CNS - Catholic News Service | This Week in Origins

This Week in Origins

Contents of Origins CNS Documentary Service, Vol. 38, No. 1 (May 15, 2008):

-- To see lay ministry as merely the church's fallback position in a time of fewer priests or as an effort to make the church more democratic is to undervalue and reduce to the practical something that flows from the church's very nature, says Bishop Blase J. Cupich of Rapid City, S.D., who outlined the theological, sacramental and ecclesial context of lay ministry in a keynote speech to the National Ministry Summit, a collaboration of six national Catholic organizations.

-- The National Ministry Summit was sponsored by the Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership Project, a collaboration of six national Catholic groups that has been studying the many changes taking place in U.S. Catholic parishes today. Outlining the project's findings to the National Ministry Summit, project director Marti Jewell says that when the project began "we assumed we were looking for new organizational and leadership structures. ... What we discovered is that the Spirit is inviting us into an unanticipated future."

-- The Vatican's clergy congregation asks that bishops not grant access to parish registries to the genealogical society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.