The Archdiocese of Chicago is revamping its formation program for permanent deacons to bring the academic component more in line with the formation for priests. The change comes about 10 years after the last major change in diaconate formation, said Father Thomas Baima, provost of the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, which administers the diaconate formation program. It will affect about 65 men who are in the four-year program, said Deacon Robert Puhala, the director of deacon formation. “The new program will follow the same calendar and be very similar in its sequence of courses to what is done in the seminary program,” Puhala said. “Diaconal ministry is ordained ministry, so following some of the approaches of the seminary which have been proven to be effective simply makes good sense.” The program will focus on the candidate’s development of a strong identity as an ordained minister, which, in turn, will integrate his mission and ministry. Intellectual formation will be expanded, especially as deacons are more often called upon to preach at Mass and assume a teaching role in the parish. “The role of the deacon has evolved since the late 1960s” when the permanent diaconate was restored to the church following the Second Vatican Council, Baima said. The Archdiocese of Chicago embraced the permanent diaconate quickly, and now, with 580 active deacons, has the largest group in the United States and, Baima said, most likely the world. Permanent deacons are, like priests, ordained ministers, not laymen, but most of them work in the secular world, are married and have children. Their charism is service. They also assist at Mass, proclaim the Gospel and preach the homily, and celebrate the sacraments of holy matrimony and baptism. In recent years, many more deacons have taken on teaching and preaching responsibilities in their parishes, Baima said, which called for an increased emphasis on their intellectual formation. “On the basis of experience, it becomes easier to say these would be the elements of formation that best prepare a man for ordination to permanent diaconate,” he said. The change comes after new directories for deacon formation were released by the Vatican in 1998 and by the U.S. bishops in 2005. Since then, the program has been implementing the formation norms, which cover the human, spiritual and pastoral elements of the program. Over the last year, Puhala said, those who run the program turned their attention to the intellectual elements of formation and decided that shifting classes to the seminary’s quarter system would best allow them to bring together all the elements of the new program design. Deacons were a fixture in the early church, but the role of permanent ordained deacons disappeared for several hundred years before Vatican II resurrected it. The Archdiocese of Chicago accepted the permanent deacons so quickly because of several pre-existing conditions, Baima said. One was the history of involved laypeople in Catholic social action movements, encouraged by clergy such as Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand. Such movements “asked the laity to assume their proper role in the sanctification of the world,” Baima said. At the same time, there was a history of lay activity at the parish level, he said, and the ethnic diversity of Chicago created a need for people from within communities to step up and serve those from the same backgrounds. All three factors prepared some men from the archdiocese to accept a call to ordained ministry, and prepared parishioners to accept them, Baima said.