The Deaconate and the Universal Call to
Holiness
Mark, S. Roberti, Director of Stewardship
Heartland Parishes of
I’m a candidate of the first deacon formation class for the Diocese of Salina. In the fall, we take our last course. Then, we participate in a week long discernment retreat. Presuming no one gets cold feet and the bishop, in fact, calls us to this ministry, we will be ordained on January 3, 2009.
Including an
initial year of discernment, the whole process will have taken over four years.
We will join the ranks of 17,000 deacons in the
One of the steps before being accepted into the program is a psychiatric examination. A written test is taken on the first visit. The next visit entails an interview with the psychologist. This may amuse you, but when the psychologist asked me why I wanted to be a deacon, the question startled me.
I hadn’t thought about why I wanted to, I just felt compelled to step forward. Certainly, I had given the issue a lot of thought. I had discussed it with my wife. I recognized how much work it could be. I just never really gave much thought to why I chose to do it.
I stammered a bit as I began to respond to the psychologist. “I just feel that the Church is in some very difficult times, and I feel as though the Church needs good, passionate, Catholic men to step forward. I don’t see a whole heck of a lot of men doing that. So I did.”
“Oh! So you felt a call,” the psychologist said. Though I had never really looked at it that way, he was exactly right, I felt a call. Having had a whole lot of time to think about it since, and not without some trepidation, I’d like to share with you some of my insights. I don’t say they are right. They are simply my appraisal of where we Catholics find ourselves in 2008.
First and foremost, we are going to need a whole lot more than seven deacon candidates to step forward. If you read my Register articles regularly, you know I harp quite a bit on the fact that women, not men, carry this Church. If as many Catholic men as Catholic women assumed their God-given responsibilities of discipleship, we would not have the problems we are now having.
There is a significant aging of our priests taking place within the Church and our diocese. There are also a small number of seminarians on the horizon. And I’ll tell you forthrightly that not all seminarians become priests. Frequently, that’s because good young women see in them just what our bishops see in them. They are intelligent young men of character. For some reason, smart young women seem to like that. They have a tendency to put up a pretty tenacious fight for that which they want.
Looking into my crystal ball, unless something changes, I see not only a significant shortage of priests in this diocese down the pike, but I also see parish closings and consolidations. I see less frequent daily and Sunday Masses. Watch! It may happen right within your own parish.
Deacons are not the solution. They are part of it, just like Parish Life Coordinators are part of it. But the real answer is in all of us being part of the solution. Every Catholic must accept his/her God given responsibility to join in this struggle to revitalize the Church. Catholics need to become Catholic again. The call to holiness is universal, whether we feel particularly holy or not.
Realistically, if we did everything right, starting from this very moment, it would likely take twenty-five years to heal this Church. The Catholic Church needs priests to accomplish its mission. It’s that simple.
We might get surprised by a priest dying suddenly, but we are not going to be surprised by a priest being ordained suddenly. There is no pie in the sky solution. The answer is vocations. And God is not going to give us those vocations unless we seek the holiness that breeds them…together, as a faith community.
Holiness is in answering the call, whatever our station in life. It is in taking seriously our call to stewardship…the stewardship of our very lives. It is in giving sacrificially of our time, talent, treasure, and trusting in the truths of the Church’s teaching. It is in raising our children as good, faithful, Catholics and in being open to the fact that they may have a vocation to the priesthood or religious life.
Answering the call to holiness, albeit unworthily, demands something of each of us.