Article Sidebar
Published:
Sep 1, 2019Keywords:
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All research papers published in ERATS are open access. This means that they are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication for free download on the journal website. With open access, authors can easily share the content of their research work with a much wider audience, the global research community can have access to all articles, there is no need to have any kind of membership or pay any fees in order to use, or download published journal articles. Any user can read, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
The copyright holder – author(s) of all published articles grants usage rights to others using an open license (CC BY license). All Research articles in this journal are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Main Article Content
The Role of the Laity in the Roman Catholic Church and in the World Today
Anthony Kofi Anomah
Peter Addai-Mensah
Abstract
Fifty-four years after Vatican II, it seems to the researcher that the role of the laity in the Roman Catholic Church is still problematic to some clergy and the laity. Some clergy and the laity still see the laity’s role in the Roman Catholic Church as passive and overstretching their bounds when they wish to participate fully in the mission of the Church as priests, prophets and kings. There is an underlying tension between some clergy and the laity as to the proper role of the laity in the Church and in the world, whereas Vatican II clearly defined the role of the laity in the Church and in the world. In this article, the researcher seeks to lay bare the role of the laity in the Roman Catholic Church and in the world as prophetic, priestly and kingly; and to point out that there are some places in the world, such as the family, socio-cultural, politics, economics and so on, where only the laity is more qualified and competent and can more effectively preach the gospel by their words and deeds. Therefore, the article recommends that the clergy and the laity are both called by their baptism and confirmation to take active roles in the Church and collaborate in the mission of Christ for the spreading of the kingdom of God on earth.
