Course Work

The aim of this Diaconate Formation Program is to offer a challenging and rigorous human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral education and formation that provides aspirant/candidates with practical liturgical and pastoral knowledge, as well as experience in preaching – the knowledge they will need most in their service as deacons.

We also seek to offer deacon aspirant/candidates an educational foundation that fulfills and even exceeds the Church’s requirements for philosophical-theological studies and formation without over burdening them.

As a result this course of study follows a distance-learning and residency educational model in recognition of the fact that many of the men called to the Diaconate in our Church cannot attend a seminary for such an education. To ensure their success, each aspirant/candidate will be assigned a tutor.

Recognizing that the men who enter this program are required to pay for their own education, we have worked to keep the expenses for this program at a reasonable level.

Material Covered

  • Canon Law
  • Catechetics
  • Church History
  • Christology
  • Homiletics
  • Liturgy
  • Liturgical Music
  • Moral Theology
  • New Testament
  • Old Testament
  • Patristics
  • Philosophy
  • Trinity
  • Vibrant Parish

Annual Residency

For each of their four years in the program, aspirant/candidates particiate in an annual residency. Designed to give married diaconate aspirant/candidates a seminary experience over the course of an extended weekend, each residency combines additional coursework in practical and pastoral areas, time for prayer, and fellowship.