Jesuit Sees Bigger Role for Catholic Lay People

The head of one of the most prestigious Jesuit schools in the United States said declining numbers of men entering the priesthood means that the Roman Catholic Church either must consider having a married clergy, ordaining women or giving a greater role to lay people.

Father Timothy Healy, president of Georgetown University, said: “The sharp drop in vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life indicates to us that we must either adapt by having a married clergy or ordaining women, or we are going to have to take seriously the stirring words of the Second Vatican Council on the empowerment of the laity.”

The Jesuit educator made it clear that, at least for the moment, he believes that the church will adopt the “empowerment-of-the-laity” option.

Sees Role for Laity

Healy made his comments at graduation exercises at Fairfield University, a Catholic university in Fairfield, Conn., last Sunday. He told the graduates that in the future “an educated Catholic laity” may take over, among other roles, the administration of such Jesuit colleges as Fairfield and Georgetown.

Healy’s challenge to the Fairfield graduates was also a challenge to the wider church, especially the Vatican bureaucracy, that it not foreclose change in the church.

Addressing also the Vatican attempts to apply church law to stifle dissent in the U.S. church, Healy called on the graduates “to make your voice, America’s voice, heard within the church as it has never been heard before” in challenging the Vatican.

“The American church can teach the universal church that justice must be seen to be done, as well as done; that openness renders both reasonable and loving even the most rigorous application of law, and that when secrecy and administrative ease do violence to any individual, justice is no longer served.”

The Vatican has sought to crack down on dissent, in cases ranging from the censure of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle to the stripping of moral theologian Charles Curran’s license to teach theology, to threats to oust two nuns from their religious order over their views on abortion.

“Too frequently in recent years,” Healy said, “the Roman curia . . . (has) made of the law a Procrustean bed into which reality and people must be cropped to fit.”

Sense of Liberty

He said the same sense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience that has shaped U.S. democracy and the American church must be addressed to the Roman church.

“Our religious freedom has taught us much, and we have only begun to share that teaching with the universal church,” he said.