Talk:Catholic minister

I am/was a Catholic and have never come across someone called a "deacon" in the Catholic Church. I am not saying they do not exist - but if they do they just cannot be particularly common. Also I have never heard the word "minister" used in the Catholic Church as a title or job description or as a word which groups a sets of jobs. So "Catholic Minister" as a Wiki page seems weird to me.

The writer(s) of this page say an Altar boy is a catholic *minister*. No, they have no formal training, they do not "minister" to anyone. They assist the priest during Mass - a few of my class mates were altar boys - it was more a chore, not a vocation!

No mention is made of Brothers (Monks) or Sisters (Nuns). The author of this page must surely think they are ministers if an altar boy is one.

Anyway, I think this page should go in favour of Catholic priest.

Psb777 14:13, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I you think that deacons are not commonplace in the Catholic Church then you are very ignorant. That does not inspire confidence in your other comments. In regard to deacons in the Catholic Church, see Holy Orders, and look at the canons of the Council of Trent, and at the online Catholic Encyclopedia, or any of zillions of Catholic web sites. Michael Hardy 20:22, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There are deacons in the Catholic Church, both temporary (i.e. they will be priests eventually, but haven't been ordained yet) and permanent (for one reason or another, they don't plan to be ordained as priests).

"One reason or another" is usually that they are married men. Michael Hardy 20:25, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

As for the point about altar boys, you're quite right: ministers, according to Canon Law, are those who may licitly administer one or more of the sacraments. That would include clergy and extraordinary (i.e. not ordained) Eucharistic ministers, but would exclude altar boys and non-ordained religious (monks and nuns). — No-One Jones (talk) 14:26, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

OK, so what is the Wikipedia etiquette now? Can I just go ahead and edit away? And, forgive me, why haven't you? You know more about it than me. Psb777 13:37, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Edit as you see fit. — No-One Jones (talk) 13:48, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The term minister is not used commonly in the Catholic Church. Like deacon, these are titles which are more commonly used in the protestant Christian religions.

Visit your local Catholic Church and ask to speak to a minister and either you will not be understood or you will be pointed down the street to a protestant church or they will explain that this is a 'Catholic' church and ask if you would like to speak to a priest.

I am suggesting that we document the Catholic Church in terms with which it itself is familiar.

Psb777 03:27, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Any Christian can baptize. So mention of the power of deacons (or that class of office bearers in the Catholic Church who would not readily identify themselves as such) to baptize has been removed.

As there are no unordained deacons, priests and bishops that word was removed too.

This misleading page is difficult to correct. I suggest we recognize this and replace it with a page which has links to the various types / levels of clergy in the Catholic church and have a page for each.

Psb777 03:57, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Actually, Catholics hold that even a non-Christian can validly baptize. But aside from the question of validity of baptism, there is also the question of licitness of baptism. Except in emergencies, only ordained persons -- deacons, priests, or bishops -- can licitly baptize in the Catholic church. Michael Hardy 01:56, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

It is nonsense to say the word is not commonly used in the Catholic church. Bear in mind that this assertion was made by someone who did not even know that deacons are commonplace in the Catholic church. I suspect that that person was most recently informed on these matters in about 1975. Michael Hardy 02:02, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

A google search on the words "Catholic", "liturgical", "minister" (i.e., all three words but not necessarily in that order) suggests that it is commonplace to regard altar servers, lectors, and even ushers as "liturgical ministers" in the Catholic church. Many parishes have a "liturgical minister schedule" on their web sites. Michael Hardy 02:14, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Only in Psb777's comments on this article have I seen such a high ratio of confidence-to-misinformation. Michael Hardy 02:22, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

"Liturgical Minister" seems to be a polite way of saying Reader. It's like the New Zealand term for rubbish collector: Garbage Engineer. The Readers at Mass are usually lay members of the Church. A priest can perform that role but that doesn't make those who ordinarily do it office bearers in the church. Which surely is what anybody must think when Michael wants to use the term Catholic Minister for them. Michael at best is technically correct (but he isn't always) but he sometimes succeeds in creating a wrong impression, at least on this topic.

Altar Boys are not ministers. They are boys (and girls) reluctantly (for the most part) assisting at Mass. It's a bit like calling a kid who dutifully visits his sick aunt once a week a doctor. Altar boys do not administer a sacrament.

That some members of the clergy turn up sometimes at mass to do what an Altar Boy could otherwise do does not make an Altar Boy a minister either. It simply shows that Altar Boys cannot be persuaded to turn up for 6am Mass on a Monday.

That sometimes a member of the clergy does the 1st or 2nd reading does not make those who normally do it, lay readers, members of the clergy. Some of my school colleagues' friends fathers were regular readers too. But they were not members of the clergy, they had not had any formal training, they were certainly not ordained, or even blessed by the priest! I have even read at Church, once. Readers do not administer a sacrament.

Typically there is no usher at a Catholic service of any description except optionally at a wedding or a funeral. Once again, these receive no training, I have been one myself. They are not (usually or necessarily) members of the clergy. And they do not administer a sacrament. Not minister.

Psb777 05:59, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The type of page Michael Hardy is seeing must be like this: http://www.ststephenuni.org/liturgicalministry.html Note the Ministers of Music and the Ministers of Hospitality. Evidence enough, presumably, to include them in this Catholic minister article??? See my refuse engineer point above. Minister is just being used as a synonym of provider: It does not mean this is an official Roman Catholic Church job title. It just makes them seem important. It's nudge-nudge-wink-wink PR. Psb777 07:24, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I have just used google.co.uk and google.com.au to search for UK and Aussie pages containing "catholic", "liturgical" and "minister". Very different set of results from doing so on google.com. The term "liturgical minister" is found only three times on UK pages and each time "liturgical" is used as an adjective, not as part of a complex noun. I think that now User:Michael Hardy must come up with some official Roman Catholic Church references to support his POV. Time to rewrite this page or to remove it again.

"Only in Psb777's comments on this article have I seen such a high ratio of confidence-to-misinformation. Michael Hardy 02:22, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)"

I wasn't perfect but Michael overstates his case. Psb777 07:41, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

This official RCC paper from April 2004 explains some of the confusion. http://217.19.224.165/briefing/0204/april.pdf The USA Catholic Church has been trialling deacons for the rest of the church by permission of the Pope. But no mention of "Liturgical Ministers" as a compound noun is found, only one "liturgical minister" is found and the context is clear: No job is meant, rather it is a description of what the priest/deacon is doing. I think it is pretty clear: A lay person cannot be a liturgical minister. There is no mention of Ministers of Hospitality. This seems, once again, to be USA only.

At the very least the article should be amended to say it is USA-centric.

Psb777 08:24, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The article now says in part, as it has for a while:

Lectors who read scriptural passages to the congregation are also among those called lay ministers or liturgical ministers.

Once again this might be a USA thing but I did flag this statement as controversial - and this flagging has been removed by User:Michael Hardy. Please, Michael, just state your source for Readers/Lectors being considered part of the liturgical ministry. And do so in such a way that we are not forced to conclude that the flower arranger is also part of the liturgical ministry.

Psb777 22:40, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Now that this article is no longer giving such a false impression as it did when I first saw it (practically every word has been re-written, and every fact asserted has been modified) we are still not out of the woods. It is weird that for the Church where there are not members of the clergy called Minister and where no one is addressed as minister we have an article about Catholic Ministers, yet where Ministers are commonplace, where it is a position or rank in the clergy, where it is the form of address, we do not have an article: There is no Protestant Minister page.

Indeed, this Catholic minister page is not really about Catholic Ministers: It cannot really be about that without creating a false impression because even where they exist (USA only?) they are not addressed as such and they are not members of the clergy. The only way that this page can approach the truth is to talk about Catholic ministry or the conferring of sacraments. Where is the correct place to talk about the sacraments? On the already existing Sacraments (Catholic Church) page.

This page should be renamed to Catholic ministry or Lay Catholic Ministry (USA) and, depending which way we go, the then inappropriate content moved out to its rightful page.

Psb777 22:40, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Given this (I reckon information was intended not misinformation):

"Only in Psb777's comments on this article have I seen such a high ratio of confidence-to-misinformation. Michael Hardy 02:22, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)"

I feel bound by personal pride or some other unworthy notion to point out that the facts just do not support that assertion.

If anybody had bothered to tell me that this article belongs to Michael Hardy I would have asked permission before correcting it.

Psb777 23:01, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Who comprises the Catholic, err, ministry?

From http://www.jknirp.com/stats3.htm and neighbouring pages:

Ordained Catholics	Worldwide	USA	%
Bishops	4.5k
Priests	405k	44k	11%
Permanent deacons	29k	16k	60%
Non-ordained persons in religious vocations
non-priest religious men (monks)	55k
religious women (nuns)	792k
cathechists	2.1m
non-ordained missionaries	100k++

But I don't think monks or nuns are ordained; see Holy Orders. Michael Hardy 20:54, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

... and now I've looked at that page, and there's nothing there that says nuns or monks are ordained. Michael Hardy 20:57, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Especially noteworthy are the number of nuns!

Note too that Deacons are found mostly in the USA.

non_US_deacons / non_US_Priests = 13k/360k = 3.6%

I wonder where they came from. Are they mostly Anglican clergy who became Catholics over the issue of women priests? Anybody know?

AFAIK, an Anglican priest who converts to Catholicism can retain his priesthood. There may be a rite of regularisation of some sort that has to be done; seems to me that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith once put out some kind of statement that said that those churches which have apostolic succession (Orthodox, Anglican), the ordination of their priests was "illicit but valid". One of the parish priests back home was originally an Anglican priest.

As for deacons in general, a number of churches I have attended here in Canada have had deacons. I must have attended those 3.6% churches! (To be fair, one of the parish deacons was a temp, I think - a priest in training).SigPig 01:34, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Appropriate home sought for all this info. The more I think of this, and as I have already said, I think this page should be moved to Catholic ministry, then

• who may give what sacraments under what conditions can be moved to Catholic sacraments,

• this page can be expanded to talk about the role of the nuns and monks, the cathechists (sp?), and the missionaries, as well as the relatively minor and USA-mostly lay "Ministers" (why not?)

• all the gumph here about what a Catholic minster is not can then be removed.

And then we can start a Catholic rabbi page.

Psb777 23:37, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I would not object to "Catholic ministry" as the title. Some comments about how the word minister is used and how it differs from Protestant usage should probably still be included. Michael Hardy 02:20, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

References to lay minister in canon law

Lectors and acolytes are refered to as "lay ministers" in the motu proprio of Paul VI Ministeria quaedam and in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Altar servers are refered to as "ministers" in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, both the 2000-ish version and the 1970 version. An altar server administers no sacrament and thus is not a sacramental minister, yet the altar server is still a minister according to the canon law just cited. Thus, there seem to be two canonical instances of minister: one is a liturgical function (acolyte) and the other is a sacramental function (minister of baptism). Essentially, both points put forth on this page are correct. This article, then, should retain both senses of the word. Pmadrid 06:54, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Marriage

Should the terms for the individuals categorized as extraordinary ministers in the sacrament of marriage be more properly "husband and wife" or "bride and groom"? --198.59.190.201 05:08, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Requested move

Catholic minister → Roman Catholic minister – In keeping with the name of the main article page (Roman Catholic Church), this article refers specifically to that denomination and not to churches in the Catholic tradition generally. Fishhead64 01:00, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Survey

Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~

• Support per nom. Fishhead64 01:00, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Suport per nom. — Gareth Hughes 11:35, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose This article has content issues that cannot be addressed by a rename. It seems to be in part discussing the very term Catholic minister - which would strongly argue against any rename. My first inclination is to merge with Roman Catholic sacraments and leave this as a redirect. Also, I googled "Catholic minister" -"Roman Catholic minister" -wiki; the context of the first few pages of hits seemed to be exclusively RCC, suggesting that the term itself is fairly precise. Also note that that search yielded 13,200 hits for pages using "Catholic minister" without using "Roman Catholic minister". A search for all pages using "Roman Catholic minister" yielded 136 hits (135 with -wiki). There is no confusion here. RC minister is an rare phrase in comparision. Gimmetrow 18:15, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment — I agree that there is a confusion about this article. This suggests that, even though the word minister is widely used within the Roman Catholic Church, there is no single definition of who is or isn't a minister. The addition of the adjective Catholic here is only meant to imply 'according to the Roman Catholic Church'. I am a Catholic minister in that I minister Catholic sacraments acording to Catholic rites and traditions: I am an Anglican priest. So, we could say exactly what it's all about and call it Concepts of ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, but, if that's too long-winded, let's have Roman Catholic minister. As far as Google hits go, I don't think they should be fundamental regulators of page names. What is popular isn't necessarily right. — Gareth Hughes 18:32, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
    • "Catholic minister" is a specific phrase used in a legal context (canon law) in the RCC. Google hits aren't the end-all of arguments, but this is approaching 100:1. This article should probably either address the specific phrase (and the canons involved) or be a redirect as I suggest above. Gimmetrow 20:08, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose -SynKobiety 01:58, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

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