A listener Will asks Father Dave about marriage and the diaconate. Will asks, “Why can married men older than 35 become deacons, but deacons cannot become married men?”
Father Dave first clarifies the parameters surrounding deacons and marriage. He says, “Married men older than 35 can become what we call permanent deacons, meaning that they would not be a transitional deacon on the way to priesthood.”
He confirms that if you are an unmarried man and ordained a deacon, you cannot marry after ordination. “It even applies to a married man who becomes a deacon and then his wife dies; he is also not allowed to remarry,” Father Dave continues.
The reasoning behind this is not based on specific theology but rather “a much more human answer.” Father Dave says, “I’m going to speak specifically for the Latin rite, the Roman Catholic Church, because other Christian churches and Orthodox churches have different customs and rules. It primarily comes from the fact that, in our human experience, roles such as priest and deacon have significant authority and power difference in a local community. It would be unfair to take advantage of that power differential and that authority when dating.”
“For the first thousand years of the Church, there were no restrictions on marriage. So there were married priests, married bishops, and married popes. Let’s just sum it up by saying that it didn’t go as well as it should have,” he continues. “We don’t believe [celibacy rules] are divined by God;, it’s not like instituted by Christ at the Last Supper or anything like that. Just having lived as Church hierarchy and ministry humanly in the 2000 years since Christ, we’ve noticed that it’s a problem more often than it’s not.”
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Father Dave says, “In our [Roman Catholic] tradition, once you’re committing to an ordained ministry as a deacon, you can already be in a committed married relationship, but you can’t be on the hunt for a new one, largely because of how we humanly and sinfully have such the temptation to even subconsciously or subliminally abuse that power differential.”
“You might say, ‘Well, that wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do that, and I’d like to be a married deacon. How come I get punished for what happened in the early centuries of the Church?’ Well, that’s the case in a lot of institutions,” he continues. “It’s not all about what’s happening right now. A lot of it is learned over the ages.”