Posted on 05/25/2005 6:26:29 PM PDT by murphE
Lay people are to be encouraged to take on huge new responsibilities in the Roman Catholic Church, from running parishes to officiating at church services.
Under proposals drawn up by the Diocese of Westminster, the laity will increasingly assume many of the traditional roles of the parish priest as clergy numbers continue to decline.
In the future, full-time lay ministers could live in clergy houses in parishes where the priest is no longer resident and routinely preside at weekday services using pre-consecrated communion hosts. Lay people have often been regarded as secondary to the clergy and the re-organisation of the country's "mother" diocese, initiated by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, could result in a sea change.
Traditional Catholics are likely to resist the changes. But Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, who is the Archbishop of Westminster as well as head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the Church should encourage "the gifts of all the baptised".
The paper revealed that the number of priests in the diocese fell from more than 900 in the 1970s to 623 this year. The projected number in 2015 will be 471. Congregations remain strong, however, with about 150,000 Catholics - a third of the total in the diocese - regularly attending Mass.
As a result, the paper said, there were too few clergy for every parish to have a priest in residence, and priests would increasingly look after clusters of parishes with the help of lay people, who would take over a range of tasks.
"As demands on parish priests have increased, there has been greater delegation to lay people of those tasks which have often been (wrongly) assumed to belong exclusively to the ordained priesthood," it said.
ping
I heard some protestants talking about consecrated hosts in a plastic like Lunchables. Perhaps they'll ship them straight from Rome to be dispensed by the laity. Or perhaps they'll just install a vending machine or would that be simony?
This practice is already in place in many dioceses in the United States as well.
May the Lord bless them in their struggle. Through this the church will be stronger.
>>Congregations remain strong, however, with about 150,000 Catholics - a third of the total in the diocese - regularly attending Mass.<<
That's a bit curious. Other reports say that attendance in most of Europe is down to 2 - 5%. Did this come out of the most atypical diocese? IOW, is there a diocese in Europe with attendance higher than the Diocese of Westminster?
What a novel concept! Shipping packaged, pre-consecrated hosts directly from Rome. Hmm... makes one think, now doesn't it?
The first thing that came to mind for me was the recent eBay furror over the listing and bidding on the sale of a host ostensibly from a JPII mass. They say the sale was not consummated because the seller withdrew his offer when a bishop had a talk with him. If this is true, the news is encouraging, because this is news of a bishop doing what bishops are SUPPOSED to do (for a change).
But the plan of shipping hosts from Rome would be the opposite kind of action, another unprecedented innovation, and another reason for criticism; criticism of the hierarchy for doing what they SHOULD NOT DO.
There would be heightened accusations of invalidity of the consecrations, to be sure. There's already growing din of dissent from traditionally inclined men in that regard, saying that the more innovations regarding the Eucharist there are, the more evidence there is that those promoting the innovations really believe that the hosts are not validly consecrated -- being nothing but the matter science can observe: "nothing supernatural here," as the Yugoslavian bishops said about Medge apparitions.
Each innovation quietly proclaims the denial of the Real Presence, they say. Can we prove them wrong? How many abuses do we need to see before we wonder if the abusers believe what the Church teaches? You can take any one of the traditional saints and see someone who would rather have died than even stand by idly while an abuse takes place. Nor do they have to be adults. St. Tarsicius was a mere boy who died concealing the Eucharist from persecutors. Nor do they have to be known saints. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was imprisoned in WWII, and from his cell window saw a woman who risked her life to come every day for a month to take one host from the floor with her tongue, kneeling, at the place where hosts had been spilled by vandals. He never found out who the woman was.
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