Word: lay
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...risk the Pope is prepared to take. Convinced already that Americans are cafeteria Catholics, who stay in the church while ignoring the edicts they find inconvenient, he may doubt that they will leave now in droves over issues of governance. Certainly he has shown no desire to increase lay influence. Addressing a delegation from the West Indies last month, he warned against lay people becoming "too clerical or too politicized," either by usurping the priest's liturgical role or supplanting him in "tasks of pastoral governing...
That puts the bishops in a bind. They have heard the rumblings from the faithful; they know the reluctance of Rome to entertain revolutionary ideas. The sex-abuse scandals may have led to at least one mutually acceptable innovation. Dioceses that have created lay-led panels to advise the bishop in handling such cases seem to have effectively reduced scandal and nourished a sense of enfranchisement. "This board helps the church as well as the people who are directly involved," says Louverne Williams, a retired schoolteacher who serves on a review board in Minneapolis-St. Paul, along with a psychologist...
Advisory panels, however, while a step toward healing a broken trust, are designed to address isolated crimes, not daily life. While intent on reaching out to their flocks as never before, the bishops are not moving toward the kind of representative democracy that some lay activists dream of. "I don't believe that the solution to the church's problem is to replace clericalism with laism," Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told TIME. "I do not see the Catholic Church becoming a democracy." That was not Jesus' vision, he contends...
Bishop Wilton Gregory, 54, was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last November. The word Cardinal is all but stamped on his forehead. Though an early supporter of lay panels to address abuse cases, he is very much a conservative clergyman in the mold of Pope John Paul II, and this week he and his fellow bishops meet in Dallas to discuss how to handle the church's problems. He spoke last week with TIME Midwest bureau chief Marguerite Michaels...
...unforgivable, and fresh starts for the imperfect ruled out of bounds. Similarly, homosexuals are informed that they are born that way, but no sexual intimacy is permissible, because it cannot lead to procreation. But the infertile are married every day; postmenopausal spouses are allowed active sex lives. Only lay Catholic homosexuals are given no option for sexual intimacy. They are required to live up to standards of self-denial that, among others, only priests are required to fulfill. Yet unlike celibate priests, gays are not even provided a divine rationale for their sexual and emotional imprisonment...