The laity could soon have enormous new responsibilities within the Catholic Church, from taking charge of the parishes to responsibility for religious services: according to a plan presented in recent days by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Primate of the Catholic Church of England and Wales, in the diocese of Westminster many of the traditional tasks of the parish priest will in future be performed by lay ministers, employed full time, given that the number of priests is continuously declining. These lay ministers could live in houses for the clergy in parishes where there is no longer a priest and officiate the religious services of the week using previously consecrated hosts. This would be a radical change for the diocese of Westminster. The fact is that the number of priests is constantly declining in the diocese, from over 900 in the 1970s to 623 this year; the predicted number for 2015 is 471. On the other hand, the congregations of faithful remain numerous with some 150,000 Catholics, a third of the total in the diocese, who regularly participate in Mass. According to a report in the British “Daily Telegraph”, more traditional Catholics do not seem very convinced by the changes introduced by the Cardinal’s plan. The Church ought to encourage “the gifts of all the baptized” is the reply of Murphy-O’Connor. According to the document, there simply are not enough priests available to justify a fixed parish priest in every parish, and it is inevitable that the few who remain will have to serve groups of parishes together with laypeople who would have to assume a series of tasks. “While the demands on parish priests are increasing, there has been a wider delegation to the laity of those tasks that have often been considered, erroneously, to be the exclusive preserve of the clergy”.
