I'm grateful for the invitation to be with you today, because I want thank you in person for your service as deacons to the local and the Universal Church. I also want to share some thoughts about how important your ministry is at this particular moment in the life of the Church.

You already know from experience that deacons inhabit a very unique space in the Church. On the one hand, you're clergy. You share with priests and bishops the Sacrament of Orders. You have a special configuration to the person of Jesus Christ that comes from your ordination. On the other hand, many of you have wives, families and demanding secular jobs. So you have the best -- and sometimes also the most difficult-- of both worlds. That's an experience of the Church and her people that no one else really has.

But it creates a dilemma. Because the experience is so unique, I think that no vocation in the Church is at the same time so urgently needed and so little understood. This misunderstanding is more than just the result of poor formation on the part of average Catholics. We could probably spend the next hour sharing the strange ideas some Catholics have about the diaconate - beginning with the comment I once heard from a parishioner that it's a kind of halfway house between super layman and married priest.

This ambiguity can go a lot higher than the local parish. Some years ago, a bishop from a country where deacons are uncommon, asked me how I "managed" the existence of the diaconate in my diocese. I asked him what he meant by "managing" deacons, and he answered, "Well, in my country, hens are good for either laying eggs or being a chicken dinner." I've thought about that many times. I still have no clue what he meant. But whatever he intended, he obviously didn't quite grasp the nature of the diaconate.

What is that nature, that purpose? How can deacons best serve the Gospel in a culture that seems so aggressively secular? Where does a bishop today especially need the presence of the deacon? Those are key questions facing the whole Catholic community. And you can begin to find the answers by recovering the roots of your diaconal ministry.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter Six, deacons were chosen because the Apostles needed helpers. These assistants were not asked to do something fundamentally different from what the Apostles were already doing. They were called to do the works of practical service that belonged integrally to the apostolic ministry -- duties the Apostles, because of their natural human limitations, could not always fulfill.

The early Church Fathers saw great importance in the fact that the two most prominent first deacons, Stephen and Philip, are presented by the Acts of the Apostles as "full of faith and the Holy Spirit" and evangelizers of the Christian message. In other words, in addition to works of practical charity, they were active in the ministry of preaching and teaching, and thus clearly shared the Apostles' essential vocation of serving and spreading God's word.

Stephen's discourse in Acts Chapter 7 may be the single greatest Christian summary of the history of salvation. Many converts have come to the Church simply by reading his exceptional account of God's plan. Not even the Apostle Paul, with his theological genius, was able to capture for us the transition from the Old to the New Testament in so few words.

It's instructive that God chose a deacon, St. Stephen -- your predecessor in the ministry -- as the first martyr of the Church, especially considering how central martyrdom is to the nature of the believing community founded by Christ.

Acts tells us that Stephen's detractors "came forward and debated him, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke." This is a unique and powerful choice of words by St. Luke, seen almost nowhere else in his account of the early days of the Church. And it's especially relevant when we put it together with the way Stephen died: "As they were stoning Stephen, he called out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them;" and when he said this, he fell asleep."

Obviously, Stephen's zeal to preach the Gospel and to serve the poor did not come just from intellectual conviction, like somebody who follows an ideology. And it wasn't rooted in pure emotional attachment. Feelings, no matter how strong they might be, only take the human will so far. Feelings tend to evaporate when the cost of having them gets too high. What drove Stephen was a radical and complete identification with Jesus Christ; in effect, his life became an "incarnation" of Christian charity, and therefore a fulfillment of the Apostles' vocation.

Martyrdom brings the message of Jesus Christ to its most costly and intimate coherence -- giving one's life out of love for God and neighbor. Soon, James, an Apostle and leader of the Jerusalem community, would follow. Most of the other Apostles, including Peter as the head of the Church, later followed. But all this happened only after a deacon sacrificed his life for faith in Christ.

It was a deacon who preceded the bishops and presbyters in shedding his blood for the love of Jesus Christ. This mysterious but eloquent fact of God's plan, which never unfolds randomly or by chance, is the cornerstone of the entire Sacrament of Holy Orders.

Reinstating the diaconate took place as one of the concrete ways chosen by the Second Vatican Council to bring the Church to the wider contemporary world as the Sacrament of Salvation, It was also an act aimed at renewing the Church from within. The council was not doing something really new or "revolutionary" in the sense that it had no roots in the Church's tradition. On the contrary, it was returning a neglected ministry to its earliest and richest role in the Church.

If you look around dispassionately at human affairs today, you'll see that the Church seems to face a very serious risk of disappearing in the Western world. That may sound like a strange statement; even a contradiction of Christ's promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against the Church. But remember that it was Jesus himself who also asked: "When the Son of Man comes back, will he find faith on earth?"

Pope Benedict XVI, writing as Cardinal Ratzinger, once said that when the end of the world finally comes, Christ's "triumphant" Church could be just a decimated remnant of faithful completely ignored or even rejected by the rest of humanity. Jesus will fulfill his promise to safeguard his Church, but Christ made no guarantees about her success and popularity in a hostile world.

We also know that a tiny flock of Christian survivors is not what Jesus desires, because St. Paul reminds us that "God wants all men to be saved." Therefore, God wants a triumphant Church, not in terms of what worldly "triumph" means -- the destruction of enemies and the exercise of power -- but the triumph that comes from the conversion of human hearts to service, charity and humility; in short, the triumph of God's message of love and redemption.

As deacons, you are men from the Church in the heart of today's world, and men of today's world in the heart of the Church. This has always been the nature of your vocation. But in today's unbelieving, and even anti-Christian world, this vocation puts you at the heart of the new evangelization so deeply desired by Pope John Paul II.

As clergy you're called to lead by example. That means leading both within and outside the Church.

Inside the Church, it means modeling the love of Jesus Christ both to laypeople in your parishes and ministries, and also to your brothers who are priests and bishops. Christ the Servant is the cornerstone of the entire Sacrament of Holy Orders. The diaconate has a special identification with the work of charity and justice. In its essence, the diaconate under-girds and supports the other two orders in the sacrament. Bishops have the added charism of priestly authority because of their particular form of ordination. Priests share in that priestly authority. But bishops and priests always remain deacons first. This means that they too are called to be servants. Sometimes they may forget that. Sometimes they may need to be reminded -- fraternally, respectfully and especially by your witness. But they do need to remember that servanthood can't be delegated. Ordination means being configured to Christ the Servant. It's foundationally a call to humility and service, not ego, power or command.

The Church needs her deacons to lead in the same way Stephen led in the early Church: not by means of power or position, but by means of witness, holiness, wisdom, energy and practical engagement with the world. The world killed Stephen not because he had private beliefs, but because he brought those beliefs into the world where he preached, organized and publicly acted on them. In doing that, he changed the shape of other people's lives. So outside the Church, deacons need to be a leaven in the current affairs of human society.

We live in a country where we still have a genuine freedom of religion. We don't ordinarily risk our lives by practicing our faith. But millions of other Christians around the world do risk their lives every day. One of the lessons I've learned from the past three years serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is just how rare religious freedom is. Catholics in Sri Lanka, North Korea, China, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and in most of the Muslim world face discrimination and the risk of violent persecution all the time. And frankly, we don't do enough to remember or help them.

That doesn't mean that American Catholics are exempt from martyrdom. Martyr is simply the Greek word for "witness." Martyrdom offers itself to us every day, even in a comfortable nation like our own. All around us, every day, we encounter the bloodless kind of martyrdom that comes in the form of media contempt, bigoted lawmakers, unfair public criticism, and the suffering that often flows from trying to live -- with our actions -- what we claim to believe with our words.

The things that we hold sacred as Catholics - the solidarity of the Church with migrants and the poor; her commitment to the unborn child; to traditional notions of marriage and the family; to the mentally disabled; and to the elderly and infirm - all of these things create malice toward the Church in the hearts of those who hate her. In today's environment, that malice is legion.

Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor quoted Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean as warning that "The religious community has to decide whether they want to be tax exempt or involved in politics." Those were very strange words coming from the head of a political party that encouraged religious activism during the Vietnam era and civil rights movement, and on issues like human rights in Latin America or South African apartheid. Naturally Mr. Dean has a right to tell anyone he pleases to shut up. And religious people have a right - in fact, they have a serious obligation - to ignore him on this.

The separation of Church and state does not mean the separation of public policy from moral conviction. Religious believers and religious communities have a duty to speak out about public issues in the light of their faith. If we claim to believe something, then we need to act on those beliefs. Otherwise our words are just hot air. If a man says that he loves his wife, then he needs to prove it by the way that he lives. He needs be faithful to her in all his actions - not five or six days a week, but all seven, all the time. Otherwise he's a liar.

Living our Christian beliefs is exactly the same kind of reality. If we claim to be Catholic, then the Catholic faith should shape everything we do, from the way we treat our families and friends, to the way we spend our money and conduct business, to the way we think about every serious political issue. That's why the Church is usually in trouble with unhappy people from both political parties. Over the last six months I've gotten as many letters from Republicans who are angry at the Church because of her views on immigration justice, as I have from Democrats who hate the Church for her teaching on abortion. We live at a moment in American history when a lot of people - many of them Catholic -- for all sorts of different reasons, want to punish the Catholic Church for what she teaches.

So when some members of the Church, and especially members of the clergy, commit a terrible crime like sexually abusing a child, then our own sins license that malice. All of us in the Church now face a challenge to reach out to victims of sexual abuse in order to help them to heal, while also defending the Church from the enemies who want to hurt her people and destroy her ability to do the work of the Gospel.

No bishop can do this alone. The day is long gone the when any bishop enjoys an automatic voice in society, or the Church has an automatic influence on public affairs. As American culture becomes less and less religious, Christians need to work even harder to make the person and message of Jesus Christ known. When a deacon assists at Liturgy with genuine reverence, he serves that mission. When he preaches the Gospel, or teaches religious education faithfully, or counsels prison inmates, or manages the resources of a parish or charitable program or seminary with skill, he serves that mission. When he helps his bishop mobilize laypeople to act forcefully and publicly on issues facing the Church and society, he serves that mission.

The service a bishop needs can sometimes be very demanding and truly urgent. Some of you may know that earlier this spring, a few of our unhappy Colorado lawmakers decided it would be a good time to hurt the Church by changing the state statute of limitations on sexual abuse. Two bills now being debated by our state assembly - House Bill 1090 and Senate Bill 143 -- would allow sex-abuse attorneys to sue the Catholic community for huge sums of money for allegations that go back 25 to 40 years. They're unfair, bigoted and very dangerous pieces of legislation, but because they masquerade as justice for victims, they can fool some of the public.

What the authors of these bills didn't count on were the deacons of Colorado's three dioceses. Deacon Jim Doyle here in Denver did a couple of things. First, he took the time to inform himself about the proposed legislation, and why these bills are so badly flawed.

Then he got to work mobilizing his fellow Catholics to respectfully but persistently contact their state lawmakers to oppose the bills.

The fight over these bad bills is still continuing. But Deacon Doyle, and a lot other deacons just like him, offer us a great witness about what it means to love the Church as our mother. They understand a very important part of their vocation: i.e., to serve Jesus Christ by defending their parishes and their Church. The guiding theme of every deacon's ordained ministry is to be an agent of charity and justice. Neither of these virtues can exist disconnected from the truth. Bigoted laws, and the disinformation and confusion used to market them, are forms of lying. Therefore, speaking the truth in the face of bad legislation is an expression of real Christian love. On these crucial issues here in Colorado, deacons have given an example of active discipleship that all of us need to follow -- clergy, religious and lay.

As deacons, you bring to the Church the gift of your own particular personalities and talents. You have a uniquely intimate understanding of both the Church and the world that no one else has. Be faithful to your ordination. Be faithful to your bishops. Be faithful to the works of charity and justice that come with your vocation, so that through your closeness to the altar and a deep prayer life, you will become the kind of fearless Stephens who will preach the Truth, who will separate right from wrong without fear, who will serve the poorest and most vulnerable without hesitation, and who will do all this with joy, witnessing Christ's love for all human beings.

Real love is expensive. Real love is demanding. Real love consumes the best that we have to offer, but also creates new life in the process. This is why the diaconate has always been, and always will be, a vocation for the strong and not the weak. Jesus Christ, our King and Risen Lord, came as a servant -- and in modeling that servanthood in word and action, the diaconate configures the whole Church to his image, and through the Church, one day the world.