Word: lay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...enemy combatant. Now Padilla is being held as a combatant as well--though the Administration says it has no plans to try him before a tribunal. "The real test case is Padilla," says Duke professor Scott Silliman, who specializes in national-security law. Silliman argues the courts need to lay down rules on how the President decides who is a combatant...
...last Friday, the stock market was tumbling to its lowest level since Sept. 21, much of the decline tied to the lack of investor confidence in corporate America. The verdict also revved up prosecutors for their next target: Enron and its executives, including former CEO and chairman Ken Lay and former CFO Andrew Fastow...
...deferential or embarrassed. After Mass on Sundays, I can recall having animated conversations with fellow parishioners about these issues, but then, when we leave the place and shake hands with the pastor, we find it hard to say anything but "God bless you, Father." But as lay people, we can increase lay involvement in church affairs. We can tell our priests and our fellow parishioners what we find hard to believe, what we need more of--liturgically, pastorally, emotionally. The clerical closet must also end. If there's nothing wrong with being a celibate homosexual priest, why are so many...
...church can never change are simply wrong. It has always been pragmatic about the nonessentials, accommodating itself to new cultures, to old customs and to social change. It once conducted Masses solely in Latin; now it doesn't. Communion was once dispensed solely by the priest; now lay people can distribute it. Even some of the deepest and oldest rituals in Catholic life--like the Easter Vigil ceremony--were imported in part from pagan rituals. In Africa and Asia, all kinds of cultural accommodations are made to bring the faith across cultures and into people's hearts. If this...
Perhaps what American lay Catholics need to say more clearly is that the aim of our desire to change the church is not to undermine but to save it. We love our faith--just look at how few Catholics have abandoned the church in this current crisis. We love our priests--just see how many parishioners have rallied round their own pastors in this time of trial. But what we have witnessed means we would be delinquent if we didn't fight for real change. We are actually being more faithful than those who want to perpetuate the conditions...