Deaconesses: a reasoned approach

While I now try to keep a policy of avoiding every controversy from Rome, the hubbub on "deaconesses" is too great a temptation to resist and provides an opportunity for a solid catechizing moment, speaking as someone who has felt called to the order of deacon for eight years. What is a deaconess? Is a "deaconess" the same as a "woman deacon"? Did the Church really ever ordain women to the sacrament of Holy Orders? What would a deaconess do in the 21st century?

Odd as it is to say, the idea of restoring deaconesses poses a bigger problem for the Latin Church now, after Vatican II's reforms to Holy Orders, than it would have before 1972 when bishops, priests, and deacons co-existed with the "man-made" minor orders and subdiaconate. The first are sacraments, while the second are sacramentals.

Bear with me now while we go through this step by step.

What is a deacon?

It may help to first define what a "deacon" is. I intend to write a complete article on this subject alone in future, but for now, the short version must suffice: a deacon (from the Greek diokonos, or "servant") is a man ordained by the bishop to the lowest of the three degrees that comprise the sacrament of Order proper. It's clear to most of us that the priest shares in the bishop's ministry of Christ the High Priest; they both act in persona Christi capitis. The deacon, likewise, shares the ministry of Christ the Servant (in persona Christi servi). The bishop alone holds the fullness of orders. Nothing makes this so clear as when a bishop is clad in full traditional vesture, wearing the deacon's dalmatic under his priestly chasuble.

Cardinal Burke (center) vested in not only the chasuble, but the dalmatic underneath (and even the subdeacon's tunicle in white under that)

While the priest's role in the Church is quite clear; after all, without a priest, we have no Eucharist; the deacon's is more nebulous or, shall we say, fluid. In the ancient Church, the deacon's ministry of service seemed all-encompassing. They were entrusted not only with serving the bishop at the altar, but in the administration of his secular responsibilities, i.e. the Church's finances and properties. Not a few early fathers complained that the deacons' intimate relationship with the bishop led them to abuse his trust and lord it over the priesthood. See, for instance, Saint Jerome's letter to Evangelus here:

"But you will say, how comes it then that at Rome a presbyter is only ordained on the recommendation of a deacon? To which I reply as follows. Why do you bring forward a custom which exists in one city only? Why do you oppose to the laws of the Church a paltry exception which has given rise to arrogance and pride?"

(Indeed, until the post-Vatican II reforms, the Roman rite of ordination to the priesthood had the archdeacon, who was not necessarily also a priest, call the candidates for priestly ordination forward. From the post-conciliar rite of 1968 onward, it must be a priest who does so.)

Can anyone other than a bishop, priest, and deacon be ordained?

At the onset of the Middle Ages, the deacons increasingly delegated their lesser duties to men of lower ranks. They acquired their own servants at the altar, who became known as acolytes. The duty of exorcising the catechumens; which was not performed merely once before baptism, but daily; was given to the order of exorcists. The reading of lessons in the liturgy was delegated to lectors, save for the Gospel which the deacons reserved for themselves. Even the business of locking the church at night and re-opening it in the morning was passed down to the lowly porters. The most important ministries at the altar which could yet be delegated were given to the deacon's closest assistant, the subdeacon. 

The early medieval Church came to call these the minor orders: degrees that were not of divine origin like the "big three", but instituted by the Church as sacramentals. Even though they were colloquially spoken of as "ordinations", and often even conferred by the bishop at the same Mass as priestly and diaconal ordinations, there were yet some important distinctions. For many centuries, priestly and diaconal ordinations could only be conferred on the Easter Vigil or the four Ember Saturdays of the year; but the minor orders could be given on any day, and not even necessarily in the middle of Mass. Only a bishop could ordain priests and deacons; but "ordinations" to the minor orders, which were more akin to blessings, could be given by mere priests in certain conditions (more usually by mitred abbots or cardinal priests). Importantly, at least in the Latin Church, only priestly and diaconal ordinations were made by the laying of the bishop's hands over the candidate. For every other order, "ordination" was made merely by the presenting of a sacred object for the candidate to touch. Even the subdeacon, who by the 13th century came to be regarded as a major cleric (in the West, but not the East) by virtue of his proximity to the altar and promises of celibacy, was ordained merely by the touching of an empty chalice and paten presented to him by the bishop.

For one reason or another, these "sacramental but non-sacramentary" ordinations were deemed confusing or obsolete after the Second Vatican Council, so in 1972, Pope Paul VI completely reorganized them for the Latin Church in the motu proprio Ministeria Quaedam. The orders of lector and acolyte were retained but retitled "ministries", and those who held them were no longer to be referred to as clerics, as they had been in the past. The ministry of acolyte was also to subsume any surviving functions formerly reserved to subdeacons. The orders of porter and exorcist were suppressed, though bishops' conferences could elect to petition Rome to restore them or institute new ministries for their regions (no bishops' conference has, to date, ever taken up this offer).

What is a deaconess?

What documentation from the first centuries of the Church tells us about deaconesses is shrouded in mystery. There may be aspects of it which are forever lost to time. It's certain that our Lord had women who were disciples in the general sense. The Apostles, likewise, employed women to serve the Church in some capacity; hence, in his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul commends the services of Phoebe, who is called a diokonos. However, since that word is a general term for "servant", it's no evidence that women shared in the sacrament of Order, properly speaking, alongside ordained deacons. It is only in the second century that any idea of deaconess as a real office seems to take shape, only to disappear again by the eighth century in all but the rarest of instances.

The baptism of Clovis (in the buff, naturally)

The Eastern Church's Didascalia Apostolorum, originating in the middle of the 3rd century, gives the first concrete description of a deaconess's duties. While a deacon's responsibilities are vast, a deaconess is commissioned to minister specifically to women. Chief among them is the anointing of a female catechumen's body at baptism; which, in the early centuries, was still common among adult converts, and was necessarily by immersion in the nude. No culture would have thought it appropriate for a priest or deacon to anoint a woman's naked body, so having a woman perform the anointing was a practical necessity.

Furthermore, from antiquity up to the beginning of the modern era (and to this day in much of the third world), life was segregated by sex in ways we might struggle to comprehend. Men and women stood on opposite sides of the church; a practice still recommended, at least on paper, in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (and still observed today in traditional Russian Orthodox churches). It was improper for a man, especially a priest, to visit a woman's home alone. And thus, the office of deaconess naturally arose to fulfill the needs of a society with strict cultural norms. The deaconess escorted the priest to the lone woman's home during sick calls. She catechized women and girls, and governed them in professed communities.

If some of those duties are starting to sound familiar, it's because deaconesses were among the first to form communities of women religious. However, they soon found that no ordination was needed for women who only ever interacted with other women; and the vast majority of women religious in the early centuries of monasticism were strictly cloistered nuns (rather than the 1950's sort we imagine with Ingrid Bergman teaching boys how to sing). Further, as the pagan empires and tribes gave way to Christendom, there was less need to baptize adults, and so the deaconesses' most important function fell into abeyance.

Were deaconesses ordained?

Yes; or at least, some of them were. Again, we should recall that ordinations may be given as sacramentals, not necessarily just to the three degrees in the sacrament of Order. In Syria, the 4th century Constitutiones Apostolorum has a rite of ordination for deaconesses even with the imposition of hands.... and yet, it is emphatically not the same as the rite of ordination for a (male) deacon. Only to the deacon does the bishop pray, 

"fill him with the spirit and with power as thou didst fill Stephen the martyr and follower of the sufferings of thy Christ". 

The Council of Nicaea, sensing confusion in the status of deaconesses, sought to make things perfectly clear by forbidding them to be ordained through the imposition of hands, declaring in canon 19:

"We refer to deaconesses who have been granted this status, for they do not receive any imposition of hands, so that they are in all respects to be numbered among the laity."

Do we need deaconesses today?

If there was some reasonable assurance that the Church at large was capable of understanding the proper role of a deaconess as employed by our ancient forefathers in faith... then yes, I can see some advantage to restoring them. If, God willing, I were to exercise the diaconal ministry in the future, I would be quite glad to have a deaconess accompany me to a woman's house if I were bringing Communion to her while her husband was away at work, just to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety. There may be further applications of such an office in countries like India, where traditional gender segregation still prevails, that I couldn't possibly be aware of. And, at last, as our world returns to the paganism of old Rome, the order of deaconess might rise up again out of natural need as the "smaller" Church Benedict XVI spoke of must once again baptize adult women by the hundreds.

But as it stands, we all know that any talk of "deaconesses" will inevitably be co-opted by those with another agenda. Father James Martin, SJ, for instance, has already framed it in terms of "women deacons" in direct contradiction of Church history and everything I wrote heretofore. In his own words:

"Women deacons would be able to baptize, preside at marriages and funerals, and preach during various liturgies. Their preaching would mean that the church would finally be able to hear, from the pulpit, the experience of over half its members.

What kinds of things could women deacons preach on? Everything of course, like male deacons! But imagine them preaching on the following: The Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, the Woman at the Well, the Syrophoenician woman, the appearance of the Risen Christ to Mary Magdalene, and on and on. Women deacons could preach on anything, like male deacons, but how I long to hear them preach on Jesus and on women in the New Testament. (I'd love to hear them preach on men in the Bible as well!)"

In the end, I suspect any study on deaconesses or women as deacons by Rome will come to naught for just the reason I mentioned at the beginning: the Vatican II reforms to Holy Orders. It is, ironically, Pope Paul VI who closed the door to deaconesses in the modern Church; not the men of tradition. For those who are still exposed to the minor orders today, such as Eastern Rite Catholics or Latin Catholics who are ministered to by the FSSP or Institute of Christ the King (whose seminaries still retain the pre-1972 use of the minor orders and subdiaconate), it can be understood that the Church can ordain someone as a mere sacramental.  We don't have to go very far back in history to find examples of the pre-conciliar Church conferring other privileges on women religious which might, on the surface, appear to be strictly clerical. Abbesses have, from time to time, been given the privilege of carrying the crozier or even wearing the mitre on very specific occasions. Even today, sisters of the Norbertine Order are properly called canonesses, even though the title of "canon" is typically associated only with priests (whether regular or secular).

An abbess with crozier

Until the minor orders are restored, the Church can only restore "deaconess" to an instituted ministry at best... and that's an alternative that has no appeal to the advocates of women's ordination. In fact, a vocation to the deaconess of antiquity is just about the least glamorous, sexy thing imaginable for their ilk. If anything, a ministry which exists solely to minister to other women and perpetuate divisions between the sexes would be a complete step backward in their eyes! The ideal candidate for "deaconess" was a woman at least forty years of age, preferably a widow or spinster, perhaps a midwife or in some other non-professional occupation dedicated to women's needs. The perfect match for a restored order of deaconess in our century would not be the "liberated" woman with an agenda and three graduate degrees to prove it, but rather, the archetypal "old rosary lady".

As future studies come to the same conclusion as that which I've outlined in this essay, the more likely scenario will be that women's ordination groups suddenly call a retreat and ask the book to be closed on all talk of deaconesses once they dread the horrid reality of its implications for them. The alternative would be to give official title to the very class of women they consider to be either brainwashed or, worse yet, traitors to the female sex.

Beating the bounds: recovering the rogation days

Rogation procession at my parish church earlier today

For a millennium and a half, from the dusk of the western Empire to 1969, the Roman Church reserved the three days prior to Ascension Thursday as "rogation days". Deriving from rogare (Latin, "to ask") these days were marked with processions in the fields and prayers of penitence to implore seasonable weather, a good harvest, and deliverance from evils of every kind, but especially against natural disaster. 

The post-conciliar Church didn't technically abolish the rogations, but merely said that from henceforth, national bishops' conferences could decide for themselves how to adapt rogation and ember days for their own needs, dependent upon the local culture and the concerns of an industrial society. It was a nice idea, but in effect, no bishops' conferences did anything about it. As a result, the rogation days were effectively abolished, save for their mandatory observance in the 1962 and prior missals, and now, Deo gratias, the Divine Worship Missal of the Personal Ordinariates. If you don't believe me, here's the proof, quoting from "GENERAL NORMS FOR THE LITURGICAL YEAR AND THE CALENDAR – 14 FEBRUARY 1969".

VII. Rogation and Ember Days

45. On rogation and ember days the practice of the Church is to offer prayers to the Lord for the needs of all people, especially for the productivity of the earth and for human labor, and to give him public thanks.

46. In order to adapt the rogation and ember days to various regions and the different needs of the people, the conferences of bishops should arrange the time and plan for their celebration.

Consequently, the competent authority should lay down norms, in view of local conditions, on extending such celebrations over one or several days and on repeating them during the year.

47. On each day of these celebrations the Mass should be one of the votive Masses for various needs and occassions that is best suited for the intentions of the petitioners.

Today, at my Ordinariate parish, we braved the rains and had a "votive" rogation procession while, at least in spirit, "beating the bounds": a custom from medieval English times whereby the people of a parish would walk along the parish's territorial boundary to remind the neighboring pastor and parishioners exactly where their jurisdiction ends! In the case of our own parish, our jurisdiction ends at the parking lot, so the procession was mercifully short compared to medieval standards.

Along the way, we sang "The Litany", a catch-all litany of intercessory prayers that was developed for the Book of Common Prayer, combining a little of this, a little of that from the various litanies and supplications in the Sarum Missal and elsewhere. If you'd like to read it, the version on my old pastor's blog post here is nearly identical to the one we used today.

My favorite of these oft-antiquated sounding petitions is probably:

"V. From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared,

R. Good Lord, deliver us."

From Wikipedia: "Blessing the Fields on Rogation Sunday at Hever, Kent"

Radio chat is now online!

The Poor Clares in San Antonio attending our nuptial Mass in 2014

You can now listen to my radio "fireside chat" with the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in San Antonio at this link, provided you have iTunes installed. Just select the broadcast for April 27, 2016.

Our discussion, which was prompted by the month's-mind Requiem Mass offered for their late abbess, Mother Angelica of EWTN fame, at my former parish in San Antonio, revolved around the prayers and Gregorian chants of the Requiem, devotions for the souls in purgatory during the Middle Ages, the Office of the Dead, and the importance of reclaiming the spirituality behind these traditions in the modern age. 

The sisters' main site is the Monastery of St. Michael the Archangel, or Texasnuns.com. From there, you can learn a bit more about them, buy their soap, and find their blog, Quidnunc. My first real encounter with the Poor Clares was when they attended a Requiem Mass for my stepfather years ago. Since then, I correspond with them every once in a while, and was honored to design service booklets for one of their solemn professions. And, if you saw my post two days ago, I did the same for the Requiem Mass for Mother Angelica according to the Divine Worship Missal of the Personal Ordinariates, which is now on YouTube below.

Requiem aeternam

Pictured above are a few of the first-printed service programs I designed for the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in my hometown of San Antonio, resting atop their altar as a "first fruits" offering. This evening, a Requiem Mass will be offered for the sisters' late abbess, Mother Angelica, on the month's mind of her death at my old parish of Our Lady of the Atonement. Memory eternal!

The image chosen for the cover is one of my favorites: a Requiem Mass illustrated by the great architect and father of the Gothic revival, Augustus Welby Pugin, as an endplate for his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament (which I discovered and commented on a few years ago here). For any new readers, know that this blog is largely dedicated to Pugin, a Catholic convert in 19th century Britain who is most famous for designing the "Big Ben" Clock Tower and the interior of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. But, more important than his contributions to the state were his efforts to rebuild the Catholic Church in England, which had just been emancipated after centuries of suppression. In less than two decades, Pugin raised up dozens of Gothic revival churches for the poor Catholics of Victorian England, including the first Catholic cathedral built in the realm since the Reformation. He also designed countless stained-glass windows, chalices, vestments, and other ecclesiastical furnishings, and wrote several books; including a tract advocating the restoration of Gregorian chant. Augustus Pugin, who effectively worked himself to death at age 40, was a forerunner of the Liturgical Movement and is commemorated by yours truly whenever I get the chance.

Today, I expect to speak with the Poor Clares on their weekly radio program, A Good Habit, later this afternoon on such matters as the Requiem Mass and devotions surrounding prayer for the faithful departed. The program begins at 1pm central time and is broadcast primarily in Texas. See here if your city is listed among the stations on the Guadalupe network. Otherwise, check back later when I post the recording.

"This place is terrible!"

The Introit Terribilis is also used for the feast of the dedication of Saint John Lateran in Rome, the Pope's cathedral and the first church built following Emperor Constantine's Edict of Toleration.

This place is terrible!

This is a translation a friend once gave me for the Introit sung at the beginning of the Mass for consecrating a new church building: Terribilis est locus iste. The fuller antiphon, drawing from Jacob's dream of the ladder, reads:

"Terrible is this place: it is the house of God, and the gate of heaven; and it shall be called the court of God."

The King James translation goes so far as to say, "how dreadful is this place!" Is it not strange how  these terms, once used to refer to the kingdom of God as a place of splendor and majesty, are now devolved into words we'd sooner use when expressing sorrow over someone's dog being run over on the street? 

It seems we've forgotten that the idea of the afterlife is a "terror to behold", and that the images in our churches are not always there to give us warm and fuzzy feelings of security. Sometimes, as with the icons of the East which stare into the depths of your soul, or the mad paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, we ought to feel a bit uneasy about our place in the universe. They invite us to step outside our comfort zones. And so, the liturgy addresses God as "King of awful majesty" (Rex tremendae majestatis from the Dies Irae, or sequence for Masses of the Dead). And it was these words; terrible, dreadful, and awful; which ran through my mind as I watched the following video. It's a re-enactment of a Palm Sunday procession as it have been seen in Chartres in the year 1190. The actual venue is the famous Cloisters of the Met Museum in New York City, and though it's not a true liturgical service, the vested ministers are real Capuchin friars. This may be of special interest to any of my Eastern Christian readers who observed Palm Sunday just yesterday.

My only nitpicks are the ministers' failure to sing the texts, and perhaps the use of female singers, but it's absolutely worth watching in any case.

See the video itself at this link.

(You may also wish to follow along with this program or listen to the opening remarks afterward.)

The spirituality which led to the development of these hallowed rites has long since given way to suffocation and then, ultimately, the total banality which most of us would suffer if we were to walk into any average parish down the street on a Sunday. The holy mysteries are now, for the most part, stumbled through with less grace and solemnity than my family picnics.... and worst of all, no one sees the problem with it.

I can only imagine the millions of keystrokes that have gone into explaining how to dig ourselves out of this cesspool of bad worship. While a return to rubrical authors and older liturgical texts is certainly important, it won't stick unless we allow the old rites; with all their smells, sounds, uneasy sights, and perambulations in and out of the church; to shape our interior dispositions. Good liturgy, should we be open to it, will instill in us the seventh gift of the Holy Ghost: the fear of the Lord, which, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, "fills us with a sovereign respect for God, and makes us dread, above all things, to offend Him".

Then, perhaps one day, we'll be able to genuflect before the Eucharistic Host at Mass, make an examination of conscience on our readiness to worthily receive Communion, and only after that, answer the question, "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" with (like the archbishop of Canterbury to Henry V in Shakespeare's play), "the sin upon my head, dread sovereign..." and then boldly step before the altar of God.

Out of the Anglican patrimony: what on earth is "lovingkindness"?

When speaking of the Anglican Use and Personal Ordinariates, we must inevitably come to terms with defining what, exactly, that nebulous expression "Anglican patrimony" is. While I personally like to lump in the pre-Reformation customs and devotions of the English church, the phrase more often refers to those various customs of the post-Reformation Anglican churches which, being in no way contrary to the Catholic faith, are "baptized" and integrated into the life of the Church. A few examples off the top of my head would include Evensong (a sort of conjoined Vespers and Compline), the singing of psalms to harmonized "Anglican chant", and the common praying of the Collect for Purity at the beginning of Mass (a prayer which, before Cranmer, was a private devotion for the priest out of the Sarum Missal while preparing for Mass).

The Introit given for this past Sunday in the Ordinariate's Divine Worship Missal gave me another one to add to the list: "lovingkindness". The Latin original (used for the 2nd Sunday after Easter in the Extraordinary Form, not the 3rd) begins with Psalm 32(33):5..

Misericordia Domini plena est terra, alleluia;
(in most translations: "The earth is full of the mercy of the Lord, alleluia")

This is in accord with the Douai-Reims Bible, which usually translates the Vulgate's misericordia as "mercy". The Divine Worship Missal, on the other hand, renders it as:

The lovingkindness of the LORD filleth the whole world, alleluia.

What on earth is "lovingkindness", and how did we get to that from "mercy"? From what I can tell, "lovingkindness" was coined by Myles Coverdale (1488-1569). First, some background:

One of the early English Protestants, Coverdale's greatest contribution was in his efforts to translate the Bible into English. While the King James Version later eclipsed most of his Biblical work, Coverdale's translations of the Psalms persisted within the Book of Common Prayer all the way up to the 20th century. Most choral Evensongs sung in the great English cathedrals, therefore, sing the Coverdale psalms. It's sad to say that, like Cranmer, he became a traitor to the Roman faith for which he was ordained, preaching against the Real Presence and dying effectively as a Puritan. There is a delicious irony, then, that Anglican Use and Ordinariate priests around the world regularly pray Coverdale's finest translation of all: his superb rendition of the Roman Canon, made back when he was still an Augustinian canon (or at least, so attributed; there seems to be a bit of debate on the matter). I've never seen another version in any Latin Mass hand missal that matches its perfect balance of beauty and accuracy.

Returning to Coverdale's unique word: as I'm no Biblical scholar, I don't know exactly what led him to develop the term since he was not a scholar of Hebrew (and thus still drew from the Latin Vulgate, as well as Luther's German Bible). In the Hebrew Old Testament, chesed is said to mean "to bend or incline oneself" or "to be merciful". We can easily picture this in God descending from the heavenly to the earthly plane, whether in the Incarnation two thousand years ago or the Eucharist upon our altars every day. We can also see it in the act of a superior bending the knee to wash a subordinate's feet, from the Last Supper on the night the Lord was betrayed, to the medieval king's re-enactment of the Mandatum by washing the feet of beggars on Maundy Thursday. 

Kings and vagabonds

Lovingkindness is kindness proceeding from love. Mercy is certainly an appropriate word, but one that I feel doesn't have quite the same "punch" in our English language; and, I daresay, one that's almost been debased by so many Church leaders; compared to that word which makes you stop and think for a moment at how odd it is. 

"Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses; for they have been ever of old."

"Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions."

"I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name."

"But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the Lord."

The tonus solemnior: more solemn tone

Toward the back of the 1962 Missal, there's a section of ad libitum chants including the tonus solemnior, or "more solemn" tone of the Preface. This tone is rather difficult for non-musically inclined priests to learn, but has an outstanding effect when sung by a skilled celebrant (in my opinion; some people hate it and find it too much gilding of the lilly). When you hear it, you might find it reminiscent of the Exsultet tone, which is a sort of ultra-solemn Preface tone in itself.

Since Pentecost is coming up, I thought to record a tutorial video for any adventurous priests who might want to learn this tone and increase the solemnity of their celebration. If I get any requests, I'll see about setting the tone to the words given for the Preface in the Ordinary Form or Divine Worship (Ordinariate) Missals....

This video below has another sample Preface with the matching dialogue versicles as well. I think that, for "pastoral reasons", you can mix and match the regular versicles with the more solemn Preface itself. (In other words, good luck getting a congregation to learn them.)