Today is the 20th anniversary of my husband's ordination to the permanent diaconate.
The photo above is a little faded, but it is Deacon Kelly, me, and Archbishop Elden Curtiss. The years have gone by quickly. We look 20 years older, but the archbishop emeritus looks about the same.
Congratulations to Deacon Kelly. Deacons have done more to humanize the Church than all the Vatican dicasteries piled upon each other. When we get some lady deacons, too, we will be in much better shape.
ReplyDeleteMany congratulations! It is nice to see pictures of the people on here. Funny how bishops don't age ...
ReplyDeleteBishops have never had to worry about how they will pay their own rent, or the bills for the pediatrician and braces, nor the bills for schools and college. Unless they are pedophiles or embezzlers, their job security is unmatched, so they don't worry about losing their job and their income. They have perqs and privileges galore.
DeleteThey never walked the floor all night with a sick baby, or sat white-knuckled in a hospital room with a sick child. They don't have to worry about why their son is failing math, nor do they have to worry about whether their kids will fall prey to anti-social behavior like drug use. They have never had to wait up late worrying about why their teenager isn't home, jumping every time their phone rings. They have staff to help them with their work, drivers to get them to events, and women to clean and cook for them. In the old days, those women were often nuns.
So, although they have their own kinds of worries, those worries are more often corporate (church related - Which schools to close? Which parishes? What to do about that new pastor that is driving people from his parish? etc) than they are personal family angst issues. Yes - they may have an addict brother, or sick parents, but, all in all, they go through their lives with few or no financial worries, and no parental worries! Less personal stress is a factor in slower aging.
Maybe bishops don't appear to age because most of them are up in years by the time they make the cut.
DeleteSorry, Jimmy, I'm with Katherine on this one.
DeleteActually Jimmy has a point. Archbishop Curtiss was probably in his 70s then. In fairness he was a good guy and very supportive of the deacons. He still does occasional Confirmations, but has to be in his 90s now.
DeleteAdding my congratulations. Deacons do add greatly to the Church. And ditto to Tom about women deacons.
ReplyDeleteHappy 20th to Deacon Kelly.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine taught classes for deacon formation for a dozen or so years. She told me that the wives are every bit as important in this ministry as the men - but get little recognition.
So happy anniversary in the diaconate to you too, Katherine!
From what I have seen in Orthodox and Protestant churches, priests'/pastors' wives tend to play substantial roles (if they so choose) in the lives of their congregations. A friend's father is a Serbian Orthodox priest and his wife is VERY important and valuable in the life of their parish. The people accept her almost as a co-pastor and revere her as much as him. Maybe even moreso!
DeleteI've known a lot of wives married to Protestant clergy. I'm not sure they feel particularly loved or valued. Criticized for sure.
DeleteI should add that my mother-in-law's pastor and his wife were absolute jewels. Wesleyans, I think, some kind of Methodist off-shoot happy-clappies. They visited every single day when Ma was comatose. One day I walked in there and the pastor's wife was quietly brushing Ma's hair and telling her what the weather was. I was so moved. The guys would never have thought of doing such a thing. They were terrified and stood around the doorway jingling the change in their pockets asking the nurses when she might wake up.
DeleteJean, that is a touching story about the pastor's wife and your mother in law.
DeleteWe lived next door to a Wesleyan church when we were first married. They were nice people. I think they used to be called Pilgrim Holiness. Word was that they split off from another group over slavery (they were opposed to it). Not sure which group that would have been.
I was mistaken, the Pilgrim Holiness split off from the Methodist Episcopal church in 1897, so it couldn't have been over slavery. They merged with the Wesleyan Methodists in 1968.
DeleteRaber and The Boy took Pa to his Wesleyan church after Ma died every few weeks. They were very welcoming and always remembered The Boy by name, asked him about school and his music. They announced it in the bulletin when he made drum major in high school.
DeleteWe come from many generations of Welsh and English Methodist Dissenters. Some of them are great. Some of the Methodist off-shoots are a bit nutty on temperance. That might have precipitated the 1897 split.
Thanks for the good wishes, everyone!
ReplyDeleteThe aspect of the permanent deaconate that could revolutionize church ministry is not that ministers can be married, or even that they could be women, but that by and large they are unpaid ministers.
ReplyDeleteThere are many men and women in our parishes who would make good priests and deacons, especially as they (we) age and become accomplished or matured in our professions, marriages and child rearing. I think a dozen total unpaid priests and deacons matured by life- long study and experience could do a much better job than a priest or two raised in isolated seminaries without experience in civil jobs, marriages and child rearing. We have over-professionalized ministry rather than seeking to ordain a variety of gifted persons,
We need to move away from a parish model where a single pastor tries to imitate the Christ of the (pre-Church) Gospels surrounded by disciples and the crowd (this model is prevalent in Protestant as well as Catholic congregations) to the primitive churches of Acts and the Epistles where many people were involved in ministry with many different gifts. The voluntary model would emphasize that all people of the parish are ministers by their baptism with some being ordained as priests and deacons because of their evident gifts already in the service of the parish and its surrounding community.
There are only a few jobs at the parish level that should be paid because they require non-church skills such as music ministry (directors, accompanists) and business officer/accountant. Some ministries at the diocesan level such as the bishop and his assistants would be kept celibate and paid as a balance to the voluntary ministries at the parish level. These ministries would have stronger training in theology to maintain unity throughout the diocese, country and the world.
If the present paid priesthood is opened to married men and women, we will become a more clerical, hierarchal rather than a less clerical church, just as we have recently made the church more clerical by turning many parish and diocesan ministries into paid ministries. All of this reduces the ability of very talented lay people to exercise their gifts within parishes and diocese.
Celibacy (the giving up of marriage and children) both by diocesan priests and men and women religious has been a great gift to the Roman Church; we should not abolish it at the diocesan, national and international levels. However voluntarism (the forgoing of salary) is an equally promising gift especially at the parish and diocesan levels, and should be acknowledged by ordination to a voluntary diaconate and presbyterate. Our current mostly voluntary diaconate has been a good step in that direction.
Good points, Jack, about people exercising their talents.
DeleteAnd another good thing about voluntarism is that it is...voluntary. The person is able to decide for themselves what tasks they are able and willing to undertake. Whereas, in a paid position, one has a job description, and duties which are expected of one.
Katherine, what a wonderful picture! And congrats to Deacon Kelly and you. Did you go through all the classes with your husband?
ReplyDeleteInteresting ordination time of the year. Our diocese's class for this year within the last few weeks, but that was because of the coronavirus - normally, ordinations are in May. My anniversary is May 16 (for Therese and me, 16 years this year).
Yes, I went through all the classes. At that time it was a requirement. The formation program has gone through at least three updates since we were in. They used to split it into a rural and urban class. Now it is all together. It used to be three years, now it is four. It was every Tuesday night during the school year, with an hour commute both ways. We would get home about 11:00 pm. And I would have to get up at 5:00 am to get ready for work. The couples would take turns bringing food, because it started during most people's supper hour. Now it is a weekend thing, I think once a month, with it being optional for the wives. You have to write papers and stuff now, which we didn't then. It was just reading homework.
DeleteThey used to do ordinations in October since that worked out better for the archbishop. He had transitional diaconate and priesthood ordinations in May or June.
Coronavirus has really put a crimp in things now, I think classes have at least partially gone online.
My view re: the spouses doing all the formation are: it can be a hardship for some folks to positively require the wife to attend. On the other hand, I strongly encourage couples to do it together, if they're able to swing it. In the very early years (1970s) in our diocese, the men did it by themselves, and it became clear that the men were getting all this enriching spiritual development and forming these new friendships which their wives were not a part of. Much healthier for the couples to do it together. But not every couple can do it together because of other life commitments - and that in turn is a very important factor for discernment during the aspirancy year (that's what we call the first year - to be brutal about it, sort of the weed-out year for those who won't be going forward).
DeleteJim, that was the thought here, too, that not including the wives in the first classes had stressed some marriages. Hence the requirement. I think they have hit the right note now, the wives are encouraged and invited to participate. But leaves it up to them as persons of agency to discern whether and when.
DeleteKatherine,
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to both of you.
You wrote, "the wives are encouraged and invited to participate," and it sounds like it was, for you, a good experience. Jim agrees that it's "much healthier for the couples to do it together," but adds, "not every couple can do it together because of other life commitments."
In this age of Zoom, what about this as a better-than-nothing (though far from perfect)solution: make it possible for the wives to be present virtually during the classes and, if their commitments make it impossible for them to be there "live" when the classes are given, to post the video recordings of the classes on the diocesan website so that the wives can see them at a time that works for them?
Thanks Gene. Good idea about posting the video recording on the diocesan website. Especially since all the classes have gone on Zoom now. I expect the pandemic to change the formation program in a lot of ways.
DeleteGene, I agree it's a good idea. In addition to the problem of wives having to miss some of the classes, we husbands also had to miss them sometimes because of work or family commitments.
DeleteAt the time I was in formation (starting about 20 years ago), I had encouraged our formation program to video-record the lectures and other class sessions so that absent classmates could view them later. The archdiocese certainly had recording equipment, and even videographers; they have a television studio somewhere. I was, at that time, among the youngest in the class, and among the more tech-savvy across both the cohort of classmates and the various formation program staff members and instructors. I say this, not to boast of my own techie prowess, which actually is quite modest, but to illustrate how backward everyone else was. Most of my classmates at that time were in the empty-nest stage of life (where I would hope to be now, if I could figure out a way to get my fledglings to leave the nest :-)) and the idea of recording classes, much less attending them via something like Zoom, alternately bewildered and frightened everyone else.
The deacon formation program has made a lot of strides since then on the technology stuff. Even our parish staff knows how to use Zoom now (some of them, anyway).