon’s particular vestment, but the bishop wears it beneath his priestly vestment to be reminded that he is always a servant: as you will be always a servant, serving. 

All of this giving of yourselves over to Christ and his Church is beautifully and solemnly symbolized in the liturgy in the moment when you will be prostrate on this floor, face down before God and before the Church: Yes, you will plead for the whole Communion of Saints to come to your aid, to embrace you, to intercede for you, but lying flat on the ground also symbolizes your complete surrender of your life to Jesus. 

I’m heavily into the Surrender Novena: “Jesus, I surrender myself to you.” Whatever you had planned to pray for when you’re lying there in a minute, please include that as one petition: “Jesus, I surrender myself to you. I am not going to worry about my future, about what’s coming. I surrender myself to you. You take care of me, and then I won’t worry.”

In this rite, that surrender and your total gift of self is further symbolized in two promises you make today: the promise of celibacy and the promise of obedience. (Those who have been at it for a while aren’t quite sure which is harder!) That's the gift of self.

It's important for all the faithful to realize that today is the day these men make the promise of celibacy, not at their ordination to the priesthood. As men to be ordained deacons on the way to the priesthood, today they make their promise to live their life in celibate chastity for the sake of the kingdom of God, in imitation of Christ the bridegroom of his bride, the Church. You give yourselves to that, and you promise obedience to Christ and his Church, to your bishop. 

Before I was ordained, I made—I’ll call it a deal—with the Lord: I said, “Lord, I don’t want it to be about me or about my will; I want your will, so I’m just going to do whatever the bishop asks me to do.” I know that sounds very self-serving, but that’s the spirit in which you must live. Be obedient to Christ as he was obedient to the Father, and Christ ministers to the local Church through his vicar the bishop. It’s your total gift of self. Let it go, let it all go, put yourself in Christ's hands—and he’s got you.

We worry about all sorts of things in the world and in the Church today. But don’t worry. Jesus has got this, he’s got you. Jesus loves the Church infinitely more than all of us together. He bled his blood for his bride, the Church. He loves your diocese infinitely more than you and your bishop do. Put in his hands whatever you are worried about and surrender in that gift of self. 

So, brothers, this is who you are today. This is your identity. Whatever you do as a deacon, in your service at the altar, in your service of the Word, in your service in that charity that is the heart of the deacon's ministry, do it first as servants: as images of Christ, the true servant. And on your diaconal ordination day, I entrust all of you to Our Lady: Our Lady of Humility. She is your model; she is the perfect, obedient servant of God. And in her humility, we find strength. I want her to be your mother. Take her as your mother. Let her enfold you in her mantle of love and protection. Entrust to her your vocation to the diaconate and the priesthood, and she will lead you always in the way of Christ her son, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for the many. 

Alexander K. Sample has been Archbishop of Portland in Oregon since 2013, having previously served as Bishop of Marquette, Michigan. A native of Kalispell, Montana, he is a graduate of Michigan Technological University, the Pontifical College Josephinum, and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 4, 2024

Yesterday I had the great fortune of being able to attend the ordination of fifteen deacons from the North American College in St. Peter’s Basilica. The circumstances of my invitation to attend the event are themselves instructive of just how infectious the joy of Catholicism can be, if just given the chance. A young seminarian (Robert Williams of the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma), who is a reader of my various online scribblings, saw that I was going to be in Rome covering the Synod and reached out to me with an offer of tickets to attend his diaconal ordination. I happily accepted, and not only participated in one of the most moving liturgies I have attended in years, but also made a new friend in the young deacon whose priestly ordination I will now attend next year, God willing. My wife Carrie was with me, and we were able to meet Robert’s mother and share in the joy of this special event.

We were not alone in this joy. There were over a thousand people jammed into the area around the Altar of the Chair, all of whom were there to offer their love, support, and prayers for their sons, brothers, students, and friends who were being ordained. The mood was joyous and positive, and I would wager that not a single person in attendance felt that they were somehow disenfranchised and alienated from the Church simply because they were not the ones being ordained. Nobody wore armbands expressing discontent over this or that Church policy. In fact, the dominant focus was not on the movement of the Holy Spirit in the subjective dispositions and emotional vagaries of those in attendance, but rather on the presence of that same Spirit in the Sacrament of Holy Orders being conferred on young men brave enough to give their lives to the service of God’s holy Church.

I could not help but draw a contrast between the prayerful sanctity and sacramental gravitas of this event with the lugubrious chatterings of some of the synodal cognoscenti going on in the nearby Paul VI Audience Hall. In the first few days of the Synod, we have been allowed a peek into the deliberations of the various extra-synodal committees established by Pope Francis to look into the allegedly “closed but not closed” questions of women’s ordination to the diaconate and the Church’s moral teachings on human sexuality. Framed in the fractious mindset of the ever-disgruntled and “alienated” dissident Catholic malcontent, the questions raised in these committees seem filtered through the lens of endless grievance. And filtered as well through the lens of a joyless interpretation of Church “reform” as an interminable daisy chain of linked “issues,” all of which are in immediate need of “radical paradigm shifts” (i.e. scuttling of traditional Church teaching), lest the Church fall off the cliff into demographic oblivion.

Absent in these synodal fulminations is the spirit of joy that comes from the engraced reception of God’s gift of grace. Absent is any sense that one is not only not “burdened” by one’s Catholicism, but that the faith one has been given in grace, via Christ’s Church, is a gift beyond any metric tied to the penultimacy of fleeting opinions on topical agitations of the moment.  

I myself am a laicized deacon, having in my youth stopped short of priestly ordination because I discerned that someday down the road I wanted to pursue marriage and family. And yet I did not sit at yesterday’s ordinations stewing in the wort of any fabricated alienation, and I never once thought, “if only the Church would get over its medieval fixation on celibacy, I too could have been up there getting ordained.” In fact, I thought the opposite and felt an exhilarating pride in these young men who were willing to give up that which I chose not to.

My wife has a Ph.D. in theology and is a dean at a major seminary. She, too, was filled with the joy of the faith yesterday and, I can assure you, never once recoiled from the event as an exercise in patriarchal sacramental oppression since no women were being ordained. She supports the Church’s teaching on the matter and therefore did not “endure” the ordinations as “painful” stabs at her baptismal dignity, but rather as the altogether magnificent outpourings of a divine prodigality that knows no limits. She felt joy: the joy, too, of knowing that someday she might be privileged to receive the sacraments from one of these fine young men. She did not feel anger. She did not feel “disenfranchised” and/or “disempowered.” She felt instead the privilege—the exhilarating and limitless privilege—of being a Catholic. 

The ordaining prelate was Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Oregon. His homily should be framed and posted in every house of formation. The central theme was that the diaconate is a ministry of service and not one of self-promotion. This can perhaps sound a bit boilerplate to those who were not there and did not experience the percussive force of his words and the profound unpacking of this concept in his message. It was lightning in a bottle, and it stood in direct contrast to the voices of nearby synodal participants who had been framing diaconal ordination as an act of empowerment: who speak as if ordination to Holy Orders is the only pathway to service in the Church that is worthy of consideration, since it alone, allegedly, opens up the corridors of ecclesiastical power.

Would that the synodal “Spirit listeners” had listened to that homily. Because there are an endless variety of ways for service to be exercised in the Church, and the only “power” that matters is the authority that comes from the sanctified gift of self, no matter one’s station in life.  

In my youth, I worked at a soup kitchen in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the regulars there was an impoverished, elderly gentlemen named Sylvester Triplett. Yet despite his lowly status in terms of social “power,” Sylvester helped us out in countless ways and was a man possessed by the deepest wellsprings of charity I have ever seen in a human being. Sylvester died of a heart attack while I was working there, and a few of us decided to attend his funeral. There were no more than five or six people in attendance. Sylvester was one of the anonymous little ones of God that few noticed.

And yet, forty-three years later, I still pray for his intercession at every Mass. Because there was more “power” in one of his tiniest acts of charity than in all of the combined blatherings about “governing structures” in every synod ever convened. Sanctity, not “changed structures,” is the only reform we need.

Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology at De Sales University and the co-founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania.

A Living Church

by George Weigel

During a magnificent liturgy on October 3, at which two of my former students and a fellow parishioner from St. Jane Frances de Chantal Church in Bethesda, Maryland, were ordained deacons, it occurred to me that it had been exactly sixty years and four months since I first set foot in the Papal Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican: which is, at one and the same time, an architectural, engineering, and decorative marvel; the stage on which the drama of world Catholicism is played out in a media age; a vast Christian necropolis in which many saints are buried; and the world’s greatest tombstone. The last, of course, is what gives ultimate meaning to all the rest, for it is the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles that makes St. Peter’s so much more than a tourist attraction, more than the baroque ecclesiastical version of the Empire State Building, Windsor Castle, or Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

When I first came to the basilica in 1964 on a month-long parish “Grand Tour” of Europe, the vast nave of St. Peter’s—six hundred twenty-four feet long—was filled with cushioned bleachers, rising some twenty tiers about the floor and extending from the red porphyry stone near the atrium on which Pope Leo III had crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in A.D. 800 to just short of the papal high altar and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s stupendous baldacchino. The bleachers had been built to accommodate the 2,500 bishops attending the Second Vatican Council, which was then on pause between its second and third working periods. That, more than half a century later, I would write a book about that seminal event was a thought that never entered my adolescent mind. Like just about every first-time visitor to the Vatican basilica, I was simply overwhelmed by its size and the magnificence of its decoration (another expression of Bernini’s genius). 

Vatican II cemented in the global media’s mind what I’ve often called the “cowboys-and-Indians hermeneutic” of the Catholic Church: The Church is a vast, sprawling, international organism in which there are ongoing and sometimes bitter contentions, typically about power, between good Catholic progressives and bad Catholic traditionalists. That this “narrative” makes no sense of the Council is a point I hope to have nailed down in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. What struck me this past Thursday morning, however, was how that politicized cartoon of the contemporary Catholic reality was making no sense of what was going on, at and around the basilica’s Altar of the Chair (now, thanks to the generosity of the Knights of Columbus, being restored under a scrim that, this past Thursday, made it impossible for ordinands, congregants, and pilgrims to ponder yet another Bernini masterpiece, this one of great theological and spiritual significance).

For here was a living Church: men, women, and children, primarily from the United States but in truth from all over the world, joined in prayer to the Thrice-Holy God as fifteen men promised to become living sacrifices for the healing and sanctification of the world. They were being ordained by a man who stood in a line of apostolic succession that runs back to the band gathered in Acts 15 around the Galilean fisherman above whose bones we were praying. They had come from different backgrounds and had brought different life experiences to this moment. But they would not have been here if it were not the case that, as Pope Benedict XVI insisted at his inaugural papal homily on April 24, 2005, “The Church is young!” Young with youthful vitality. Young with youthful enthusiasm. Young with youthful optimism. And, yes (at least among those of chronological youthfulness), young with youthful naivete about what lies ahead. But not decrepit; not moribund; and certainly not dead.

The fifteen ordinands will serve dioceses that range quite literally from “sea to shining sea”: from Portland, Oregon, to the nation’s capital, with Tyler and Beaumont in Texas, Venice in Florida, Brooklyn, Nashville, Green Bay, Fort Wayne-South Bend, Duluth, Sante Fe, Rapid City, and Tulsa in-between. They are the products of vibrant Catholic families, parishes, schools, and campus ministries. They are being prepared for the priesthood at a reformed seminary, the Pontifical North American College (and it was a special grace that the college rector who began that reformation, Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, was present “in choir” for the ordination). These fifteen men will eventually return home to take up priestly ministry in local churches that face daunting challenges, including an ever more toxic culture and an increasingly cynical citizenry. But they will return to a living Church. 

For that is what those parts of the Church in the United States that have embraced the teaching of the Second Vatican Council as authoritatively interpreted by two men of the Council, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, are: living cells in a living body, the Mystical Body of Christ in the United States of America on the edge of its sesquicentennial.

It may be hoped that the Synod on Synodality is aware of all that, and perhaps even learns from it and from similar expressions of living Catholicism around the world.

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Baltimore Orioles fan in mourning.

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Image by Dnalor 01,  from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.