Restoring permanent deacons among Second Vatican Council’s continued impact

A statue of Mary the Immaculate Conception is seen as a group of deacons greet each other during a Mass of Ordination to the Permanent Diaconate at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in February. Forty deacons were ordained, bringing the total number of permanent deacons serving the Archdiocese to 423, the second largest group of deacons in the nation. (Photo by James Ramos/Herald)

HOUSTON — More than 60 years since dramatic changes in the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council, three Houston clergymen — young seminarians in Rome in the 1960s — shared their first-hand witness with about 300 deacons and their wives Aug. 2.

Monsignor Chester Borski told the Diaconate Convocation meeting at St. Mary’s Seminary, “All of you deacons are here because of the Second Vatican Council!” He said more than 2,000 bishops attended the council.

“I was a student at the time in Rome,” Monsignor Borski said. “And this was the first time I heard the bishops describing the Church as the People of God.”

During that time in the early 1960s, the world was still recovering from World War II, especially the pockmarked and bombed-out buildings still visible and people reeling from losing millions of lives in the horrors, he said.

Father Sal De George, OMI, also a seminarian then, recalled his personal healing in witnessing the council’s candlelit procession of thousands gathering in St. Peter’s Square. “Oct. 11, 1962, was a special night that I will never forget. It was a holy night, and I would cry and drop to my knees in thanks,” he said.

Father Donald Nesti, C.S.Sp., in recalling the council’s decision to change the Liturgy from Latin to the vernacular, said, “I love Latin, but as seminarians we were told to prepare ourselves for dialogue with the people.”

The parishioners also had to learn to participate more and take their mission to the community, growing from “passive acceptance to active engagement,” he said.

“The four Dogmatic Constitutions of the Council started with divine revelation to the divine light within each person,” Father Nesti said. All three clergy agreed that the impact of Vatican II was distinctly pastoral, making the Church relevant to the people as a “medicine of mercy, rather than severity.”

Deacon Phillip Jackson, Archdiocesan director of the Office of the Diaconate, updated the group of local deacons who now total 423, including 235 who are active and 188 who are retired. The Archdiocese is home to the nation’s second-largest number of permanent deacons, only behind Chicago. 

“Thank you, deacons and wives, for your commitment,” Archbishop Vásquez said. “You are an extension of me to serve as effective ministers of the Church.”

He reflected on meeting Pope Leo XIV in Rome when the pope presented him with his wool pallium, a symbol of his being a metropolitan archbishop.

Archbishop Vásquez said the Holy Father’s main words to the new archbishops were “unity and community” as his primary themes of his papacy, continuing the spirit of Vatican II.

The annual convocation ended with the deacons attending Mass celebrated Archbishop Vásquez, who urged them to balance “teaching and preaching, offering comforting yet challenging words of hope” to keep parishioners actively returning to Church.