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This chapter describes the Catholic effort of inculturation, the attempt to develop a Catholic theology and church based upon Maya culture instead of the western imposed forms that presently exist. Bureaucratic Catholicism slowly began to wrestle with the problem of inculturation at Vatican Council II and the conferences of Latin American bishops. In the Maya area, groups composed predominantly of Maya Catholic priests met to make explicit an already existing Maya theology. Some Maya parishes have established the permanent diaconate as a hopeful step toward a married Maya priesthood. The question is: Will these efforts be fully recognized and allowed to advance by bureaucratic Catholicism so that a distinctively Maya Catholicism will be fully integrated and accepted as orthodox Catholicism?

The diaconate and the presbyterate are ministries of service: deacons and priests are treated theologically as called by God to work as servants and shepherds to the faithful. Legal arrangements in the Church of England reflect both this and the idea that the ministries of priests and deacons are shared with those of the bishop and the laity in partnership. This chapter examines the process of ordination, ministerial appointments, and functions, which vary depending on the position held, pastoral care for clergy, ministerial discipline, and termination of ministry. There are many parallels with the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church: in both churches, as a general principle, the ministry of priests and deacons is subordinate to that of the episcopate; all aspects of their ministry are in the keeping of the bishops. It is within the framework of the canonical ministry of priests and deacons that the use of supplementary executive norms operating at diocesan level is most evident.

This chapters looks at FutureChurch—and along the way Call to Action (CTA) as well as VOTF. All of these organizations challenge, to varying degrees, the doctrinal orthodoxy as well as the behavioral and institutional customs of Catholicism. Founded in the bicentennial year 1976 under the auspices of the American bishops, CTA soon broke away to press for women's ordination, optional celibacy for the priesthood, and similar causes. Sr. Christine Schenk founded FutureChurch in the Cleveland area in the 1990s and has concentrated on promoting the “female diaconate”—that is, allowing women to be ordained as permanent deacons, a step just below the priesthood in the Catholic hierarchy. Schenk's agenda opens up a gray area between permissible and expressly forbidden change. Her advocacy inside the church is analogous to the liberalization that John Courtney Murray sought decades earlier in the relations between church and state.

A servant paradigm has controlled the basic understanding of the diaconate across denominational lines in modern times. This paradigm has determined much of what is expected of deacons in churches today. The paradigm’s Protestant roots mark a divergence from the ancient diaconate as represented in Orthodox tradition, while within Roman Catholic experience the modern servant model has tended to crowd out more broadly pastoral initiatives. The overriding ideology remains the nineteenth-century German concept of Diakonie as loving service. In none of its many reincarnations today has the diaconate been fully aligned with the alternative re-interpretation of diakonia (Collins 1990). The situation raises the question whether the pastoral potential of the diaconate can be realized without confronting the confusion surrounding the identity of this ministry.

Since Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, churches have experienced the impact of translation upon the diaconate. The diaconate of charity recognized by sixteenth-century Reformers failed to flourish until the emergence in the 1840s of a renewed emphasis upon diakonia as loving service. Although this did not accord with specialist linguistic comment, diaconal pastoral practice inspired the development of a specifically Christian lexicography of diakonia, culminating in twentieth-century churchwide social services designated by the German neologism Diakonie. This semantic shift also effected a broadening of the concept of ministry itself as churchwide and deriving from baptismal charisms. The 1990 semantic study Diakonia (Collins) claimed the new servant model rested upon a misunderstanding of diakonia. Recognized as a correction in 2000, and supported by further semantic studies, the Collins re-interpretation encourages new thinking about diaconate and ministry.