Lack of trust in the laity ‘ironic’ – claim

Staff reporter

A leading academic has claimed that if it were not for the vocation crisis, there would be little appetite to involve lay people in the Church here.

Fr Oliver Rafferty SJ, Director of Irish Studies at Boston College, insisted that “if there was not a shortage of priests in the contemporary Church the mind-set of most Irish clergy would still be that of the mid-1960s”.

Writing in Ireland & Vatican II, Fr Rafferty said that calls by some churchmen in more recent years for a partnership between clergy and laity not because there is a shortage of priests but because it is demanded by people’s participation in the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist, were “not only decades old but also clearly misleading”.

The Jesuit priest claimed that in the past “there was a lack of trust on the part of clerical leadership in dealing with the laity,” noting that even “in areas of lay competence such as education, clerics still wanted to control things such as boards of management in schools, which quite clearly could and should be chaired by those who knew most about them”.

“This at least would have freed the clergy from some extraneous duties so as to enable them to concentrate on other areas of pastoral ministry,” he suggested.

“The lack of trust in the laity is ironic in that the distinctive motif in the theology of Vatican II was to emphasise the role of the non-ordained in the Church,” he said.