Facing a liturgy-starved church: do we need to think afresh about the basics of ministry?

O'Loughlin, Thomas

Abstract

The Catholic Church cannot, at present, find sufficient clergy to staff its parishes and this is provoking a massive pastoral, and so a liturgical, reorganization. However, these changes are not primarily driven by the demography of the actual churches, communities of people, but are solely the result of a decline in clerical numbers. Most attempts to deal with this turn on seeking to increase the number of deployable persons in presbyterial orders (e.g. seeking clergy from Africa or India), making a wider use of deacons, and scaling up the size of liturgical communities, irrespective of the nature of that liturgy, so that areas are ‘covered.’ But this assumes that actual communities, when gathered for the eucharist, are a function of the number of clergy; but surely the number of ministers is secondary to the location and size of the communities who are in need of ministry? This paper seeks to ask fundamental questions about the nature of liturgical ministry in keeping with the conference's theme of ‘who ministers what to whom?’ What is the basis of liturgical ministry? Does it exist independently of a worshipping community? Is it primarily as an individual's ‘vocation’ to ‘be a priest’, who then ministers, or a community need provided from within that community in union with the larger church? This ‘bottom up’ approach affects how we see not only actual liturgical ministry, but the priesthood of the Christ, the priesthood of all the baptized, and our pneumatology of vocation within actual churches.

Citation

O'Loughlin, T. (2019). Facing a liturgy-starved church: do we need to think afresh about the basics of ministry?. New Blackfriars, 100(1086), 171-183. https://doi.org/10.1111/nbfr.12441

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 3, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Nov 29, 2018
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Nov 6, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 30, 2020
• Journal: New Blackfriars
• Print ISSN: 0028-4289
• Electronic ISSN: 1741-2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 100
• Issue: 1086
• Pages: 171-183
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/nbfr.12441
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1230354
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nbfr.12441
• Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nbfr.12441. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.