“I would appeal to lay people not to be clerically minded,” Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan has said, urging Catholics not to believe they must imitate the work of a priest in order to take part in the Church’s mission.
“Do not think that you have to mimic what the priest does in order to be effective publicly,” the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore told The Irish Catholic.
Bishop Cullinan said evangelisation requires lay Catholics who are prepared to find new ways of sharing the faith. He pointed to Catholics gathering neighbours for prayer, organising pilgrimages, leading catechism classes and running Life in the Spirit seminars.
“It certainly isn’t a question of going to the priest and saying, ‘Father, you have to start a youth Mass in the parish,’” he said. “It’s a question of having people who are fired up by their love for the Lord and who want to think of new ways of getting the message across.”
“We’ve got to stop thinking about the only way we can help out in the Church is giving out Holy Communion and being a reader,” he added.
The bishop added that lay mission is also lived through ordinary responsibilities, citing the example of a father coaching an underage football team who models honesty and fairness and brings the children into the church to pray before a match.
“Faith is picked up off the kitchen floor,” he said. “It’s in the home. It’s the domestic Church, and we’ve got to put a huge stress on that.”
