Here's One To Rattle A Few Cages: Deaconesses

Pope Francis says a lot of things that get under the skin of the Katholik Krazies.  The comments about many (if not most) contemporary marriages being invalid because so many people today don’t understand—and consequently cannot make—lifelong commitment is only one thing.  His recent agreement to authorize a study about women deacons is another—and probably even more threatening.

The reason that women deacons are such a threat to the established (and, let’s me hones, patriarchal) Church order is that the diaconate is the firewall to the priesthood.  Ordination to the diaconate is the final step before Ordination to priesthood, and to ordain women to the diaconate—well, dollars to maniples, it is only a matter of time before we will see women being ordained priests and bishops. At least this is what the krazies fear—and, frankly, I think they are right.  Once we are used to the sight of a woman in an alb and stole standing at the altar, our emotional prejudices against women in the ordained ministries will somewhat quickly evaporate.  As a faithful Catholic I will agree that the priesthood (and episcopate) is closed to women; as a historian I have to say that the trajectory of history says it is only a matter of time. 

Deaconesses are mentioned as early as Paul’s letter to the Romans which refers to Phoebe as a deaconess.  (The Greek text uses this word but—at the insistence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholic translations usually use the word “servant”—which is a literal translation of the Greek and which can be applied as well to male deacons.)  Both Christian writers (Clement of Alexandria and Origen) and pagan writers (Pliny the Younger) refer to deaconesses in the Christian communities.  Saints Basil, John Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa all refer to ordained deaconesses and their ministry as well. 

Traditionalists acknowledge that there were deaconesses in the early Church but they claim that a deaconess is not a woman deacon, that deacons and deaconesses are two distinct offices and that the deaconesses did not share in the sacramental character attributed to deacons.  That question bears study but we need a very careful monitum (that’s Latin for “warning” for those, including some of our younger clergy, who like to pray in Latin but don’t understand a word of it).  We cannot attribute the 21^st century theological understanding of the Sacrament of Orders which we embrace to the Church of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries.  Our theology has evolved considerably—and in this case especially with the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic (and neo-scholastic) theologians who follow him and who for centuries now have held the balance of power in Catholic theological thought.  We must compare the deaconesses of late antiquity, not to how we understand deacons today but to how the Church of the late Roman world (and also the Byzantine world where women deacons continued to function until about the 12^th century) understood male deacons in their day.  Did the Church of those early centuries consider deaconesses to be women deacons or did they understand them to be in a “separate and unequal” position? 

On the one hand, deacons and deaconesses had distinctly different ministries. Deaconesses were assigned ministry to women where male deacons would not have been accepted.  In the Roman world women were always under the “protection” of a male—their fathers until marriage, then their husband, and in their widowhood their eldest surviving son.  A woman had no status before the law and could neither sue nor be sued—the legal burden fell on the man under whose protection she dwelt.  In such an environment it was necessary that certain ministrations to women, especially to the sick and the enfeebled and to women in childbirth, be carried out by a woman who could move comfortably around a Roman household.  But in fact, male deacons were designated for the care of the poor and the sick as well so the major difference was not the work but to whom they ministered.  Women deacons, unlike men deacons, did not directly participate in liturgical leadership.  The women’s choir was under their direction but they themselves did not step forward to proclaim the Gospel.  But again, it would have been considered inappropriate for a woman to have entered the all-male presbyterium where the clergy took their places around the altar.  Women deacons did have a liturgical role however in the sacrament of Baptism where they performed the actual baptism of women as the men deacons baptized the males. 

As the Roman world dissolved into the chaos of the Barbarian West the legal and social distinctions between women and men also dissolved.  Women were much more free to interact with men as equals—and even superiors—and the need for separate ministers for women became less pressing. At the same time in the West baptism by immersion began to be replaced by pouring or sprinkling and nudity was not required for the baptismal candidates, removing the need for women to be baptized by women.  The female diaconate survived however primarily in monastic communities where the abbess and perhaps a few senior nuns were still set apart (to avoid using the controversial word “ordained”) as deaconesses.  They wore the stole and maniple as did male deacons and sang the Gospel during the liturgical offices (and seemingly at Mass should no male deacon be present) though they sung it from within their choir and not from the presbyterium.  Deaconesses lasted somewhat later in the Eastern Churches—in public churches perhaps until the seventh century and in monastic communities until the 12^th.  But like in the West, as the primary function of the deacon became strictly liturgical, women were increasingly excluded. 

A curious vestige of the female diaconate has survived in the Western Church were the hermit-nuns of the Carthusian Order—the most secluded of the monastic orders—still receive at their final profession of vows the stole and maniple.  These nuns also still sing the Gospel during the Night Offices.   

Deacons are ordained and receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders but they do not receive nor participate in the priesthood (as do presbyters and bishops) other than to the extent and manner in which all the baptized faithful share in the Priesthood of Jesus Christ as members of God’s Priestly People.  One can still maintain, therefore, the current teaching of the Church that participation in the hierarchical Priesthood of the Episcopate—in which the presbyters (priests) share—is reserved by Divine Law to men and favor the ordination of women to the diaconate.  But my earlier point that the cultural barriers against admitting women to the ordained priesthood will evaporate as we accommodate to women deacons stands.  The opposition to women deacons is because the all-male diaconate is the firewall that protects an all-male priesthood. 

Realistic Expectations Are More Than Enough

It is very naïve to expect substantial changes in doctrine from Pope Francis. The media has been quick to label him a doctrinal conservative in the mode of Pope Benedict and he is, but that is beside the point.  In the first place the changes that are necessary for the “rebuilding” of the Church are not changes in doctrine but changes in polity and Francis has been quick to signal that there is a new sheriff in town and while the laws may remain as is, the sheriff has a more contextual manner of enforcing them.  But even more important—at least from a historian’s point of view—is that major changes in doctrine, or rather the evolution of doctrine, is something that needs to come about in a slow and considered way.  Knowing history and its patterns, I have no doubt, for example, that the Catholic Church—despite all the current “theological” objections and obstacles—will one day ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate.  Moreover, I favor the ordination of women.  I think all this “stuff” about theologically impossible is, consciously or unconsciously on the part of those who declare it to be so, simply drawing a line to protect the self-interest of a male power establishment within the Church.  I say that not as feminist mumbo-jumbo, but based on the behavior of those who are insistent on this “doctrine” towards women religious and towards women in their own parishes or chancery offices.  I think celibacy has made the priesthood—for many, not for all—a place of refuge and psychological safety from women.  I know that one of the concerns for many in the Church today is that the clergy are becoming—or are perceived as being—a gay club.  I think that is a misreading of the data.  I am more concerned about the clergy being misogynists.  The dysfunction in today’s clergy, I believe, is not as simple as a gay subculture but the more complex and wider issue of its drawing men who are psycho-sexually non-integrated.  Celibacy is a great gift for ministry and a great witness for the Gospel if it is freely given by healthy adults who are fully developed human persons spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically but it has no witness value or ministerial usefulness if it screens an incapacity for human intimacy, warmth, and depth of personhood.  Real men have no problem working with women as equal or superior collaborators.  All that being said, however, one does not overturn a two thousand year old tradition over-night.  One, even a Pope, does not overturn a two thousand year old tradition on one’s own authority.  And one does not overturn a two-thousand year old tradition without paying close attention to the social implications it will create in a multi-cultural society such as the Church.  There needs to be a process by which the universal Church comes to a consensus on such an issue.  Our Anglican brothers and sisters have seen their world-wide Communion torn apart  by the way significant changes have been unilaterally implemented by one Province or another of the communion.   It is important that we take note and not make the same mistake but rather set up careful dialogue among all the local and particular Churches that comprise the Universal Church not only on the question of the possible ordination of women but on any significant development in polity or doctrine.  
Another area in which many may have unrealistic expectations of Pope Francis is the possibility of change in the Church’s teaching on contraception.  Again, perhaps development is a better word than change for history shows us that doctrine develops, or our understanding of doctrine develops, rather than makes abrupt changes.  Is such development possible?  Absolutely.  Pope Paul VI had convoked a panel of theologians, bishops, and laity to study such a possibility when the invention of “the pill” became a game-changer in the practice of family-planning.  In the end the Pope decided, contrary to the majority report of his commission, that “the pill” was an artificial means of contraception rather than a tool to aid the natural processes.  That was forty-five years ago and the situation today is much different.  Advances in understanding of the reproductive processes makes conversations with biologists, embryologists, and other scientists absolutely necessary as we continue to develop our moral theology.  Notice, I said conversations, not dialogue.  Dialogue implies a parity in the discussion while in this case I think theologians and bishops must listen more than talk.  That is not a process with which they are, for the most part, familiar but we must learn from science before we can make credible moral and theological judgments on matters in which science plays a foundational role.  And after learning the scientific data on which the theological judgments can be soundly constructed I think theologians and bishops need to listen carefully to the lived experience of the People of God.  Theology, moral or dogmatic, cannot develop in an experiential vacuum.    This is not to say that the faith of the Church is a majority decision; it isn’t and never has been.  But the faith of the Church is the Wisdom the Holy Spirit has planted in the hearts of the faithful; it is the ministry of the magisterium and the theologians to clarify and articulate that unspoken wisdom. 
To be honest I am not sure that doctrinal development is the most urgent matter in the Church today as much as it is a change of style.  More and more people have felt increasingly alienated from the Church over the past decades because, at least as they articulate it, they have been made feel unwelcome.  Part of this has been the very successful attempts by secular voices in our society to change the public perception of the Church to be an angry, even bitter, opponent of our contemporary world.  But too many Churchmen (and notice that I am being gender specific because I am speaking of the clergy—both hierarchy and “lowerarchy”) have been unwelcoming, arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, and in general poor witnesses to the power of Christ’s Gospel.  As I often write: today everyone knows what the Catholic Church is against; few can tell you what we stand for. 
In just a week and a half Pope Francis has made some huge changes in that perception.  The world has been drawn by his simple ways.  Let’s hope that simplicity inspires bishops and priests and deacons to change their styles as well.  And let us hope that changed style spills over to us too so that when people join us on Sundays they find a welcome and feel at home around their Father’s table.    

Two Sad Stories and a Happy One

A black youth is killed by a “Neighborhood Watch” warden with the very white name of George Zimmerman.  Stories abound—conflicting and contradicting one another.  Some rally around the white man and cast aspersions on the youth—he was suspended from school; he had been found with marijuana.  He was always in trouble.  They point out that George Zimmerman is in fact Hispanic.  (His ancestry is both European and Latino).  Others speak up for the victim: the President of the United States says: if I had a son, he would look like that young man.   Rick Santorum risks alienating his conservative base and jumps in on the side against the killer.  When Zimmerman’s defenders say: “He looked suspicious—he was wearing a hoodie,” thousands of people wear hoodies to Church to protest profiling.   Zimmerman’s friends claim that he, not the young man, was the victim.  They allege that the kid jumped Zimmerman, beat his head against a sidewalk.  911 tapes are released telling Zimmerman “We don’t need you to do that (follow Trayvon Martin)…” indicating that Zimmerman was out for the kid.  Racist remarks by Zimmerman are heard on the tapes but Zimmerman’s friends say there are other tapes not yet released that will give a different story.  Who knows what happened?  I wasn’t there.  This is what we have Grand Juries for. 

       And it is like the continuing saga of Marcel Guarnizo, the priest who denied Barbara Johnson communion at her mother’s funeral Mass because Johnson isn’t heterosexual.   Guarnizo has his story. Johnson has hers.  Guarnizo is having trouble getting people to go along with his story—not only family members but funeral home employees, parishioners, and even parish staff who were present are not backing him up and in fact accusing Guarnizo of bullying them to support his claims.  So the Archdiocese of Washington is convoking an investigation,  much like a Grand Jury, to determine as best they can the facts of the case.  And people on both sides are making wild accusations at the opposite side.  You know, Don Wuerl, those red hats don’t come cheap.  You pay for them with migraines.

      In the meantime, I want to surface a letter that appeared in the Washington Post two weeks ago that puts a different face on Catholicism.  Not on official Catholicism, the Downtown Chancery sort of Catholicism, but the real every day sort of Catholicism.  An Episcopal Priest,  the Reverend Anne Monahan, wrote of the compassionate warmth she received from a Catholic parish when her mother died and was being buried from a Catholic Church.  read below.  

      When my Roman Catholic mother died, I had a very different experience at her funeral than did Barbara Johnson, the gay woman recently denied Communion during the service for her mother at St. John Neumann Church in Gaithersburg.

       Until my mid-20s, I was, as a friend commented, “a little more Roman Catholic than the Pope.” But after starting a news reporting career, marrying a good Irish Catholic in my family’s parish church and giving birth to three daughters in three years, I had many questions for the church. Soon I found that the church did not welcome questions and had unsatisfactory, rigid answers to many of them. In 1966 I voted with my feet and left for the Episcopal Church, where a priest told me, “We may not have answers but we’ll walk with you on the search for answers.” 

     My journey led to ordination as a priest and a 30-year ministry. Once the culture shock wore off, my parents proudly told the world, including their pastor and his assistant, “Our daughter is a priest.”

      As my mother’s congestive heart failure approached its end stage, she and Dad informed their pastor that they wanted me to participate “up front” at her funeral. When she told me that the priest had agreed, I cynically thought, “The Second Coming will arrive first.” But I said I would ask about funeral participation when the time came. 

       Mom died in the early morning hours of a beautiful autumn day, and in the afternoon I called her priest to inquire about funeral planning. Prepared to be put in my place as an apostate, I gingerly approached the subject of participation, asking if I might read a lesson or lead the psalm.

     “Oh, more than that. You can do anything you want,” Father responded.                     

     “Anything?”

      “Anything,” he repeated.

       We set a meeting for the next morning at the rectory. There, warmly received by the pastor and his assistant, I found myself talking easily as we discussed our ministries and, as priests often do, exchanging war stories (e.g., a parishioner who wanted to be buried in a columbarium but definitely did not wish to be cremated). People are people, no matter where they pray, and priests have lots of stories to prove it. 

       As we planned Mom’s service, I found that “anything” meant “anything,” beyond my imagination. Both priests urged me to vest in alb and stole and to choose Scripture readings and hymns. When I said I hoped to read a lesson, they insisted it be the Gospel, which is reserved for a priest or deacon. Preach? “Your mother would want you to do that.” Two hours later, the service was outlined. At no time would I be excluded. 

       When I asked if they needed to get approval for my participation from their (very conservative) bishop, they gently informed me it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission, a practical rule I’ve invoked several times in parish ministry. I was awed by their courage in responding pastorally and compassionately to my family even though it might bring them harsh discipline from their hierarchy. (I decided not to name the church here, just to be on the safe side.)

        Vested as a priest, I presided at the reception of the body, read the Gospel, preached, concelebrated at the altar, distributed the bread, imparted the final blessing and led the graveside service from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I will never forget the pride in my father’s face or the tears and smiles of those, especially women, who received Communion from my hand.

       There was no dis-invitation to receive Communion, an act that has offended so many Christians at Roman Catholic services. Everyone was welcome. After all, a female priest was “up front.”

         As I left the cemetery, a local Episcopal priest and his wife, my friends and also former Roman Catholics, tearfully related how my presence at the altar and their reception of Communion had helped to heal the pain they’d felt at their parents’ funerals, where Communion, along with any role in the service, was denied to them.       

       That evening my daughter Sue told the family that, as she stood graveside with the pastor’s assistant, he smiled and quietly said to her, “Remember what you saw today at the altar. That is the church’s future.”

        I pray it is, for all my brothers and sisters in Christ, and especially for Barbara Johnson.

       Well, I don’t know where this happened and hopefully the diocese in question will never find out.  But it just one more example that the Church on the ground is usually far ahead in the journey to God’s Kingdom than the Church of the Chancery office.  If there is anything wrong with Catholicism it is this: that the hardness of the official party line is allowed to mask the evangelical faithfulness of its pastoral practice.   

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda: The Church, always reforming--always in need of reform

Yesterday a woman at church said to me “I am so at the end of my rope with the Church—this sex abuse issue, the coverup.  I resent the fact that a criminal can be a priest, but a woman can’t be.”  I had never heard it put quite that way.   We are in the midst of a mess in the Church these days.  The sex abuse and the cover-up are part of it—a huge part of it.  We are seeing hypocrisy when the “The Church” is taking such a harsh line not only on the political hot-potato of “gay marriage” but of appropriate pastoral care of gay people.  Indeed it seems that “The Church” has defined for itself the most rigid of codes of sexual morals when it is clear that many of bishops and clergy who make up “The Church” are living a double standard, sitting in the chair of Moses, as it were, but not practicing the morals they preach.  In the last few entries to this blog we have seen this is nothing new.  The blog has looked at gay popes and cardinals and bishops and we have looked at bishops and cardinals and popes with multiple illegitimate children.  We have seen prelates who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth for themselves and been interested in their own aggrandizement rather than the pastoral good of the souls entrusted to them.  We have seen abuses of power and resorting to violence to achieve one’s ambitions in the Church.   

Somewhat coincidentally I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities or, more precisely, listening to it on an audio book.  I last read it as a sophomore in High School but it has always remained among my favorite books.  Last evening, on my way home from church, I had been listening to the scene where Monsieur the Marquis’s carriage runs over and kills the child of Gaspard.  One could not help but be appalled at the Marquis’s apathetic contempt for the ordinary citizen.  Here is a man who lives in a universe where he thinks the “vulgar masses” were created solely to provide him with his indolent lifestyle.  And you know, I hate to say it, but in so many ways I see “The Church” reflected there.  In many ways it was the Church of the Renaissance and the ancien regime that Dickens was writing of—quite explicitly.  He does not leave that to your imagination when he speaks of the French ecclesiastics.    “The Church” was complicit in the evil that left so many people in dire poverty and squalor in those centuries when some think the Church was so glorious.  Those Basilicas and palaces of Renaissance Rome were built on the backs of the poor.  Not only Italy, but all Europe was being drained dry by the Medici, Della Rovere, Piccolomini, Borgia, Farnese, et al popes and their sycophant cardinals  and bishops and pezzi grossi prelates who were building their palaces and screwing their pages and poisoning their enemies while God’s poor starved.  I am not being anti-Catholic in saying any of this.  I am just reporting the facts.  And when I say that today we have prelates in Rome and prelates here parading around in silk gowns with trains longer than Kate Middleton’s upcoming dress and pontificating about sincere people who are trying to figure out how to balance their need for giving and receiving love, their same-sex attraction, and their devotion to Christ I am not sure how much has changed.  And when I hear sermons that tell me the priest is from cloud la-la land and has no idea how parents of families with four and five kids are trying to make ends meet without the mother having to work outside the home, or hear priests say that they have a life of sacrifice when a maid plops their three course dinner down before them on a table set with linen, china, and crystal I think that there is a need for change in “The Church.”  When I hear priests disparage women or hear of a Bishop who has instructed his pastors that when he visits, no woman is to be invited to dinner I cannot but think of Monsieur the Marquis and his contempt for the people who carried him with all his comfort on their backs and with the sweat of their brows.

But that is not the whole story, nor even half of it.

Also last evening I was at Tenebrae.  The Cathedral was packed.  The Liturgy was moving.  As I listened to the ancient readings and saw how the scriptures were arranged in the various antiphons and responsaries to tell the ancient story of our fall and our redemption—our fall in the disobedience of one man and our redemption in the obedience of another—I was moved to think of those countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of monks and nuns who through the centuries created this prayer, wove these texts together out of their meditations.   In the ever-darkening shadows of the Cathedral as the service progressed, I was reminded of faithful pastors, the holy priests, the humble men and women who, while the false shepherds were making a mockery of the Cross, were on their knees, lost in the mystery of God’s love made manifest in a naked and bloodied thorn-crowned man from Galilee whose faithful obedience set right all the sin in human history.  I looked around me at the Cathedral.  Connecticut Avenue lawyers in their three piece suits.  Mothers with strollers.  A smattering of the DC street people.  Some same-sex partners from the Dupont Circle area.  Senior citizens who live in the neighborhood.  Yuppies and DINKs (Double Income No Kids).  African Americans. Asian Americans.  White bread.  Hispanics.  That’s what it means to be Catholic.  Y’all come.  Everybody’s welcome.  And this is what The Church is.  The hierarchy is not the Church. The Pope is not the Church.  Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” is not the Church (despite what he pretends).   The Church is the whole kit and kaboodle.    We all belong. Even those popes with kids and those popes with pages, even the Borgias with their special mushroom casseroles and Sixtus IV with his pretty-boy Cardinals.  Saints and sinners, wheat and tares, Christ died for all and if you or I are one of the lucky ones who remember that it is about Christ dying for us—and for all—and not about capes and swords and tall bejeweled mitres, just be thankful that your eyes have been opened and pray for those who are still so blinded by the glory of “The Church”  that they can’t see the true glory, the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.