IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW
The Emerging Diaconate: Servant Leaders in a Servant Church

by William T. Ditewig
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2007, 219 pp. plus notes and bibliography, paper, $23.95)

Reviewed by Phyllis Zagano, senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate in the Catholic Church (Crossroad, 2000).

Forty years later, and the church is still trying to figure out the diaconate. Bishops, individual pastors, and even deacons themselves are often not quite in agreement as to what comprises the lived vocation of deacon.

With The Emerging Diaconate, William T. Ditewig sheds more light on the questions and the struggles involved with recovering this ancient ministry of the church. Deacon Ditewig, who for several years served as executive director of the Secretariat for the Diaconate of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is the leading American voice on the renewed diaconate. His newest addition to Paulist Press’s impressive line of books on the diaconate is a study rooted in Scripture and in history of the way the renewed permanent diaconate is now and may be in the future.

In the first half of this latest book, Ditewig briefly reviews his own history and then, in much deeper detail, the history of the permanent diaconate. After seven years of high school and college seminary—from ages 13 to 20—Ditewig sought another way of serving the church as the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the issuance of the papal encyclical Humanae vitae signaled a new era. Suddenly everything was questioned, everything was on the table. And the permanent diaconate, Ditewig says, crept in on little cat feet.

Forty years later there are about 16,000 permanent deacons in the United States. Citing a 2004 study of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Ditewig reports that U.S. deacons are mostly (over 80%) white, and their average age (about 62) is not much younger than the average age of U.S. priests. Most (93%) are married, and volunteer in ministry (73%). Only about a third hold paid secular employment.

Where did this permanent diaconate come from? The first part of the book provides a brief examination of the scriptural basis of the diaconate and its place in history, through the Council of Trent to the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Ditewig’s impressive middle chapter on the discussion of the diaconate at Vatican II will serve scholars well.

Built upon a foundation of history, the second half of The Emerging Diaconate enters into current theological waters, discussing what the ministerial diaconate can become, if allowed. Ditewig’s major premise, that the diaconate makes no sense until the entire church enters into diaconal kenosis, comes hard upon the general impression that the permanent diaconate is (often unnecessary) volunteer service in retirement. Examining sacramental theology, Canon Law, and ordination liturgy, he skillfully presents the diaconate as a distinct and real order.

The Emerging Diaconate will spark more discussion of the theological and ministerial place of the diaconate. One would hope that in the future Ditewig, now associate professor of theology and religious studies at St. Leo University near Tampa, Florida, will include the history and possible future of women in the diaconate barely mentioned in this and earlier writings. The kenosis the whole church so desperately needs demands nothing less.