Mahony Calls for Saving Term <i> Ministry</i> for the Ordained

Reiterating a position he took at a Vatican bishops’ conference on the laity, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said Monday that he would like to reserve the word ministry for the ordained clergy and to discourage the labeling of many lay parish activities as “ministries.”

Mahony said that the trend in American Roman Catholic parishes has been to regard even “making popcorn” or acting as a Sunday morning greeter as a ministry. “My concern is that we have diluted the meaning of ministry,” he said.

“I think we inadvertently have given the wrong signal to lay Catholics that unless you are doing some ministry in the church you are not an active Catholic,” Mahony told a news conference.

“We want the laity to be leaven in society, to be active in the world as Catholics.”

The archbishop made the remarks to elaborate on his proposals at the monthlong Synod of Bishops that concluded last week in Rome. Mahony was one of six U.S. bishop-delegates to the consultative body.

Mahony’s synod speech suggested that clergy and lay roles be more sharply distinguished, but that when laity do take up major teaching or worship posts the duties should be more formalized as “an office or an order.”

Though some perceived Mahony’s proposals as countering the desire of many bishops to increasingly involve lay people in parish activity, Mahony said Monday that that was not so. His proposals were incorporated “in one way or another” in the recommendations forwarded to Pope John Paul II at the end of the synod, he said. After the synods, usually held every three years, the Pope summarizes the findings and can act on them as he sees fit.

From his impressions at the synod, Mahony also said that he might ask legislators who are Catholics to attend periodic sessions to acquaint them with Catholic positions on issues with moral overtones. He said he was struck by how much lay Catholics in Asian and African countries seem to have made their specifically Catholic positions clear in public and political life.

It might have been useful, Mahony said, to have gathered Catholic legislators to acquaint them with the U.S. bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter on the economy.

“But I would not envision myself calling together legislators and saying, ‘Vote for this,’ ” he said.

In other matters, Mahony said he now hopes that a series of eight auctions of items from the Estelle Doheny Collection will raise $30 million for a seminary endowment fund instead of the originally projected $20 million. The centerpiece of the collection, an edition of the rare Gutenberg Bible, sold for $4.9 million at the first auction in New York on Oct. 22.

He also said he wants to send questionnaires to the archdiocese’s 285 parishes “sometime soon” to gauge the effects of the Sept. 15-16 visit of the Pope to Los Angeles.