As noted in this week’s front-page story, the Diocese of Brooklyn is in line to maintain or surpass our current number of permanent deacons with the upcoming ordination classes in 2027 and 2030. That’s important.
Parishes with deacons offer a pastoral service that provides a great blessing to their parishioners.
Every parish should be doing its best to encourage and recruit candidates to serve as deacons in the future.
However, the article also highlights another aspect of the diocese’s formation program that goes above and beyond the numbers.
Our diocese is preparing our future deacons to meet the ever more complex pastoral realities of the Church and culture of our times.
How? By “raising the bar” with innovative and enhanced standards for admission, formation, and evaluation.
The 11 ordinands of 2025 carry the same ecclesial role as St. Stephen and his six companions did in Acts Chapter 6: threefold service to God’s Word, to the Eucharist, and to the works of charity.
But the world they will serve in today requires different skills — actually, different skills from even 20 years ago, and certainly from 1967 when the Second Vatican Council re-established the permanent diaconate in the Latin Church.
Just think of the culture-shaking revolutions since 1967: space exploration, the digital revolution, the sexual revolution, secularization of Western society, and so much more that challenge the way we relate the Gospel to the modern world.
Every Catholic, but especially ordained ministers, must be able to understand, accompany, and witness to the Gospel in a world that in some respects doesn’t realize how much it needs that truth. By requiring stronger academic qualifications of deacon candidates, their formation can provide them with a deeper theological foundation and a wider capacity to respond to the many new developments that challenge faith today.
As Our Lord said, his disciples must be in the world, but not of the world (John 17:14-16).
By ensuring that the candidate’s family life has a firm foundation before undertaking diaconate formation studies, the formators can provide more extensive preparation for serving our increasingly diverse cultural world.
Faith is formed first in the family.
By forming candidates who are capable in English as well as in their perhaps different native tongue, the future deacons can help the local Church better bridge the various communities across the Diocese of Brooklyn.
After all, the whole world is in Brooklyn and Queens parishes!
Pope Leo XIV has spoken of the permanent diaconate as a ministry “configured to Christ the Servant,” one that shows a love that “bends down, listens, and gives generously.”
He also wrote that deacons and priests, serving together with “the same passion for the Gospel and attentiveness to those most in need” become a “shining witness of communion.”
In a diocese as diverse and demanding as Brooklyn, that kind of witness cannot be improvised.
It has to be formed, tested, deepened, and supported over time.
We are blessed by this strong diocesan commitment to the biblical and ecclesial vocation of deacons, ensuring they can continue serving generations to come.