Quotes about Laity

Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.

There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.

Evangelism is not a calling reserved exclusively for the clergy. I believe one of the greatest priorities of the church today is to mobilize the laity to do the work of evangelism.

Hence, the Reformers dramatically failed to put their finger on the nerve of the original problem: a clergy-led worship service attended by a passive laity. It is not surprising, then, that the Reformers viewed themselves as reformed Catholics.

Thus, the founder of Opus Dei, though he was a priest, did not seek to gather power to the clergy. In fact, he wanted the Catholic laity to discover their own dignity and assume the responsibilities that came with baptism.

The two-tiered spirituality created an artificial separation between the clergy and the laity—and thus between the Church and the world.

We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.

The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.