Resources

D Is for Deacon

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Last week the Kathryn Jean Lopez reviewed a new children’s book by author Elizabeth Ficocelli entitled Where Do Deacons Come From? This is the latest of a series by Ficocelli (other titles so far include Where Do Priests Come From?; Where Do Sisters Come From?) to introduce vocations to children.

Ficocelli comments on the reason for her book:

“Deacon Greg Kandra recently blogged that his friend, Deacon William Ditewig, had made the following statement: ‘The diaconate will only become fully accepted as a vocation when young people say, “When I grow up, I want to be a deacon.”‘

“Well, Deacon Ditewig, I hope my book Where Do Deacons Come From? will help make that a reality.

“For many kids today, the vocation of deacon is being brought home–literally–as fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and other adult males they know are answering the call for this special role of service in the Church. This book sets out to clarify what a deacon is–and isn’t–through kid-friendly text and charming illustrations.”

Adults will also appreciate this book.

“As with all my books for children, Where Do Deacons Come From? is written keeping in mind the parents or teachers that may be sharing the book with young people. I, myself, learned new things about the diaconate, as I did with each book in this vocations series.”

General interest

Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception

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We wish all the friends and affiliates of the Institute on Religious Life a most blessed solemnity of the Immaculate Conception today.

In a particular way, we send our prayerful best wishes to the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, based in Northridge, California.

These Franciscan sisters’ mission is to be in the Church and for the Church. The members live their vocation through a total surrender of themselves to the poor and humble Christ in prayer, sacrifice, and apostolic action, in imitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They are involved in catechesis, education, health care, and retreat ministry.

The congregation was founded in 1874 in Mexico City by a Franciscan Priest named Fray Refugio Morales and three young women. Guided by the Holy Spirit and, in the midst of religious persecution, they started to teach the Christian life to children and to take care of the elderly in their own homes, encouraging everyone not to be afraid of living their Catholic faith as sons and daughters of God.

For more information on this wonderful community, click here.

General interest

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts

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The Institute on Religious Life is pleased to announce that it will host a regional conference in Southern California on the topic “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts: The Sacred Liturgy and Consecrated Life.”

The event will take place on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at Sts. Peter and Paul parish in Wilmington, California. Speakers include Fr. Brian Mullady, O.P. and Rt. Rev. Eugene Hayes, O. Praem., abbot of St. Michael’s Abbey in Silverado, California.

As the Church embraces the revised edition of the Roman Missal, it is good to be reminded that “an indispensable means of effectively sustaining communion with Christ is assuredly the Sacred Liturgy” (Bl. John Paul II, Vita Consecrata, no. 95).

This year’s regional meeting will offer reflections on the vital importance of the Sacred Liturgy in the Church’s life and mission, with special emphasis on how Divine Worship relates to the consecrated life in the living out of the evangelical counsels and serving the needs of others.

Everyone—clergy, religious and laity—is welcome to attend this day of spiritual renewal, reflection and affirmation of the consecrated life.

For more information or to register, click here.

News

Welcome to America

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The Detroit Free Press published this article last week on the influx of foreign-born priests in the United States to help compensate for the relative shortage of American-born priests.

In 2011, about one-third of priests ordained in U.S. Catholic dioceses were foreign-born, up almost 50% from 1999, according to data Georgetown University compiled for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The number of foreign-born seminarians has varied between 20% to 30% over the past decade.

The article says that of the 293 priests serving at metro Detroit parishes, more than 50 are foreign-born, from countries such as India, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines, Cameroon, Poland, and Ireland.

News

Increase in Vocations

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A recent Catholic News Service story reports on the continued increase in seminary enrollment in the United States. Some examples:

— At the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, 40 new seminarians arrived this year, bringing total enrollment to 186, the highest level since the 1970s.

— St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, welcomed 30 new graduate-level seminarians, making its class of 100 seminarians the largest since 1980. The influx forced 24 seminarians and two priests off campus into leased space at a former convent.

— In the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the St. Pius X diocesan seminary closed in 2004 because of declining enrollment, the number of seminarians has more than doubled–from eight to 17 in the past two years.

But the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.

“I’m tremendously impressed with the quality of the candidates, their zeal,” said Father Phillip Brown, who was appointed rector of Theological College in Washington last March. “We’re seeing a real renewal of the priesthood.”

Under Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, the Church worldwide has been blessed with a priestly vocation boom. The number of major seminarians surged from 63,882 in 1978 to 117,978 in 2009, an increase of nearly 85%, outstripping world population growth (58%) and Catholic population growth (56%) during the same time period.

General interest

Lessons from a Saint

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Check out this article from Catholic News Agency entitled, “Encounter with Blessed Mother Teresa transforms woman’s life.”

Susan Conroy is a lay woman whose life was forever changed as a result of time spent with Mother Teresa in Calcutta in the 1980s.

More recently, Susan has worked with the Maine Children’s Cancer program, helping dying children. She has helped out  in soup kitchens, homeless shelters and with AIDS patients in the south Bronx. She taught religion to poor children.

Eventually, Susan wrote a book about her time with Mother Teresa and received her blessings on the project. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the book, Mother Teresa’s Lessons of Love and Secrets of Sanctity, go to the Missionaries of Charity’s work in Haiti and to EWTN, the Catholic television station that offers spiritual nourishment to Catholics, especially shut ins.

For the full story, click here.

General interest

Pope’s Intentions for December

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Let’s once again unite our prayers this month with those of Pope Benedict XVI. Here are the Holy Father’s intentions for November 2011, as published by the Apostleship of Prayer:

Peace among All Peoples. That all peoples may grow in harmony and peace through mutual understanding and respect.

Children and Youth. That children and young people may be messengers of the Gospel and that they may be respected and preserved from all violence and exploitation.

Further, as we enter a new liturgical year and head toward Christmas, the Holy Father  invites us to remain “watchful” and “alert” by entering prayerfully into this holy season, so that we may be ready to greet Jesus Christ, who is God with us.

Papal Address

Pope Addresses New York’s Bishops

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Here at An Undivided Heart, we will be examining the statements of the Holy Father as he concludes his ad limina meetings with the U.S. bishops at the Vatican with an eye toward capturing the Pope’s thoughts on the subject of vocations.

Unlike the first ad limina address, Pope Benedict did not explicitly address the subject of vocations in his address to the bishops of region II, which includes the Catholic dioceses of New York.  However, he did discuss the need for re-evangelization and interior conversion, as well as the importance of engaging college students. Here are some excerpts from his address:

“[T]he seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated. The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers, leading at times to that “quiet attrition” from the Church which you raised with me during my Pastoral Visit. Immersed in this culture, believers are daily beset by the objections, the troubling questions and the cynicism of a society which seems to have lost its roots, by a world in which the love of God has grown cold in so many hearts. Evangelization thus appears not simply a task to be undertaken ad extra; we ourselves are the first to need re-evangelization. As with all spiritual crises, whether of individuals or communities, we know that the ultimate answer can only be born of a searching, critical and ongoing self-assessment and conversion in the light of Christ’s truth. Only through such interior renewal will we be able to discern and meet the spiritual needs of our age with the ageless truth of the Gospel. . . .

“In the end, however, the renewal of the Church’s witness to the Gospel in your country is essentially linked to the recovery of a shared vision and sense of mission by the entire Catholic community. I know that this is a concern close to your own heart, as reflected in your efforts to encourage communication, discussion, and consistent witness at every level of the life of your local Churches. I think in particular of the importance of Catholic universities and the signs of a renewed sense of their ecclesial mission, as attested by the discussions marking the tenth anniversary of the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and such inititiatives as the symposium recently held at Catholic University of America on the intellectual tasks of the new evangelization. Young people have a right to hear clearly the Church’s teaching and, most importantly, to be inspired by the coherence and beauty of the Christian message, so that they in turn can instill in their peers a deep love of Christ and his Church.

For the complete text, click here.

Men's communities

Bands of Brothers

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Hermits of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel in Texas

Last week the National Catholic Register published an article entitled “Surprising Revival for Men in Religious Life,” which the emergence of new religious communities for men despite the sharp overall decline in the number of men in consecrated life.

Michael Wick, the executive director of the Institute on Religious Life, was quoted at length in the article. He affirmed that there are many young men today who take religious life seriously and who joyfully accept the necessary sacrifices that are a part of it.

Wick addressed the popular misconception that religious brothers are men who are not smart enough to be priests: “Catholics tend not to have a problem with women religious, but when it comes to non-ordained men religious, they are a bit uncertain. What they might not realize is that a religious brother has just as legitimate a consecrated vocation by striving to be a brother to all.”

Wick sees the various thriving men’s communities as unique expressions of the Holy Spirit in the Church. “There are so many different charisms,” he said. “We have the older, more established orders, newer communities in the tradition of an older order, and then altogether new orders. There’s something for everyone, but a common thread among the communities doing well is their faithfulness to the Magisterium.”

General interest

American Deacons

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The online edition of Catholic World Report published this month an interesting report on the permanent diaconate by Jeff Ziegler, fittingly entitled “Servants of the Lord.”

Vatican II (1962-65) expressed the hope that “the diaconate can in the future be restored as a proper and permanent rank of the hierarchy” in the Latin rites, especially in mission territories.

Ziegler summarizes the subsequent history:

“In 1967, Pope Paul VI issued general norms for the restoration of the permanent diaconate where requested by episcopal conferences. More than four decades later, 46 percent of the Church’s 37,203 permanent deacons serve in the United States, according to figures published in the 2011 Catholic Almanac, while an additional 5 percent serve in other parts of North America. A third of the Church’s deacons minister in Europe, 13 percent in South America, and approximately 1 percent each in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. There are more permanent deacons in the Archdiocese of Chicago than in all of Africa and Asia combined.”

Ziegler then gives interesting statistics on “deacon rich” and “deacon poor” dioceses in the United States. Interesting, one of the “deacon poor” dioceses Ziegler cites in his article is my own Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. However, the most recent figures Ziegler had at his disposal did not include the 17 deacons ordained in the Archdiocese’s first class six months ago.

Ziegler also notes that the Church’s theological understanding of the diaconate is beginning to deepen in recent decades:

“Catholic teaching on the diaconate, while not as fully developed as magisterial teaching on the episcopate or the priesthood, has not been lacking over the past 50 years. The Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI’s 1967 apostolic letter on the restoration of the permanent diaconate, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church all briefly summarize the ministry of the deacon; Blessed John Paul devoted three general audiences to the diaconate in 1993, and Pope Benedict delivered an important address on the diaconate in 2006. In 1998, two Vatican congregations issued documents on the life, ministry, and formation of permanent deacons, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a national directory devoted to the same topics six years later.”

Most recently, Bishop Alexander Sample published for the Diocese of Marquette, Michigan this past June “The Deacon: Icon of Jesus Christ the Servant,” a 19-page pastoral letter—perhaps the lengthiest and most thoughtful examination of the diaconate by an individual bishop in the deacon-rich United States.

While the information in the article is excellent, it remains for chancery offices around the country to make sound pastoral decisions as to how to best implement the ongoing restoration of the permanent diaconate. Ziegler’s statistics dispel the still-prevalent notion that the promotion of the diaconate somehow undercuts the promotion of vocations to the priesthood.

At the same time, the Church is already benefiting from the advances in diaconate formation that have been put into place in recent years. She will further benefit from an enhanced understanding of the deacon’s three-fold munera of word, liturgy, and charity, which are summed up in the call to serve the people after the manner of Jesus Christ, who came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life for others.