Adressing a Deacon

[Matthew_Holford]

OK, so maybe the local or American Eastern bishops have that policy, but it is at least not a strict thing applicable everywhere. Thank you. I had been told “the Eastern Church doesn’t allow clergy to re-marry, period.” Although the person who told me that would know, he might have been referring only to the local situation.

I’ve only heard that it can happen. I haven’t heard whether it’s something which happens in the various Eastern Churches in the west or in their traditional territories. What always made me accept it is that I see the Eastern Churches as being less legalistic than the Western Church and I could see them allowing for this pastoral exception more than the Western Church.

 

[Andreas_Hofer]

Just the same as me once I am ordained into the permanent diaconate, the God forbid my wife pass, i cannot petition to be considered a transitional deacon then work a couple of years and be ordained a priest. I would have to start from scratch; first off I would have to find a bishop that would agree to allow me to pursue the priesthood. That’s not a guarantee.

As ciero said, there is a certain point (which gets reached very soon out of the gate) at which distinguishing between “transitional” and “permanent” deacons is just silly. Still, despite being rather unprecedented it is nonetheless now canonically mandated. The extremes to which many dioceses go in actually forbidding “permanent” deacons from dressing like clerics are absurd and most likely abusive, but the requirement for those deacons to specially permission for admission to priesthood/priestly studies upon the death of their wives is indeed enshrined in canon law. Now, it used to be that no one had so facile an understanding of permanency that they held one who was ordained to serve indefinitely as a deacon to be “stuck” as a deacon the rest of his life. In fact, the diaconate, and not the presbyterate, was the prime ground for picking new bishops. But when Paul VI revived the permanent diaconate for the dioceses he also introduced something that hadn’t been seen for roughly a millennium (and in most places hadn’t been seen licitly for many centuries prior to that), namely a married diaconate. He invented this new, stricter meaning of “permanent” deacon in order to prevent the abuse of the diaconate as a sort of consolation-prize priesthood for married men, or just another, albeit longer, stop for those married men on their “real” path to the priesthood. He wanted it to be clear that he was looking for men, celibate or married, who really felt a call to service as deacons. I think it’s safe to say that widespread misunderstanding continues to reign in many parts of the world (even the US which holds roughly half of the entire world’s permanent (Latin) deacons), so the discrimination against permanent deacons was, in my mind, not worth the hoped-for clarification.

I think I have heard that the Roman Rite sometimes makes an exception if a deacon is left with small children when his wife dies.)

The Roman possibility of exception for bereaved deacons with small children to remarry is, to my knowledge, the first time any church has ever let clerics marry. Period.

 

[plato3]

I have been a perm. deacon for almost 8 years. Call me anything except late for dinner.