(RNS) Christian deacons date to the New Testament, which describes the apostles hiring seven men to wait on widows and the poor while the disciples preached.
The word “deacon” is derived from the ancient Greek noun for “servant.”
In his first letter to Timothy, St. Paul says deacons should be “grave, not double-tongued” and generous teetotalers. Their wives, Paul says, should be serious and sober as well. Some scholars believe there is strong scriptural evidence that women were ordained as deacons.
During the first four centuries, deacons served as right-hand men to bishops, helping to run the financial and temporal affairs of the church. Tensions between priests and deacons often ran high, with both competing for the bishop’s favor.
Later, as the Roman Catholic Church began to borrow the sequential and hierarchical order of offices from secular Rome, the diaconate became a steppingstone on the way to the priesthood. To this day, Catholic priests are ordained as deacons temporarily before they become priests.
For a thousand years, the permanent diaconate lay dormant in the Roman Catholic Church, though Protestant Reformers like John Calvin sought to revive deacons’ role as servants to the surrounding community. Most Christian denominations still employ deacons, though it is not always an ordained ministry.
The Roman Catholic Church revived the permanent diaconate during the groundbreaking reforms of the mid-1960s, when the church sought new leadership roles for rank-and-file Catholics. The idea came from German and Polish priests who wondered why the church had not been able to stop the horrors of World War II.
In 1968, American bishops successfully petitioned Pope Paul VI to allow permanent deacons in the U.S. The first permanent deacon in the U.S. was ordained in 1969.