RUMOR CONTROL: White House bash and lay ministers

[didymus]

tinyurl.com/5x6b73

RUMOR CONTROL: White House bash and lay ministers

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

. . .

Among other things, I’ll try to use this space to perform some “rumor control,” in the hope that inaccurate or overblown material can be put in its proper context before it spins out of control.
Two points already belong in the hopper.
1. The Pope is “snubbing” President Bush by not attending a White House dinner in his honor.
In fact, the pope virtually never attends gala events organized in his honor by other parties, especially while he’s on the road. Basically speaking, when the pope travels he commits to following his official agenda, no more and no less.

. . .

2. The Pope is “correcting” the American Catholic church by not using lay Eucharistic ministers during his public Masses.
Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the use of lay men and women during Mass to distribute the Eucharist, the consecrated bread and wine that Catholics believe to be the body and blood of Christ, has become for some Catholics a powerful visual way of underlining the empowerment of the laity in the church. These lay men and women who distribute
Communion are known as “Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist.”
News, therefore, that lay ministers will not be used to distribute Communion during Benedict XVI’s Masses in the United States has struck some as a theological signal from the pope, as if he were implicitly criticizing American Catholicism for an inadequate sense of the distinction between lay people and ordained priests.

The official rule governing the use of lay Eucharistic ministers specifies that they are to be used only in “extraordinary” situations, meaning when a sufficient number of priests and deacons is not available to comfortably distribute Communion to everyone present.
The one place on earth you can usually guarantee there will be no priest shortage is wherever the pope happens to be saying Mass. For the Mass at Yankee Stadium, for example, organizers plan to deploy roughly 530 priests and deacons to distribute Communion to a crowd estimated at almost 60,000. They expect to be able to get the job done in roughly 15 minutes.