This theological roundtable has stand-alone articles that are complementary and together trace a flow toward ecclesial participation, of movements of bodies and voices, toward full inclusion in the Catholic Church. These works, taken together, can shed light on the dynamism and development of the church when it responds to pressing social and cultural needs—from official development of structures within the ordained magisterium in response to poverty and economic crises (Yount) to students moving together for change and participatory inclusion (Ahern) and from lay adults forming social action communities for racial justice (Rademacher) and, building on the experience of lay LGBTQ+ Catholics, to demand ecclesial participation (Flanagan). It is movements such as these that call and enact development in the church, and knowing what has come before can prompt our own reflection on what needs to come next and the role of each of us in that.
Introduction
This article is an examination of adaptations in ministerial structures in the Catholic Church of the United States through documentary evidence. Shifts in the United States over the past half century are considered in the tradition of the global church over time by briefly highlighting several changes in ministries from Old Testament communities to the early church and through two current Vatican revisions. The focus, however, is on lay ecclesial ministry over the past fifty years. Development in the local governance body of the Catholic Church in the United States and in the content of its documents about ministry both reflect and bring about growth in the church's own self-understanding and identity. Reflections on processes related to relational and ministerial changes, and the mutability of our ministerial structures more generally, can inform the ways that the current United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) implements some of the changes on the horizon, including the ministerial adaptations in Pope Francis’ 2021 documents Spiritus Domini and Antiquum Ministerium.
Ministerial Development: Context
Biblical and early church movements demonstrate the early adaptability of formal ministerial structures. The long tradition of shifts in ministerial structures over time periods and locations provides an important context for our examination of more recent US postconciliar ministerial development. The context begins with Scripture, follows some historical currents, and then examines two recent developments during the pontificate of Pope Francis.
The Old and New Testaments demonstrate changes in notions such as priesthood and discipleship—and subsequent interpretations and applications—and illumine the development of current notions about laity, clergy, and leadership roles in parishes. In the Old Testament, we see the rise of the professional priesthood, and the New Testament provides important insight into developing perspectives of discipleship and the accompanying ministerial roles.
a. Old Testament Period: Rise of the Professional Priesthood
The role of the priest (kohen) in the Old Testament period was filled differently at various times. The heads of tribal groups and families originally performed some priestly functions (e.g., offering sacrifice), but with the development of increasingly formal social hierarchical structures in Israel, the office of the priesthood surfaced.Footnote 2 DeuteronomyFootnote 3 and Numbers describe the Israelite priesthood, and the distinctions therein, as, generally, priests as teachers of the law, judges, mediators between humans and God through the offering of sacrifices, and vehicles for messages from God to humanity through the Urim and Thummim (tools that later faded out of use).
The early priests had many functions other than offering sacrifices—in fact, all of the heads of households could offer these; the only difference between what the priests and the household heads could do during sacrifices was that only priests could sacrifice the parts of an animal that required approaching the altar.Footnote 4 Raymond Brown describes priests from the pre-monarchical time period as altar attendantsFootnote 5 while including within this term diverse functions of the Israelite priesthood, some of which involved mediation from God to humanity while others entailed speaking for humanity to God.
The Israelite priesthood was flexible, and, per Raymond Brown, the Israelites saw all of their people as worthy of the title “priest.” The development of a professional priesthood, which corresponded with increasing education and training for these ministers,Footnote 6 ushered in some divisions. The professional priest “was sanctified by and for his work” and, because the holiness of God was associated with God's transcendence, the purity of a priest was achieved through his removal from the secular or profane.Footnote 7 By the end of the Old Testament period, the function of offering sacrifice was the only one left to the priest, as the others were given over to the prophet and scribe.Footnote 8 Accompanying this was a shift to a view of the priest as speaking to God for humanity.Footnote 9 Community leaders such as prophets and, later, kings were viewed as providing special functions, ones for which they were sometimes authorized through anointing.Footnote 10
b. New Testament Period: Discipleship and Identity
The New Testament has recurrent themes of discipleship, but official church leadership is rarely discussed. In the time of the early church through the fourth century, there is limited material about the laity and clergy, given ministers were seen as part of the church, the entire faithful people rather than separate from it. The focus was on Christian versus non-Christian identity rather than internal role differentiations, and Christianity was a minority community subject to persecution.Footnote 11 Kenan Osborne objects to treating the laity/clergy distinction as if it existed in the early church, asserting that this reinforces, in a revisionist way, a current focus on contrasting lay and clerical roles. He writes that it was only much later, after the introduction of ordo, that the two terms began to be used in the church in the ways we use them now. The term “ordo” began as denoting those in leadership positions and soon came to describe the function of those leaders, described theologically as tied to the ordering in the Old Testament priesthood and ordered according to the pattern of order in creation. There was then a “gradual inclusion of the ministerial ordo into the sociopolitical structures of the Graeco-Roman world, then the Frankish world, then the world of the Holy Roman Empire.”Footnote 12 Lastly, ordo became a way of “being,” with the focus on the “ontological” difference between those with and without these orders.Footnote 13
Alexandre Faivre points out that the New Testament has no hint of the term “lay” nor “even a trace of any reality that could be transposed and put in parallel with our contemporary phenomenon of the ‘laity.’”Footnote 14 The notion of “priest” as it is used today cannot be found, either: the only references to “priest” or “priesthood” refer to Christ or the collective believers. During the time of the New Testament's composition, and likely through the end of the first century and well into the second, there were no Christian priests, only pagan and Jewish. The author of 1 Peter describes the whole people as a “royal priesthood” and the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the priesthood of Jesus by comparing his death and entrance into heaven with the Jewish high priest's annual entrance into the holy of holies, bearing a blood sacrifice to expiate the sins of his people.
Brown describes four ministries in the New Testament that eventually become part of the Christian priesthood: “the disciple, the apostle, the presbyter-bishop, and the celebrant of the Eucharist.” The concept of the disciple during the New Testament period, though it included all Christians, emphasized following and living according to Christ.Footnote 15 The presbyter-bishops were to live in a closer relationship to Christ (such as that of the Twelve) and help to guide the Christian community.Footnote 16 There is no evidence that the Twelve presided over the eucharistic meals they attended nor that they appointed those who did.Footnote 17 Paul never mentions presiding over the Eucharist and rarely mentions baptizing, and other indications demonstrate that he saw his role as much more than an administrator of the sacraments.Footnote 18 Liturgical leaders were designated in diverse ways, with “the essential element always being church or community consent.”Footnote 19
Kenan Osborne points out that Paul's theological foci are God, the centrality of Christ, the mystery of the church, the role of prayer, and living a life of high moral values based on Christ.Footnote 20 He calls these the ideals of Christian discipleship, and keeping this notion of discipleship at the forefront, he says, reminds one to consider whether the church is following these ministerial ideals.Footnote 21 Osborne's idea of using the lens of discipleship is an important contribution.
Tracing the adaptability of ministry from these foundations throughout church history would be beyond the scope of this project, but it is helpful to note that this pattern of shifting roles does continue, and, as will be briefly covered later, recently Pope Francis officially shifted some installed ministries.
Ministerial Development: US Catholic Bishops
There was also significant development in formal ministerial structures in the United States, and here we examine the formation of what is now the USCCB and its early concerns related to workers. These shifts are relevant because they both demonstrate what they effect—that ministry is adaptable—and because this body will then issue statements and reflections about ministry and the relationships of clergy and laity in that context. The USCCB has written about economic justice and fair wages for workers, including about those for lay ecclesial ministers (LEMs). These concerns around economic justice, in fact, preexist what we currently think of as the deliberative body of the USCCB and are in the very roots of the formation of the organization.
In 1917, the US bishops convened the National Catholic War Council to support World War I servicepersons. After the war, in 1919, they created the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), which had an administrative committee and a general secretary. “Council” became the consultative “Conference” in 1922, but otherwise this organization persisted until 1966, at which point the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) were established (combined to become the USCCB in 2001).Footnote 22
An early initiative of the National Catholic Welfare Council was the 1919 “Program of Social Reconstruction” (hereafter, “Program”) a response to the need for the bishops to publicly take a stand “in the national debate about the ideal structure of the post-war economy and society.”Footnote 23 The document outlining the Program underscored the need for common good reforms such as an increase in public works projects as well as systems to support workers’ rights and the poor, including a national labor board, an increase in public housing, a minimum wage, and subsidized insurance. Monsignor John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945) was commissioned to write the Program, and its themes are, as to be expected, in line with his previous justice-oriented work.Footnote 24 The Program was written out in a document and was to serve “as an imperative call to action [and to] keep before our minds the necessity for translating our faith into works” (§13).Footnote 25 In 1920, the year after the publication of the Program, Ryan became the head of the social action department of the NCWC. Ryan continued to lead the social action part of the group associated with the annual meeting of the US–ordained magisterial leaders and its secretariat, called the National Catholic Welfare Council and then the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Inc., until his death in 1945.
John A. Ryan's thought was very influential in the development of the priorities at the roots of the current USCCB, and, although a deep exploration of his work is outside the scope of this article, can be briefly summarized here. His dissertation was published as A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects in 1906, and it discussed wages, unjust structures, and put forward a theological anthropology that pointed to inherent dignity. He has a long history of objecting to unfair wages and other unjust economic systems, contending “that the right of a living wage is a natural human right rather than simply endowed externally by a political authority or an economic system.”Footnote 26 His second book, Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth, published in 1916, carried forward many of these themes regarding justice and fair compensation.
The influence of the moral framework of the Program extends beyond that of Catholic social thought applied to the US context as posited by the US bishops, and continued citations of his work in official church documents such as the USCCB's “Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the US Economy” (1986) and in the work of many theologians, sociologists, political scientists, and business leaders demonstrate his continued relevance.Footnote 27 Of note here are both the early developments of what would become the USCCB and Ryan's strong influence on the seminal NCWC and its mission and priorities.
Thus far in the article we have seen the adaptability of both the church leadership structures more generally (through Scripture and church history) and of the organization of the official ordained magisterial structures in the early twentieth century (National Catholic War Council, National Catholic Welfare Council, National Catholic Welfare Conference, Inc., precursors to the current USCCB). These have all been shaped by the self-reflection and lived experience of the church. More recent developments include those at the universal church level and at the level of the United States.
Ministerial Developments: Past Fifty Years
Ministries can be added and adapted, and have been, as demonstrated above. Recently, at the global church level, two apostolic letters developing ministries have been issued motu proprio by Pope Francis, Spiritus Domini (January 2021) and Antiquum Ministerium (May 2021). Spiritus Domini (SD) modifies canon 230 §1 of the Code of Canon Law, providing laypeople access to the ministries of lector and acolyte.Footnote 28 Antiquum Ministerium (AM) institutes the ministry of catechist (“therefore, after having taken all things into consideration, and by apostolic authority I establish the lay ministry of Catechist”).Footnote 29
Pope Francis, points to the tradition of official church documents, including Ministeria Quaedam, expressing “the intention not only of adapting the ministries of Lector and Acolyte to changed historical circumstances … but also of encouraging Episcopal Conferences to promote other ministries, including that of Catechist” (AM §7). Quoting from his own apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), he relates this to “‘a growing awareness of the identity and mission of the laity in the Church’” (102).
Critical to what Pope Francis does in both of these initiatives is doctrinal development and putting into writing what is already happening in the life of the church. Development regarding the roles of lector and acolyte include: “a doctrinal development has taken place in recent years which has highlighted how certain ministries instituted by the Church are based on the common condition of being baptized and the royal priesthood received in the Sacrament of Baptism … A consolidated practice in the Latin Church has also confirmed, in fact, that these lay ministries, since they are based on the Sacrament of Baptism, may be entrusted to all suitable faithful, whether male or female, in accordance with what is already implicitly provided for by Canon 230 § 2” (SD).Footnote 30 The same is true for the ministry of the lay catechist, which, Pope Francis points out, is already part of the life of the church, arising out of our current practice: “The history of evangelization over the past two millennia clearly shows the effectiveness of the mission of catechists.… Nor can we forget the countless lay men and women who directly took part in the spread of the Gospel through catechetical instruction” (AM §3).
The shifts that Pope Francis made expanded the roles that laypeople and women can have in these installed ministries, some of which had been seen, in canon law at least, as part of the path to ordination. The Holy Father explicitly attributes this to development of doctrine. Given the ecclesiological implications of the relational shifts by these installed ministries, it also represents development in the church's own self-understanding.
Ministry and Development of Doctrine
Fr. Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904–1984), a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian whose broad-ranging work also includes economics and human and societal knowledge and development, has much to say about our own self-knowledge—individually, of course, but also as a church. Lonergan's methodological approach to the ways that human beings gain self-understanding into their own nature—and, correspondingly, the ways that the church does as well—is helpful as we consider the implications of the relational shifts that are necessitated by development in official and installed ministries. Ultimately, shifts in the ecclesiological dynamics caused by changed views of ministry both come from, and result in, development in the church's own self-understanding.
Lonergan examines the process of arriving at insights for human beings, and he makes clear that this process can also occur collectively. In a lecture given in 1964 on these topics,Footnote 31 he draws on Bruno Snell's The Discovery of Mind to trace “the way the human mind develops”Footnote 32 and as an “illustration of [one's] discovery that [one] has a mind.”Footnote 33 For Lonergan, this was both an example of how human minds work and an enactment of this development in the self-discovery of such. He summarizes his use of Snell's work thus: “The book recounts the manner in which the Greek poets and philosophers gradually came to objectify and state the fact that they had minds and wills, bodies and souls.”Footnote 34 The second part of the article is an application of this to the church.Footnote 35 In the way that one's understanding of one's own mind can be expanded, so, too, can the “mind” of the church. Lonergan suggests that the way human beings “experience and inquire, understand and think, reflect and judge” demonstrates growth—and, likewise, so does the church through an analogous process.Footnote 36
Moving from descriptions of the human mind and will through the Greek dramatists, the epic lyric poets,Footnote 37 Lonergan points out that the sophists and philosophers built on the symbolic disclosures of the poets. He recounts stages of humanity's own self-understanding, tracing an expansion over this period of time.Footnote 38 These examples of ever-expanding consciousness as humans grow in self-consciousness are, for Lonergan, illustrative of the journey to insight and being able to reflect on one's own processes. The portrayal of the inner self of humans went from “a first objectification of the inner life of [humans]. The philosophers exploited the disclosure in their analyzing, distinguishing, relating, establishing, deducing. And so we have Greek logic, Greek psychology, Greek cognitional theory, and Greek moral theory.”Footnote 39 This process of moving from experience in consciousness to objective knowledge is universal. The christological development that he traces is used as an illustration, as the process of the apprehensions of the Trinity and who Jesus was reflects the process of learning more generally:
That sketch provides just landmarks on the process. The preaching of the apostles was to Jews and Gentiles. When anyone preaches he does not communicate purely and simply everything he has in his mind. What he communicates, what he can communicate, depends about ninety-eight percent on what his listeners already know. The process of learning something, particularly learning something completely new—and Christian doctrine, the apostolic preaching, was something completely new—occurs when people apprehend in virtue of their already acquired habits of imagination and feeling and understanding and thought and conception. They have to put whatever they are told into their own mode of apprehension or they do not apprehend at all. They can make slight adaptations to what they already know, but they cannot make a total transformation of their own minds.Footnote 40
In this same way, growth in the church's understanding—and that of the church in the United States—is an ongoing, long process, moving from experience to understanding and onward. Laity, lay movements, and lay ecclesial ministers have certainly made important contributions to the self-knowledge of the church; and this process is ongoing. As the circle of our own self-understanding as a church expands, perhaps this process is analogous to the pattern highlighted above—praxis at the level of experience. The formalization of lay catechists into a specific ministry (“Catechist” as a proper noun, per the new document), grew out of practice and then, as it entered the mind of the church, eventually was formalized in documents as a specific ministry.Footnote 41
Observing common practices and using them to inform church teaching and revise canon law, as happened in these cases with Pope Francis regarding catechist and lector/acolyte, is allowing the development of doctrine to proceed through a consultation of the entire body of the church—not just through speech or writing, but embodied, on-the-ground practices as well.
Historical Statements of the USCCB Regarding Laity and LEM
The USCCB wrote about lay participation in ecclesial ministry in many documents over the past half century, including “Called and Gifted” (1980), “Called and Gifted for the Third Millennium” (1995), “Lay Ecclesial Ministry: The State of the Questions” (the culmination of committee work from 1994 to 1999), and “Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord: A Resource for Guiding the Development of Lay Ecclesial Ministry” (2005). A summit was held at the ten-year anniversary of the “Co-Workers” document to assess the current situation of lay ministers in the United States and to formulate some next steps.Footnote 42 Other subsequent initiatives included “Co-Workers: Bishops and Lay Ecclesial Ministers in Conversation,” a series of monthly webinars through the first part of 2021. This last event was a joint project of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth at the USCCB and the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.
“Called and Gifted: The American Catholic Laity” points out that the self-identity of laypeople increasingly includes a perception of themselves as members of the church with “knowledge, experience and awareness, freedom and responsibility, and mutuality in relationships.”Footnote 43 Laity often have leadership positions in churches and, per the document, express their faith in all aspects of life: “the laity are uniquely present in and to the world and so bear a privileged position to build the Kingdom of God there.”Footnote 44 Laypeople are “seeking spiritual formation and direction in deep ways of prayer.”Footnote 45 Collaboration between laity and clergy is important,Footnote 46 and the parish should be a place in which laypeople and their leaders join together for “mutual spiritual enrichment.”Footnote 47 Ecclesial ministers, defined as “lay persons who have prepared for professional ministry in the Church,” are a gift to the church and a new development; women, “who in the past have not always been allowed to take their proper role in the Church's ministry,” need an increased role in ministries of the church.Footnote 48
“Called and Gifted for the Third Millennium,” released by the USCCB on the fifteenth anniversary of the first “Called and Gifted,” carries forward some of the same ideas with an added focus on the potential of relationships to bring us into deeper unity with Christ and to reveal to us the work—which surrounds us—of the Creator. Suffering, service, and simplicity are emphasized as an aid to addressing global injustices and ecological issues.Footnote 49 The mission and ministry section of the document says that laity and clergy should be partners in transforming the world and notes two parallel responsibilities: that of laity to “develop the gifts she or he has been given by sharing them in the family, the workplace, the civic community, and the parish or diocese” and that of the clergy to acknowledge and foster lay ministries and offices.Footnote 50
In speaking of LEMs particularly, the document acknowledges that there are more “professionally prepared lay men and women offering their talents and charisms in the service of the Church,” which is a blessing for which the church is grateful.Footnote 51 With this increase, the need to “foster respectful collaboration, leading to mutual support in ministry” between clergy and laity becomes even more evident, and this “huge task” will require “changes in patterns of reflection, behavior, and expectation among laity and clergy alike.” Ordained and lay members must both view their “roles and ministries as complementary” and understand that their purposes are united in the one mission and ministry of Christ, whose prayer at the Last Supper for unity can be brought closer to fruition through “collaboration in ministry.”Footnote 52
“Lay Ecclesial Ministry: The State of the Questions” highlights the following qualities of LEMs (defined in the document as “professionally prepared men and women, including vowed religious, who are in positions of service and leadership in the Church”): called, gifted, formed, trained, commissioned, installed, and “commit[ed] to performing the duties of a ministry in a stable manner.”Footnote 53 Concrete suggestions for stability are provided to bishops in “Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord: A Resource for Guiding the Development of Lay Ecclesial Ministry” (hereafter “Co-Workers”).
“Co-Workers” is a reflection document designed to be a resource for bishops and “all others” who have the responsibility for the development of LEMs in the United States. It issues out of the “strong desire” of the USCCB “for the fruitful collaboration of ordained and lay ministers who, in distinct but complementary ways, continue in the Church the saving mission of Christ for the world, his vineyard.”Footnote 54 It highlights the need for ministers and roots ministry in an understanding of the common call in the church, focusing on discipleship and ministry as a way to share in the Trinitarian communion.Footnote 55 Drawing on this theology of ministry based on Trinitarian communion, the document discusses the relationship of LEMs to bishops, priests, deacons, and other laity. This includes ecclesial ministers needing to be formed spiritually and educationally (regarding church teaching)Footnote 56 and requiring “authorization of the hierarchy in order for the person to serve publicly in the local church.”Footnote 57 Authorization is the responsibility of the bishop and involves the prepared LEMs in a certification, commissioning, or public appointing. The document also suggests that bishops “consider prescribing terms of service for the exercise of certain responsibilities within the Church.”Footnote 58 The document notes the need to “arrive at a better appreciation of the specific place of lay ecclesial ministers in an ordered, relational, ministerial community.”Footnote 59
The broad and ever-changing context of ministries in the Catholic Church is one of ongoing development, and this impacts ecclesiological structures, theologies, practices, and more. The rise of the professional priesthood in the Old Testament, the New Testament focus on discipleship and the ministers who embodied discipleship in various ways, and the development that followed reveal the adaptability of ministerial structures in the Catholic Church. The echoes of these early movements, and the subsequent changes that they brought forward, also inform the mission and identity of who we, as a church, are today. This is also the case for the development of the current USCCB: their roots in economic justice and social action concerns help inform—and further reflection on these early priorities can increase this impact—the ways that the current US Conference of Catholic Bishops implements some of the changes on the horizon, including the ministerial adaptations in Pope Francis’ 2021 documents Spiritus Domini and Antiquum Ministerium. Understanding how humans learn and discover more generally can aid us in understanding the processes of the ongoing self-discovery of the church, the ways that growth in the church's own self-understanding happen. The historical perspective of the growth and adaptation of particular ministries in the United States is helpful as the USCCB and its many partners—all of us—discern the implementation of some of the revisions that are on the horizon, including implementing some of the role and relationship changes that are part of the revisions to the installed ministries of lector, acolyte, and catechist. Growth and change in ministries are an ongoing process of discernment as the church's self-knowledge develops, one that is informed by both the historical context of the church and the horizon upon which we fix our sights.
