Roman collars or muddy shoes

Deacons wearing collars

I am completely against deacons wearing Roman collars. If I am fortunate, my bishop will never ask me to wear one.

A recent discussion on a closed Facebook group yielded over 150 of comments, many of them in favor of wearing the Roman collar, many arguing its usefulness to distinguish deacons as clergy.

My first reaction was that this may be a symptom of a growing clericalism of the permanent diaconate. But this is not my major concern.

My second reaction was that wearing a collar can create distance between the deacon and the rest of the People of God. When the local bishop asked me to consider the diaconate I told him that I was concerned that this would create a wider breach between me and the people I serve.

As a layman from the US, a missionary in Honduras, I had privilege. I could leave whenever I want and return to the US. I had the financial security of social security monthly payments and a bank account. And there was more.

Would becoming a permanent deacon pull me further away from the poor in whose midst I serve.

But my real reason against the collar is theological. I think the theology of the diaconate is not sufficiently developed and so we fall back upon arguments of the deacon being a cleric and the usefulness of being recognized as one.

But I think we need to get back to the roots of the move toward the permanent diaconate.

After talking with the bishop, one of the first articles I read on the diaconate mentioned that priests in the Dachau concentration camp seriously studied the crisis in Nazi Germany and the failure of the church to recognize and respond to the emergent evil of the Third Reich.

This was not a move to clericalize the church. Rather, as William Ditewig wrote in The Emerging Diaconate,

the pioneers of a renewed diaconate, incarcerated at Dachau concentration centration camp, saw the diaconate as a necessary component of a renewed church transforming the world so that tragedies such as the Second World War and the Shoah would not happen again.

I wonder. Was there no one in the Resistance to Nazi Germany who had the ears of the bishops? If there were permanent deacons, living and working in the streets of Germany, would they have been able to let the bishops see what was really happening?

If the deacons are “the eyes and the ears” of the bishop, they may make them more aware of the serious crises facing the lives of ordinary peoples.

The deacon should be in a place in the secular world – not only revealing the sanctity of the world of work by his presence, but also bringing the experiences of his coworkers to the altar. He also should be the one who brings the poor to the church and the church to the poor.

Does the permanent deacon bring the world of work into the structures of the Church? Will he let the bishops and those in authority know of the challenges facing the world?

In addition, would the deacon in his daily life of family and work be better able to show the presence of Christ? This seems to be what one of the priests at Dachau noted:

The Church has not succeeded in holding its ground among either the leading intellectual classes nor among those classes most easily led astray, the proletariat. In their own milieu, deacons from these classes for these classes could gain influence incomparably deeper than could any priest, since priests would never develop within this milieu the kind of rapport that deacons would have already established. One could develop the diaconate into a means to win back the de-Christianized milieu. An intelligent deacon from the working-class would, without any special theological training, be able to touch the heart of his worker colleagues with just the right words.

The working permanent deacon might be the one who can better connect the world and the altar, the Church and the people who are alienated or marginalized from faith.

I think this is part of what Pope Saint John Paul II meant when he spoke in a 1993 general audience:

A deeply felt need in the decision to re-establish the permanent diaconate was and is that of a greater and more direct presence of Church ministers in the various spheres of the family, work, school etc., in addition to existing pastoral structures.

This line of thought leads me to suggest that we need to develop the practice and the spirituality of the worker-deacon.  One of the experiments in Europe in the mid-twentieth century that I think held out some hope for the re-evangelization of Europe was the worker-priest movement. Perhaps that movement should be the inspiration of a theology of the “worker-deacon.”

I write this as one working full-time in the church but I see the need to develop a diaconate in the world, a diaconate of the blue collar worker, a diaconate of the campesino, a diaconate of the bus driver, a diaconate of the civil servant.

In addition, the deacon should be recognized by who he is and what he does – not just at the table of the Lord at Mass but at the table of the poor.

Is the permanent deacon – am I – an icon of Christ the Servant at the Table of the Lord and an icon of the Servant Body of Christ in the world?

A final thought.

If the deacon is to serve in the margins, to witness the church’s love and justice for the poor and neglected, what might be our distinctive sign?

Father Paul McPartlan pointedly wrote that “The deacon stands at the altar and prepares the gifts with clean hands, but he stands also where the practical need is greatest, getting his hands very dirty.”

The dirt under our fingernails might be a worthy sign of our diaconal ministry. But I think there is another image that might help us develop a practical theology of diaconal ministry.

Pope Francis worked for some time with Jesuits in formation in Argentine. When they returned from their visits to the villas miserias, the poor neighborboods, he would inspect their shoes to see if they had walked among the poor.

Maybe muddy shoes should be the sign of the deacon.