Permanent deacons

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Yin-yang of Washington Post on Amy Coney Barrett: Wait. Pope Francis embraces charismatics?

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It would appear that the goal on the cultural and religious left is to find a way to link Judge Amy Coney Barrett to all of that strange charismatic Christian stuff like healing and speaking on tongues while avoiding anti-dogma language that would raise warning flags for Sunday-morning-Mass Catholics. She may as well be a fundamentalist Protestant!

Here is the Big Idea that is right up top, in a story that uses the term “handmaid” 11 times — early and often.

Oh, this will also require tip-toeing around the awkward fact that millions of charismatic Christians are found in Latino and Black pews — Catholic and Protestant.

Will this play a role in the hearings that are getting underway as I type this? We will see.

In the branch of the Democratic Party known as Acela Zone journalism, the key to the news coverage has continued to be a steady drumbeat of references to the word “handmaid,” which in cable-television land calls to mind all kinds of horrible fundamentalist terrors, starting with sexual slaves in red capes and white bonnets.

It’s hard to know what to write about the People of Praise-phobia angle of this story right now, since your GetReligionistas have been on it for some time now. See my podcast and post here: “Why is the 'handmaid' image so important in Amy Coney Barrett coverage?” Also, Julia Duin’s deep dive here into 40 years of history linked to the People of Praise and charismatic Christian communities of this kind. There there is Clemente Lisi on three big questions that reporters need to face linked to Barrett’s faith.

There are too many elite news stories on the handmaid angle to parse them all, so let’s focus on that recent Washington Post feature from a team led by the scribe who brought you the hagiography of Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

For starters, this would be a good time to remind readers that reporters rarely play any role in the writing of the headlines atop their work. The headline on a piece such as this one primarily tells you the angle that editors thought would launch it into social-media circles among the newsroom’s true believers. Thus we have: “Amy Coney Barrett served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise.”


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RNS report confuses many crucial terms in Eastern Orthodox debates on female deacons

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I know that we have been over this before, but once again we need to address a complicated issue in church history -- whether the role of "deaconess" that existed in the early church is the same thing as the status being described in modern proposals to raise women to the ordained role of permanent deacons.

This is the crucial question that reporters and editors need to understand if they are going to cover debates on female deacons in the Church of Rome and in Eastern Orthodoxy. As always, journalists do not have to AGREE with the traditional point of view on the issues involved in this debate, but they do need to understand them.

It would help, of course, if journalists knew the details of the duties that historians believe ancient deaconesses performed, as well as the liturgical work done by today's permanent deacons. (Note: "Permanent," as opposed to deacons who will soon transition to the priesthood.)

The pivotal question, as described by Pope Francis last year, is whether the church is going to restore the ancient role of the deaconess or do something new, which would be ordaining -- that's the key word -- women to the altar-centered role of permanent deacon.

I bring this up because of a recent Religion News Service story that, truth be told, is basically a press release for the movement to ordain female deacons in Eastern Orthodox churches. The headline: "Orthodox Church debate over women deacons moves one step closer to reality."

The crucial material begins here, where the issue is clearly framed as a debate about the ordination of women:

That prospect may now be a giant step closer to reality, since the Patriarch of Alexandria, who presides over the entire Orthodox Church in Africa, followed up on his 2016 decision to reintroduce women deacons and last month appointed six nuns to be subdeaconesses within the church.
In a symbolic ceremony, the patriarch blessed the women and used other religious symbols to effectively restore women’s ordination within Orthodoxy. The move follows years of discussions within different branches of Orthodoxy on whether to reinstitute women deacons, and it comes at a time of growing interest around the issue within the Greek Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox denomination in the U.S.

This is completely over the top. And what, exactly, is a "subdeaconess"?


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Will Catholicism admit women deacons or deaconesses to ranks of ordained clergy?

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Will Catholicism admit women deacons or deaconesses to ranks of ordained clergy?

THE QUESTION:

What are the reasons the Catholic Church might, or might not, ordain women in the clerical rank of deacon? (Almost all Q and A topics are posted by our online audience, but The Guy decided to pose this timely question himself.)

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Catholicism’s long-simmering discussion about whether to ordain women into the clerical ranks as “permanent deacons” took a dramatic turn May 12 when Pope Francis said he’ll form a commission to study the issue. His promise came during seemingly off-the-cuff answers to questions during a Rome session with the International Union of Superiors General, whose members lead nearly 500,000 nuns and sisters in religious orders.

Without doubt, female deacons would be a major change. Liberals hope — and conservatives fear — that permitting women to be deacons would be a step toward allowing female priests. However, that’s a distant prospect if not an impossibility considering Pope John Paul II’s absolute prohibition in his 1994 apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.”

To explain that term “permanent diaconate”: The order of deacons in the early church gradually dwindled over centuries so that eventually ordination as a “deacon” became a mere stepping-stone for men on the path to priesthood. (That usage occurs in Anglican and Episcopal churches. Lutheran deacons, male and female, fill a permanent office, not a temporary one. Baptists use the deacon title for lay members who govern congregations with the pastor.)

Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council (1962-65) restored the “permanent diaconate” as a third, separate and ongoing ministerial order in its own right that is subordinate to priests and bishops. Particularly in North America, which has half the world total, such deacons help ameliorate the shortage of priests.


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Deaconesses or female deacons? Journalists do you know the history of these terms?

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Once again, it is time to play that popular news-media game, "What did Pope Francis say and what might it mean?" The goal is to fit a bite or two of church history into the rapid-fire and breathless responses of journalists in some elite newsrooms, where a papal call for clarification on female deacons is being hailed as a possible door to the ordination of women as priests. 

Let's start with some basics: The word used in Romans 16:1 to describe the woman named Phoebe is diakonos -- which some have translated as "servant," while others use "deacon. In the New International Version, that would be:

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.

In the classic King James Version, that reads: 

I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.

Scan through this Bible Hub search and you'll see a variety of translations that go each way. But we can start our discussion with an acknowledgement that the early church did include some kind of role for women known as "deaconesses." 

Now, we also need to recognize that in the modern world, a rapidly rising number of Catholic parishes and ministries are featuring the ministry of men ordained as "permanent deacons," as opposed to deacons who will soon transition into the priesthood. This is a very newsworthy trend.

So, when you clicked on your news source of choice (or perhaps even opened a newspaper) today, did the story you read contain some material resembling the following from the report in Crux?

Currently, canon 1024 of the Code of Canon Law says that only a baptized male can receive the sacrament of ordination, so the law does not presently permit female deacons. The question, however, especially in light of the Biblical evidence for women being referred to as “deaconesses” in early Christianity, is whether that law could be changed.


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