The Deacon

By Deacon William T. Ditewig, Ph.D.

Dear Holy Father,

Congratulations on your election as Supreme Pontiff and your generous acceptance of the responsibilities associated with serving both as the Bishop of Rome and the successor to St. Peter. Be assured of our constant prayers for you. (On a personal note, as a fellow American, also born and raised in the great State of Illinois, I am very proud of you. However, as a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, I weep over your devotion to the Chicago White Sox!)

I am writing today not as an American, not as a baseball fan, but as a Deacon of the Church. We stand with you, with Peter, ready, willing, and prepared to serve. We recall that decisive moment at the beginning of our ordinations when our names were called and we rose and called out “Adsum!” Present! We joined with generations of ordinands before us, eagerly presenting ourselves in humble response, fully aware of our human limitations, but full of confidence that the Spirit would continue to guide and inspire us in the days and years of ministry that lie ahead. Every day we stand humbly before God and renew that response: “Adsum!” It remains as true today as it was on the day of ordination. Together, we stand before you and proclaim, “Adsumus, Sancte Pater!” We are here with you, Holy Father, ready to be and to do whatever Christ needs us to be in today’s Church and world, ordained to serve in an integrated diakonia of Word, Sacrament, and Charity.¹

In September, during the Mass for the opening of the General Chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, you prayed in your homily that those assembled for the Chapter would receive “the gift to listen, and the gift to be humble, and the gift to promote unity, within the Order and throughout the Order, throughout the Church and the world.”² For deacons, in a special way, those three gifts – to listen, to be humble, and to promote unity – have particular applicability.

During our ordination, the bishop prayed:

Send forth upon them, Lord, we pray, the Holy Spirit, that they may be strengthened by the gift of your sevenfold grace for the faithful carrying out of the work of the ministry. May there abound in them every Gospel virtue: unfeigned love, concern for the sick and poor, unassuming authority, the purity of innocence, and the observance of spiritual discipline.

The Gift of Listening

“Strengthened by sacramental grace,”³ we deacons strive to listen to the cries of the sick and the poor, those most in need, with the corporal and spiritual works of mercy as our constant guide. We cannot attempt to meet those needs without first hearing their cries. Once they are listened to, only then can we serve appropriately and effectively. With our promise of obedience, we recall that the root meaning of obedience (“ob-audire”) is to act in response to what we have heard. And so we remind ourselves frequently that we must never rush into a pre-determined agenda of care. First, we must close our mouths and open our ears and our hearts.

The Gift of Humility

We resonate with your description of the Petrine ministry, when you spoke with the assembled cardinalate on May 10: “Beginning with St. Peter and up to myself, his unworthy Successor, the Pope has been a humble servant of God and of his brothers and sisters, and nothing more than this.” We deacons recognize in this description our own vocational call and the character of our service. In this, we are further guided and inspired by St. Augustine, who was asked by a former student which virtue should be valued most highly. The great Bishop of Hippo responded that “first is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction…because, unless humility precede, accompany, and follow every good action which we perform, being at once the object which we keep before our eyes, the support to which we cling, and the monitor by which we are restrained, pride wrests wholly from our hand any good work on which we are congratulating ourselves.”⁴

Here again, the bishop’s prayer at ordination calls us deacons to humility as we serve with “unfeigned love, concern for the sick and poor, unassuming authority, the purity of innocence, and the observance of spiritual discipline.”

The Gift to Promote Unity

The bishops assembled at the Second Vatican Council reminded us of our identity as a sacramental communion of believers. “Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission.”⁵ When the Council turned its attention to the clergy, we read: “For the nurturing and constant growth of the People of God, Christ the Lord instituted in His Church a variety of ministries, which work for the good of the whole body. For those ministers, who are endowed with sacred power, serve their brethren, so that all who are of the People of God, and therefore enjoy a true Christian dignity, working toward a common goal freely and in an orderly way, may arrive at salvation.”⁶ We clergy are ordained precisely to build up the People of God, to do whatever we can to heal divisions, tear down walls, and to be – in our own various ways, bridge builders between people, following the lead of the Successor of Peter, the Pontifex Maximus – the Great Bridgebuilder. We resonate with your motto, “In Illo uno unum” (In the One Christ, we are one). As we serve within a sacrament “in service of communion,” we renew our promises of ordination.

We deacons frequently emphasize that our ministry extends beyond the specific acts of service we perform. As your sainted predecessors taught, deacons are “the animators of the Church’s diakonia” (St. Paul VI) and “the Church’s service sacramentalized.” (St. John Paul II) As important as our various diaconal functions might be (which Vatican II called “supremely necessary for the life of the Church,” (LG 29) I am writing about something equally vital. As deacons ordained to serve “in persona Christi Servi,” we are configured as signs of the same unity that exists between Father, Son, and Spirit, a sign of the communio to which we are all called.

And so, Holy Father, here we are, standing with you, walking with you, and serving with you as best we can. We exist to serve, Holy Father: no more, and certainly no less. We have embraced our vocation as deacons with joy, eagerness, and even some little trepidation at the tasks remaining before us. Adsumus! TD

Footnotes

1. Cf. Lumen gentium 29.

2. Homily of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV for the Holy Mass for the Opening of the General Chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, Monday, 1 September 2025.

3. Lumen gentium, 29.

4. St. Augustine, Epistle 118.22.

5. Lumen gentium, 1.

6. Lumen gentium, 18.