By Ssolbergj - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2992630
SPQR Senātus Populus que Rōmānus.Translated, the Senate and People of Rome. The motto of the Roman Empire, whose legions marched under that banner in service of its Emperors.
"I will burn other people's villages with a cheerful smile."
"It ain’t a war crime if you had fun."
"Behind us, there is a house on fire. Well, let it burn. One more, one less."
Russian wall scribbling in liberated Ukrainian territory.
What's wrong with Russia?
People have been asking that question for years, maybe centuries.
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill
No, it's really not.
What it is, is something it isn't. It was never part of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire was the most extensive expression of the Greco-Roman world and their culture. The Greeks had commenced the work that Rome would end up finishing, or rather the Catholic Church would end up finishing, well prior to Rome's rise, however. The great Greek philosophers came into being prior to even the expansion of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, infusing its culture with the outlook of the Western world. Under Alexander the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean region, but the Romans picked it up, and the Greek world view, and massively expanded it.
Indeed, the influence of the Greeks and the Romans was so extensive that a student of early Christianity can't help but be impressed by the extent to which Christ and his disciples lived in a Judea that had been heavily impacted by the Greeks. The version of the Old Testament that is quoted in the New Testament pretty clear is the Septuagint, the Greek version. Most, maybe all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. Thoughts expressed in the New Testament are such that there have been those who have speculated that they could not have been expressed in Hebrew, had Hebrew remained the language of the Israelites, and that therefore Divine Providence was at work. Early Christian Church fathers applied Greek philosophy to their understanding of Theology.1
The Romans built on what they obtained from the Greeks, and they built the concept of a multicultural empire. Rome started off a city state monarchy but in the end, it was a multicultural empire in which anyone within it could become a Roman citizen under certain circumstances. Its unifying features was a uniform legal code and two languages, Latin and Greek. You could be a cultural German, but if you could learn Latin and adhere to Rome's legal code, you had a chance to be as Roman as an Italian born in Rome.
The Church, and there was only one, came in and added the concept that there was only one moral code for everyone in the world, and your status and culture didn't trump that. It also came in with a strong ethos of support for the plight of the poor and the equality of everyone before God. Real women's rights came in with the Church, and the end of slavery was made inevitable by it as well. The supremacy in religious matters of the Roman pontiff pointed out that even the government was subject to the Natural Law, and that it didn't create it.
We are all Romans.
The influence of Rome spread well beyond the Empire, even during the Roman age, and that was through Christianity. Rome made it all the way up to the Teutoburg, but not beyond that. Christianity did, however. It may have taken the Northern Crusades to bring the Poles in, but brave missionaries to bring in the Scandinavians, but they did.
In the East, the Baltic was part of the Greek world, and hence the Roman world. St. Andrew the apostle travelled into what is the southern Ukraine, via the Black Sea, and preached at least in Scythia. Some maintain that he saild the Dneiper and preached in Kyiv.
Ukraine was the subject of missionary work in the 800s. St. Cyril and Methodius, brothers, passed through Ukraine during their missionary work. Western Ukraine, which is where the Ukrainian Catholic Church has its presence today, was Christianized first.
St. Cyril and Methodius.
Under St. Vladimir The Great, a Kyivan king claimed by both the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Kyivan Rus were firmly brought into the Church. But of note, Vladimir had been born a pagan and converted to the Church (again, there was only one) in 988 after traveling to the West and studying the non-pagan religions. He died in 1015 at age 57.
Now, 1015 is a very late date. St. Andrew had been in the region in 55AD. St. Cyril and Methodius in the late 800s. But as late as 988 paganism still existed in the lands of the Rus.
And in 1054, the Great Schism commenced.
Now, the Rus did take to Christianity, of that there can be no doubt. But the Great Schism put their Church outside the Latin world to some degree. Islam was already on the rise, and the Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453. In 1448 the Russian Church obtained de facto independence, although in 1439 history nearly took a different course with Russian Orthodox representatives recognized Rome as the head of the Church at the Council of Florence. Sadly, their union was prevented from taking effect.
So basically, the Russians were on the edge of the world. The Great Schism, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then the collapse of the Byzantine kept them there. Ukraine had been part of the Greco-Roman world, and to some degree, it remains so, especially the further west in Ukraine you go.
And this matters.
Outside of the Moscow elite and a very small urban elite, Russia is one great big blue-collar country.
Fiona Hill
Russia definitely has a cultured development and the Russians are a great people. But they're a people where western concepts have never taken root, including the concept that power devolves from the people, and not the other way around. Even those who have attempted, and there have been many, to change that, have uniformly failed.
It's a culture that has developed great works of art and literature, while remaining insular and focused on itself. Outside of Russia, everyone is some sort of odd stranger, and the Russians have, from time to time, imagined themselves as the archetype of Slavs. The culture has a hard time not accepting that to some degree.
And it's a rough place to live in part because of this. People die young, often due to conditions and alcoholism. Male deaths outstrip women's by quite some margin.2 Brutality and acceptance of horrible conditions exists where it has departed elsewhere. Russia's military retains an ethos of cruelty that stems back to ancient times and manifests itself in horrific ancient behaviors.
And hence, there's really no mystery.
Russia wasn't part of the Greco-Roman world.
Ukraine, however, was.
Footnotes.
1. There's a common myth that Islam preserved the works of the Greek philosophers, and Christians got them from them.
In reality, Islam got the texts of the Greek philosophers from Chaldean Christians, who had preserved them. Latin Christians did get them from Islamic Arabs, but it is important to note that Islamic Arabs got them from Chaldean Christians.
As it happened, Hellenized Islamist theologians were later dismissed and regarded as heretical in Islam.
2. As an odd expression of this, it's often frequently noted that younger Russian women are disproportionately beautiful, before age and conditions change this at a rate not experienced in the West. It's been seriously suggested that this is due to natural selection, as the population of women always exceeds that of men, thereby giving physically attractive women a heightened competitive genetic advantage.
Pope Francis commented on childless couples and pets.
Before I go into that, I'm going to note that one of the things about Pope Francis is that he tends to be incredibly hard to pigeonhole, even though his fans and critics love to go around doing just that. And here we have just such an example. Only weeks away from making it pretty clear that the Latin Tridentine Mass needs to be a thing of the past, as far as he's concerned, and while he's the Bishop of Rome, he says something that's radically. . . traditional.
Here's what he said, in so far as I tell, as I can't find a full transcript of his remarks.
Today ... we see a form of selfishness. We see that some people do not want to have a child.
Sometimes they have one, and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.
This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.
[This] "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity", he added.
Oh you know where this is going to go. . .
Right away I saw predictable "I'm not selfish, it's my deep abiding love of the environment. . . "
Yeah, whatever.
Apparently there were a fair number of comments of that type, as a subsequent article on this topic found that, nope, most childless couples are childless as they don't want children, not because of their deep abiding concern about the environment.
Indeed, tropes like that are just that, tropes. People tend to excuse or justify conduct that they engage in that they are uncomfortable excusing for self-centered or materialistic reasons for more ennobled ones, or even for ones that just aren't attributed to something greater, in some sense.
Not everyone, mind you, you will find plenty of people who don't have children and justify that on that basis alone. Indeed, in the 70s through the mid 90s, I think that was basically what the justification was, to the extent that people felt they needed one. More recently that seems to have changed, although there are plenty of people who will simply state they don't want children as they're focused on what the personally want, rather than some other goal. Others, however, have to attribute it, for some reason to a cause du jour. In the 80s it was the fear of nuclear war, I recall. Now it's the environment, although it was somewhat then as well. I suppose for a tiny minority of people, that's actually true, but only a minority.
Whatever it is, the reaction to the Pope's statement will cause and is causing a minor firestorm. Oh, but it'll get better.
The same Pope has already made some Catholic conservatives mad by his comments equating destroying the environment with sin. And there's a certain section of the Trad and Rad Trad Catholic community that's unwilling to credit Pope Francis with anything, even though he says some extremely traditional things, particularly in this area.
A comment like this one, if it had been made by Pope Benedict, would have sparked commentary on the Catholic internet and podcasts for at least a time. There's no way that Patrick Coffin or Dr. Taylor Marshall wouldn't have commented on it, and run with it in that event.
Will they now?
Well, they ought to.
Am I going to?
No, not really.
I could be proven wrong, but I doubt I will be.
The Pope's point will be difficult for the childless to really grasp. I don't think I became fully adult until we had children, really. People who don't have children don't really know what its like to, I think. And I think that probably includes even those who grew up in large families.
At any rate, I have a bit of a different point, that being my ongoing one about the industrialization of female labor. In no small part, in my view, childless couples in general have come about as our modern industrialized society emphasizes that everyone's principal loyalty should be to their workplace or a career, without question. As put by Col. Saito in the epic The Bridge On The River Kwai, people are to be "happy in their work".
That means that they don't have time for children, they believe, and moreover the children are societal obstacles to the concept that the only thing that matters is career. It's the one place that ardent capitalist and ardent socialist come together. And, as its often noted, particularly by both working mothers and folks like Bernie Sanders, it's difficult to be both a mother and worker, with it being my guess that the more education that goes into a woman's career, the more this is the case. Society, and by that we mean every industrialized society, has no solutions to this, and there probably aren't any. About the only one that Sanders and his ilk can come up with is warehousing children sort of like chickens at the Tyson farms.
It's also a lie, of course. Careers, by and large, don't make people fulfilled or happy, for the most part, although there are certainly individual exceptions. Statistical data more than demonstrates that.
The Pope, by the way, is not against pets.
Messe ocus Pangur Bán, cechtar nathar fria saindán; bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg, mu menma céin im saincheirdd
Caraim-se fos, ferr cach clú, oc mu lebrán léir ingnu; ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán, caraid cesin a maccdán.
Ó ru·biam — scél cen scís — innar tegdais ar n-óendís, táithiunn — díchríchide clius — ní fris tarddam ar n-áthius.
Gnáth-húaraib ar gressaib gal glenaid luch inna lín-sam; os mé, du·fuit im lín chéin dliged n-doraid cu n-dronchéill.
Fúachid-sem fri frega fál a rosc anglése comlán; fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis mu rosc réil, cesu imdis,
Fáelid-sem cu n-déne dul hi·n-glen luch inna gérchrub; hi·tucu cheist n-doraid n-dil, os mé chene am fáelid.
Cía beimmi amin nach ré, ní·derban cách ar chéle. Maith la cechtar nár a dán, subaigthius a óenurán.
Hé fesin as choimsid dáu in muid du·n-gní cach óenláu; du thabairt doraid du glé for mu mud céin am messe.
I and Pangur Bán, each of us two
at his special art: his mind at hunting (mice), my own mind is in my special craft. I love to rest—better than any fame—at my booklet with diligent science: not envious of me is Pangur Bán: he himself loves his childish art. When we are—tale without tedium—in our house, we two alone, we have—unlimited (is) feat-sport—something to which to apply our acuteness. It is customary at times by feat of valour, that a mouse sticks in his net, and for me there falls into my net a difficult dictum with hard meaning. His eye, this glancing full one, he points against the wall-fence: I myself against the keenness of science point my clear eye, though it is
very feeble. He is joyous with speedy going where a mouse sticks in his sharp-claw: I too am joyous, where I understand a difficult dear question. Though we are thus always, neither hinders the other: each of us two likes his art, amuses himself alone. He himself is the master of the work which he does every day: while I am at my own work, (which is) to bring difficulty to clearness.
Pangur Bán, a poem by an unknown Medieval Irish monk.
The Seamus Heany translation, which I like better. It really gets at the nature of the poem:
I and Pangur Bán my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.
‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes
a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So
in peace our task we ply, Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice
every day has made Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
The Values candidates
Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who was a pacifist, and voted against delcaring war in 1917 and in 1941. She's a hero, as she stuck to her declared values.
While I’m at it, I'm developing a deep suspicion of conservative candidates and figures that express certain highly conservative social positions but don't quite seem to adhere to them in their own lives. This coming from somebody who is obviously highly socially conservative themselves.
This comes to mind in the context of "family values", "protecting the family" and the like. I see and read stuff like that from conservatives all the time. So if you are saying that you strongly value the family, and protecting the family, etc., why don't you have one?
Now, some people are no doubt deeply shocked by that question, but it's a legitimate one, and I'm not the first person to raise it. If a person might ask if I seriously expect people to answer the question, well I do.
Now, in complete fairness, all sorts of people don't have children for medical reasons. But more often than that, if a couple don't have them, they don't want them. That's what's up with that. And you really can't campaign on your deep love of the family if you are foreclosing that part of the family in your own lives, absent some really good reason. More often than not, the reason is money and career.
Recently I saw, for example, a statement that a person is deeply committed to family and loves spending time with their nieces. Well, everyone likes spending time, for the most part, with nieces and nephews. That's not even remotely similar to having children, however. Not at all.
I'll go one further on this and note this as I do.
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.
Luke, 16:10.
I note this as some of the conservative value candidates, if you look into their backgrounds, have question marks that should give pause for the reason noted above. If a person doesn't keep to their principals in small things, or basic things, why would they keep them on anything else?
One conservative candidate that I'm aware of, when you look up that person's background, was born of an ethnicity that's overwhelmingly Catholic and went to Catholic schools growing up. That person was undoubtedly a Catholic. That didn't preclude, however, the candidate from getting divorced and remarried to another person who was divorced.
Now, that's quite common in our society, but it's completely contrary to the Catholic faith without some explanation. Maybe there is one. I don't know, but it's a fair question, just as it would be if a Jewish candidate grew up in an Orthodox household but operates a delicatessen featuring ham. That may seem odd, but if you are willing to compromise on small things, you'll get around to the big ones, if the small ones also express a deep principle.
If you won't compromise on small things, or things that are represented as elemental to your declared world view, you are dependable in a crisis. On the other hand, if you participated in a faith, and were educated by it, and okay with its elements, and it formed part of your worldview . . right up until you had to do something difficult and chose the easier path. . . well, there's no real reason to believe that haven gotten there once, you won't do it again.
The candidate, I'd note, has been stone-cold silent on the insurrection. From that, you can tell the candidate knows it was an insurrection, but is unwilling to say diddly.
The Primordal Connection
St. Jerome with lion. St. Jerome is supposesd to have taken a thorn out of a lion's paw, and the lion thereafter stayed with him. While some might doubt some aspects of this, St. Jerome's lion is also recounted as having caused fear in the monestary in which he lived, and having adopted the monestary's donkey as a friend.
Back to pets for a second, one added thing I think about them is that for a lot of people, they're the last sole remaining contact with nature they have.
There are lots of animal species that live in close contact with each other and depend on each other. We're one. We cooperated with wolves, and they became dogs as they helped us hunt. Cats took us in (not the other way around) as we're dirty, and we attract mice. We domesticated horses, camels and reindeer for transportation. And so on.
We miss them.
One more way that technology and modern industrialization has ruined things. Cats and dogs remind us of what we once were.
And could be, again.
Warped legacies
An awful lot of what the Pope is tapping into has to deal with the combined factors of moderns forgetting what, well, sex is for, and what its implications are, and that root morality and human nature remain unchanged. There are probably more generations between modern house cats and Pangur Bán than there are between your ancestors who were waking up each morning in the Piacenzian and you.
Which takes us to men, behaving badly, and everyone turning a blind eye.
And, of course, Sex and the City.
She is fiercely protective of Carrie Bradshaw and livid that she and everyone else at the show has been put into this position, It is not about the money, but rather her legacy. Carrie was all about helping women and now, under her watch, women are saying that they have been hurt.
Sarah Jessica Parker on the scandal involving James Noth.
M'eh.
A note from Wikipedia regarding the series:
When the series premiered, the character was praised by critics as a positive example of an independent woman in the vein of Mary Richards. However, retrospective analysis tends to place more emphasis on the character's repeated and often unrepentant infidelities, with many critics instead viewing her as narcissistic.
Carrie was about helping women? Well, excuse me if that was deluded.
Scary legacies
This news item came out the same day, I'd note, that Ghislane Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking. And by that we mean procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
Eew, ick.
Connection? Well, none directly.
Or maybe. More narcissism and obsession with unrestrained desire, or lust.
It sort of seems that you can't unleash this without it oozing out as filth sooner or later.
On Maxwell, because I tend to get my news by reading, I'm left perplexed by how a person says her first name, Ghislaine. I have no idea. I heard it on the nightly news the other day, but the spelling is so odd, I immediately forgot how to pronounce it.
Boston Marriages
Some recent headlines from the ill historically informed press department:
What is a Platonic life partnership? These couples are breaking societal relationship norms
And:
Platonic Partnerships Are On The Rise, So I Spoke To These Friends Who Have Chosen To Live The Rest Of Their Lives Together "I don't think our love and commitment together should pale in comparison to romantic love."
Oh my gosh! This means that people don't always default to acting like their characters in Sex In The City or Sex Lives of College Girls!
Could this be a new trend?!? Oh my oh my, what would it mean.
Well, maybe people are just defaulting back to normal, but we're unable to grasp that as we've been steeped in seventy years of Hugh Hefner pornification of absolutely everything.[1] This isn't new. Indeed, we've dealt with this here before in our Lex Anteinternet: The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past...
post. Let's take a look:
But there is more to look at here.
Another extremely orthodox cleric but one of an extremely intellectual bent, and who is therefore sometimes not very predictable, is Father Hugh Barbour, O. Pream. I note that as his comment on same gender attraction in women was mentioned earlier here and came out in a direction that most would not suspect in the context of a "Boston Marriage". Father Barbour did not license illicit sexual contact, i.e., sex outside of marriage, in any context either, but he did have a very nuanced view of attraction between women that's almost wholly unique in some ways. Like the discussion above, but in a more nuanced form, it gets into the idea that modern society is so bizarrely sexually focused that its converted the concept of attraction to absolute need, failing to grasp the nature of nearly everything, and sexualized conduct that need not be. Barbour issued an interesting opinion related to this back in 2013, at which time there had just been a huge demonstration in France regarding the redefinition of the nature of marriage.
Katherine Coman and Katherine Lee Bates who lived together as female housemates for over twenty years in a "Wellesley Marriage", something basically akin to what's called a Boston Marriage today. Named for Wellesley College, due to its association with it, Wellesley Marriages were arrangements of such type between academic women, where as Boston Marriages more commonly features such arrangements between women of means. Barbour noted these types of arrangements in a basically approving fashion, noting that its only in modern society when these arrangements are seemingly nearly required to take on a sexual aspect, which of course he did not approve of.
Hmmm. . . .
Men and women who don't marry have always been unusual, but the sexualization of everything in the post Hefner world has made their situation considerably more difficult, really. Society has gone from an expectation that the young and single would abstain from sex until married to the position that there must be something wrong with them if they are not. This has gone so far as to almost require same gender roommates, past their college years, to engage in homosexual sex. I.e, two women or two men living together in their college years is no big deal, but if they're doing it by their 30s, they're assumed to be gay and pretty much pressured to act accordingly.
Truth be known, not everyone always matches the median on everything, as we will know. For some reason, this has been unacceptable in this are as society became more and more focused on sex.
At one time, the phenomenon of the lifelong bachelor or "spinster" wasn't that uncommon, and frankly it didn't bear the stigma that people now like to believe. It was harder for women than for men, however, without a doubt. People felt sorry for women that weren't married by their early 30s and often looked for ways to arrange a marriage for them, a fair number of such women ultimately agreeing to that status, with probably the majority of such societally arranged marriages working out. Some never did, however.
For men, it was probably more common, and it was just assumed that things hadn't worked out. After their early 30s a certain "lifelong bachelor" cache could attach to it, with the reality of it not tending to match the image, but giving societal approval to it. In certain societies it was particularly common, such as in the famed Garrison Keillor "Norwegian Bachelor Farmer" instance or in the instance of similar persons in Ireland, where it was very common for economic reasons.
People didn't tend to assume such people were homosexual, and they largely were not. Indeed, again contrary to what people now assume, except for deeply closeted people or people who had taken up certain occupations in order to hide it, people tended to know who actually was homosexual.
I can recall all of this being the case when I was a kid. My grandmother's neighbor was a bachelor his entire life who worked as an electrician. After he came home from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp following World War Two, he just wanted to keep to himself. A couple of my mother's aunts were lifelong single women and, at least in one case, one simply didn't want to marry as she didn't want children, and the other had lost a fiancé right after World War One and never went on to anyone else. Her secretary desk is now in my office. In none of these instances would anyone have accused these individuals of being homosexual.
Taking this one step further, some people in this category did desire the close daily contact of somebody they were deeply friends with, in love with if you will, but that need not be sexual. Love between women and love between men can and does exist without it having a sexual component. Interestingly, it is extremely common and expected when we are young and up into our 20s, but after that society operates against it. People form deep same gender relationships in schools, on sporting fields, in barracks and in class.
Some of those people won't marry, and there's no reason that their friendships shouldn't continue on in the post college roommate stage.
Well, society won't have it as everything needs to be about sex, all the time. Haven't you watched The Big Bang Theory?
Tatting for attention?
Kourtney Kardashian, I think (I can't really tell the various Kardashians from one another and don't really have a sufficient interest to learn who is who), apparently is now all tatted up now that she has a tattooed boyfriend or fiancé or something that is. And by this, we mean heavily tattooed.
Like, enough already?
Apparently Salena Gomez has a bleeding rose tattoo. I don't get that either, but I'm sure that piles of ink will be spilled on it.
Footnotes:
It would be worth noting here that early on a female researching on Hefner's early publications noted how much of it was actually in the nature of barely disguised child pornography, with cartoons particularly depicting this. This lead to an investigation in Europe, and the magazine rapidly stopped it, but it's interesting in that the magazine was so debased that it not only portrayed women as stupid, sterile, top-heavy, and nymphomaniacs, but also underage.
The impact however had been created, and by the 1970s the full on sexual exploitation of child models was on. As debased as society has become, it's at least retreated from this.
Catholic priest from Taos, New Mexico, helps a parishioner value his land.
A very interesting podcast from a Catholic prospective, including an interesting item on the history and early purpose of the diaconate.
The office of Deacon goes back to the very early days of the Church. Indeed, the creation of the diaconate is described in the Acts of the Apostles.
At that time, as the number of disciples continued to grow, the
Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were
being neglected in the daily distribution. So the Twelve called together the community of the disciples and said,
“It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table. Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men, filled with the Spirit and wisdom, whom we shall appoint to this task, whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” The proposal was
acceptable to the whole community, so they chose Stephen, a man filled
with faith and the holy Spirit, also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon,
Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these men to the apostles who prayed and laid hands on them. The word of God continued
to spread, and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased
greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the
faith.
Act of the Apostles, Chapter 6. As can be seen, in the very early days of the Church, Deacons hold what we might regard as a a temporal service role to their congregation, as well as a spiritual role, which we will discuss below. And as we can also see from the above, they were ordained in that role.
The qualifications they had to hold from their office were set out from the earliest days.
Similarly, deacons must be dignified, not deceitful, not addicted to drink, not greedy for sordid gain, holding fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. Moreover, they should be tested first; then, if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons. Women, similarly, should be dignified, not slanderers, but temperate and faithful in everything. Deacons may be married only once and must manage their children and their households well. Thus those who serve well as deacons gain good standing and much confidence in their faith in Christ Jesus.
Timothy, Chapter 3.
We know that they preached, and in fact we know that the first Christian martyr was a Deacon.
Now Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people. Certain members of the
so-called Synagogue of Freedmen, Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and people
from Cilicia and Asia, came forward and debated with Stephen, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke. Then they instigated some men to say, “We have heard him speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God.” They stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes, accosted him, seized him, and brought him before the Sanhedrin. They presented false witnesses who testified, “This man never stops saying things against [this] holy place and the law. For we have heard him
claim that this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place and change
the customs that Moses handed down to us.” All those who sat in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him and saw that his face was like the face of an angel.
Acts of the Apostles.
We also know that they preformed Baptisms,.
As they traveled along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch
said, “Look, there is water. What is to prevent my being baptized?” Then he ordered the chariot to stop, and Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water, and he baptized him.
Acts of the Apostles, regarding Philip the Evangelist, who is not to be confused with Philip the Apostle.
They occupied a role different from that of the Priests, but still an ordained one, with, at first, a service role that freed the Priests from that same role. Quite soon, the Deacons obtained an assisting role to the Bishops, and assisted the Bishops in liturgy, administration, and distribution of alms to the poor. St. Ignatius of Antioch noted about them, in his Letter to the Trallians;
Let everyone revere the deacons as Jesus Christ, the bishop as the
image of the Father, and the presbyters as the senate of God and the
assembly of the apostles. For without them one cannot speak of the
Church.
The association with the Bishops resulted in their office, in the early centuries of the Church, growing in importance and they became the local representative of the Bishops, something that was restored when the diaconate was restored in recent decades. I.e, they work for the Bishops, not the local Priest, at least in a technical sense. In the very early days, and indeed for a very long time, we need to keep in mind that there were many more Bishops per parishioner capita than there are now, although its been suggested that this situation also be restored to a more prior patter. In the Latin Church, however, the diaconate began to decline in the 400s, something that did not occur in the Eastern Rites however. To some extent, moreover, the rise of monasticism in the West and its strong emphasis on taking care of the poor caused their role to decline. By 800 their role was reduced to being a temporary one on the way to ordination as a Priest. Again, this was not something that was experienced in the East.
Concerns over various things, most interestingly the overstretched burdens of Priests in South America, lead to a restoration of the office in the 1960s in the Latin Rite. Now Deacons are once again common as a third order of ordained clergy in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. A rarity even in the 1980s, they are fairly common now. As a rule, they're from the local community they serve.
So, in this interesting podcast with a complicated name, a Catholic Priest discusses possibly restoring their original role in an updated format, replying on the work of another Catholic Priest from some decades back:
Highly decorated Belgian Priest during World War One.
The thing I'd add to this, is that what's discussed here probably not only explores "why your priest friends don't call each other", but also why they don't call you either. I.e., Catholic priest are incredibly busy, but also incredibly isolated.
I have another post I've semi drafted regarding Pope Benedict's recent article, and in some ways this is vaguely related to that one, but I'll plow forward none the less rather than wait, which would possibly be a more prudent thing to do.
Anyhow, one of the things I've noted over the half century that I've been around is that Priests of more recent generations can be really hard to get to know, at least if they're Americans. I've probably only known three Priests fairly well, and I'd state that this observation was true of 1/3d of those Priests, which when I state that somewhat cuts against what I just stated. Of those three, one was from the region and was very easy to know. A fourth I can claim to quasi know. A second had come out of Sub Saharan Africa and was also easy to get to know, ironically in fact because his rural African origin made him a lot more like a lot of us around here than Priests who come from elsewhere. The other one I'd say was extremely difficult to get to know. Of the one I can state to have quasi known, it was simply his highly unique and aesthetic personality that probably contributed to that.
In contrast to this, when I was a kid I recall my father being very good friends with a Priest who had a lot of the same outdoor interests and who in fact grew up in the same region as my father had. He'd come over for dinner and a frequent conversation of their topics was bird hunting. Perhaps somewhat related to this, I can also recall my father picking up two Priests and the Bishop when their car broke down on the highway and we happened to drive by. The conversation on the way home was about fishing.
If all this seems odd and has a "where is this going"? quality to this, it's this. I've also observed that the administrative burdens of a Parish are enormous and I really don't think that the average Priest probably enters the seminary with that in mind. If we regard the Priesthood as not only a vocation, but an occupation, it would share that feature with a lot of other occupations. Lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, etc. etc., don't enter their fields of professional responsibility thinking that they're going to be office managers, but very frequently that takes up a lot of their daily tasks.
But because Priests aren't simply an occupation, it makes sense to me that this could indeed become a problem in more ways than one. Indeed, most parishes have a parish administrator of some sort and is assisted by a Parish Council and a Finance Council. But the administrators are in turn oddly burdened as their secular role doesn't feature a clerical one at all.
I guess that the podcaster in this instance received a fair amount of flak from his fellow Priests for this suggestion. But in my view, as a layman, it's one worth considering. The substantial problem I see with it from the onset is that almost nobody who is currently a Deacon would have entered that state with this role in mind, and therefore may be no more prepared for it than the Priests may be. On the other hand, as they are otherwise laymen, they likely have more day to day experience in the administrative role than Priests would ever have. The ones I know off hand, and I don't know very many well, would tend to potentially demonstrate that, as they've occupied such varied roles as insurance broker to lawyer. And indeed I've seen a couple of them take the position of Parish Administrator when it came open, so perhaps things are somewhat headed that way by default.
When the Permanent Diaconate was established following the 1960s it didn't mean that those seminarians progressing towards ordination in the Priesthood no longer experienced that stage, so we already have two types of Deacons in the Church now. Perhaps establishing a third type of sorts, a Permanent Deacon with a permanent administrative role, a servant of the Bishop but serving on a career basis locally, is a good idea. He could assist the Priest in the clerical areas he's entitled to, and free up the Priest in the administrative role so that the Priest could be focused only on the spiritual mission he's charged with. Perhaps then, a Priest could find the time to "call his friends", or even go fishing or bird hunting now and then.
And I think, frankly, that's important for a variety of reasons. And one is this. It's been common to note that while the Church has an all male Priesthood, women occupy lots and lots of the various roles in the daily role of the Church and accordingly men can feel they don't identify well with things (something that's claimed not to be the case in the Eastern Rite or in the Orthodox churches). If a Priest joined you at the fishing hole or in the bird fields now and then, I suspect that might be a bit different. Christ, it might be noted, had a group of dedicated male friends.
