Fairfield professor speaks about inactive Catholic laity

The sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002 caught the public’s eye, motivating the laity, or the faithful body outside of religious officials, to do something about the situation, Paul Lakeland, chair of the Catholic studies department, said last Monday.

Organizations were created, newspapers brought the attention to the public, and it finally seemed as though the laity was being heard.

In the past 2,000 years of Catholic Church history, the laity has had a largely inactive role, despite the fact that they account for 97 percent of the Catholic population. Only within the last five or six years has their voice been heard.

Lakeland is a native of England and attended the University of Oxford.

He is the chair of the religious studies department at Fairfield, where he has been teaching for 26 years.

Lakeland told the audience that he receives daily disclosures on different scandals and issues that are still occurring.

He noted press accounts saying that the movement to give more power to the laity has waned.

“Has the moment passed – run out of steam, or not? That’s really the question,” he said. “It ought not to have slowed down because the conditions that led to it have not slowed down.”

Lakeland spoke about how the public and the media have lost interest in the sex scandals.

The Catholic press is not really interested in pushing this down the throats of the Catholic people, and therefore the laity is facing a structural oppression in which many of the people become frustrated and are unmotivated to continue to make their voices heard.

Lakeland predicts that in the next 10 years, the role of the laity may remain unmotivated in keeping their voices heard, but involvement will continue to grow because of a shortage of Catholic priests.

Lakeland writes and reviews fiction for “Commonwealth,” a journal of opinion run by lay Catholics, as well as a frequent speaker in Catholic reform movement ventures.

He is also the author of seven books, and in 2004 received the U.S. Catholic Press Association Award for the best book in theology for his book “The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church.”