A permanent deacon has every canonical right to serve as a deacon at an EF mass and to deny him because he is a permanent deacon is a violation of those rights. The role of the deacon at mass is rooted in ordination, not his marital state.
A permanent deacon is not less educated than a transitional deacon. This is a myth. They go through four years of theology, whereas the transitional deacon goes to school full-time and can complete the same number of courses in two years or three. The fourth year of theology is rarely a full-time year and you’re usually a deacon by the end of your third year, if you’re a religious. If you’re a secular, it can be earlier. It depends on the bishop.
The permanent diaconate was not reinstated to give parish priests a break. Therefore, the notion that a traditional priest is more hands on than the mainstream priest is offensive to the mainstream priest. It is one thing to love tradition and quite another to elevate one group of priests at the expense of another. The traditionalist parish priest usually has a much smaller population to serve than the mainstream parish priest.
Pope Paul VI said it clearly that the reason that he was reinstating the permanent diaconate is the same reason that Pope Benedict reinstated the EF. The permanent diaconate was never abrogate in the Latin Church. It just fell out of use. What Pope Paul VI added was that married men could be ordained to the permanent diaconate, because there is nothing in dogma or morals that says that marriage is an impediment to Holy Orders.
Marriage is an impediment to the consecrated life, but not to Holy Orders. In the Latin Church the ordination of a married man to the priesthood, without permission, is illicit, not invalid. Whereas the admission of a married man to the brotherhood invalidates the novitiate, which by consequence invalidates the vows.
For some reason, the Latin Church started to treat the diaconate and priesthood as if it were the consecrated life. That’s how we lost our permanent married deacons. Sometimes, things get blended until someone like Pope Paul VI comes in and sorts it out. It was Pope Paul VI who separated the consecrated life from the priesthood.
Pope Paul was one of the best canon lawyers of the 20th century. He saw that the canons related to Holy Orders, as written in 1917, had been influenced by religious orders. Many of the principles that were proper to the consecrated life were applied to the clergy, even the term consecrated… Priests were described as consecrated, when there is no consecration in the rite of ordination, other than the consecration of the hands in order to confect the Eucharist.
Pope Paul VI set out to rectify the mistake that had creeped into the code of 1917 regarding clergy. That’s how we recovered the permanent diaconate in the Latin Church and how we recovered the religious life for men. Both religious life an diaconate had been absorbed into the priesthood.
The result was that the separation between the religious, deacon and priest took place at the same time as the reform of the liturgy. Many people associate the two. They have nothing to do with each other. The liturgy and the other just happen to coincide in time.
This coincidence has given many Trads an idea that these are “NO” ideas. The truth is that they have nothing to do with the reform of the liturgy. If we had kept the Tridentine Form as the OF, we could still have married deacons and we would still be making the proper distinction between clergy and religious.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, FFV
