Monthly Archives: September 2006

EXCERPT:
I think it is important to emphasize that when the Vatican or most decent priests make distinctions about what lay people can or cannot do, say in the context of Mass or in the realm of moral theology, they are not simply being mean or oppressive. The principle at work is this. Lay people have a great dignity of their own. To uphold that dignity, sometimes it is necessary to say “no”, and it is not “clericalism” to say it. When the inherent dignity of lay people is underappreciated the mistake is often made of imposing on them a false dignity by “clericalizing” them. Much of the clericalization of lay people has come from a truly “clericalistic” attitude. It is a common error to think that priests (and religious) are the “real” members of the Church and therefore, in order to bring lay people up the ladder of dignity, they need to be made be act like ordained priests and do the things priests do. Some priests have shuffled off their own proper roles onto the shoulders good-hearted willing volunteers whom Father is seeking to actualize. This does untold damage to both lay people and priests alike, since by this process neither of them are able properly to attend to their true vocations. At the same time it must be recognized that many of the things that priests are being required to do today are often best handled by lay people. The extremes of Father doing everything and Father abandoning even his own roles must both be avoided. And if people make the mistake sometimes of thinking that priests, etc., are the real Church, similarly we must avoid the error of thinking that priests don’t belong to the Church. The Church is both lay and ordained, each complementing and building the other. Read More →

EXCERPT:
All of the above notwithstanding, let Powers That Be today pay close attention to what Joseph Ratzinger (now gloriously reigning as the sovereign Pontiff) wrote in God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, The Heart of Life (Ignatius Press, 2003) on a related topic, the “pro multis” issue: “The fact that in Hebrew the expression ‘many’ would mean the same thing as ‘all’ is not relevant to the question under consideration inasmuch as it is a question of translating, not a Hebrew text here, but a Latin text (from the Roman Liturgy), which is directly related to a Greek text (the New Testament). The institution narratives in the New Testament are by no means simply a translation (still less, a mistaken translation) of Isaiah; rather, they constitute an independent source” (emphasis added – cf. pp. 37-8, n. 10). Read More →