Looking Back and Ahead

T he Second Vatican Council’s restoration of the diaconate as a permanent order of ordained ministry represents both a retrieval from tradition and an opening up of the church to the world. In the sense that one of the council’s major tasks was to return to the sources of Christian tradition, specifically to the early church with its many diverse ministries, the permanent diaconate is a retrieval. Yet as William Ditewig has observed in The Emerging Diaconate, an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand the state of the permanent diaconate in the United States, the diaconate envisioned by Vatican II “was never intended to recreate the patristic diaconate.” Rather, it was intended as an authentic updating of the tradition. The restoration of the diaconate marked a step toward a renewed theology of ordained ministry, which had become somewhat distorted and ossified over the four centuries since the Council of Trent.

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