Lay Ministers: A Case of
Misplaced Priorities

For the past 30 years the American Catholic bishops and other leaders have been promoting lay ministry. This past November, the bishops went so far as to issue a 70-page document,

setting out training guidelines for lay ministers on parish payrolls.

The bishops have meant well—for their aim has been to encourage Catholic lay people to participate more fully in the life of the Church—but they have made a damaging mistake. Promoting lay ministry has come at the expense of an earlier tradition of promoting Catholic lay apostolate—and the two are very different things. I argue that the bishops ought to switch their priorities, for lay apostolate not only fills important needs but is specifically designed to help lay people do what they can do best: putting Gospel values to work in their jobs, schools, neighborhoods, and homes. As the new bishops' document itself recognizes: "Lay men and women hear and recognize the universal call to holiness primarily and uniquely in the secular realm."

First, some definitions: Lay ministry is the name for certain good things lay people do in their churches and other ecclesiastical settings: distributing Communion, reading at Mass, things like that. Most lay ministers are volunteers, but a small group, called lay ecclesial ministers, are salaried employees of the Church, with titles such as pastoral associate or director of religious education and more extensive duties than the volunteers. They, too, work mainly in parishes, and it is their training in theology and pastoral work with which the bishops' new document is concerned. The volunteers, whose duties are simpler than those of the paid ministers, typically rely on a few hours of informal training.

Nobody has any idea how many volunteer lay ministers there are, but a reasonable guess would be a few hundred thousand. Lay ecclesial ministers—the people on salary—number about 30,000 nationwide.

That leaves 67 million Catholic lay women and men who aren't involved in lay ministry and in most cases never will be. Some are Catholics in name only. They attend Mass infrequently, and religion does not occupy a high place among their values. But many are faithful Catholics who attend Mass and receive the sacraments regularly and want to do more: to live their faith in the world. They are the people for whom lay apostolate is ideal.

So what is lay apostolate? For one thing, it isn't something that takes place inside a church. A woman who regularly drives her elderly neighbor to the doctor, a lawyer who quietly does more than his share of pro bono work, a college student who cheerfully tutors her fellow students for free—these people and others like them are doing apostolate when they do these things for love of God.

Some lay apostles operate in formal organizations—groups such as Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, Catholic Worker, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and the Knights of Columbus. Mother Angelica's Eternal Word Television Network conceives of itself as a lay apostolate. But tens of thousands of Catholics are probably doing lay apostolate entirely on their own, without much help from the Church and without the spiritual, psychological, and practical support that a group or even a loose network of similarly dedicated people could give them. Bishops and pastors currently spend a lot of energy encouraging Catholics to become lay ministers but give lay apostolate little thought.

Continued on page 2: How the lay ministry boom got started »