Liturgical Roles In the Eucharistic Celebration

Liturgical Roles In the Eucharistic Celebration | Francis Cardinal Arinze | From Celebrating the Holy Eucharist

The sacred liturgy is the public prayer of the whole Church. The chief person acting in every liturgical celebration is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ himself, the one perfect Mediator between God and man.

But Christ associates the Church with himself in every liturgical act. Many liturgical acts are hierarchically ordered: with a role for the Bishop and priest, for the deacon, for those lay people who are assigned a liturgical role as defined by the Church, and for all the people of God. The Church in the diocese manifests herself in the most visible way when the Bishop celebrates the Eucharistic Sacrifice in his cathedral church, with the concelebration of his priests, the assistance of the deacons, and the participation of the faithful (cf. SC 41).

Lay Liturgical Roles

For proper celebration of the sacred liturgy and fruitful participation in it by all Christ's faithful, it is important to understand the roles proper to the ministerial or ordained priest and those proper to the lay faithful. Christ is the priest, the High Priest. He gives all baptized people a share in this role of offering God gifts. The common priesthood of all the baptized gives people the capacity to offer Christian worship, to offer Christ to the Eternal Father through the hands of the ordained priest at the Eucharistic celebration, to receive the sacraments, and to live holy lives, and by self-denial and active charity to make of their entire lives a sacrifice.

The ministerial priest, on the other hand, is a man chosen from among the baptized and ordained by the Bishop in the sacrament of Holy Orders. He alone can consecrate bread into the Body of Christ and wine into the Blood of Christ and offer them to the Eternal Father in the name of Christ and the whole Christian people. [1] It is clear that though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of all the baptized and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are closely related (see LG 10).

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Comments

[LJ]

When the extraordinary ministers see their role as a power display to show that what the priest can do, the lay faithful can do too, then we have a problem.

It doesn't have to be necessarily a power display. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time in many parishes, it is simply a fixture of habit. Two EMHC's and one priest distributing to one hundred communicants, and if you were to ask either of the two EMHC's why, they would probably answer that it was their turn, or that they were on the schedule for that Mass. It is that well entrenched.

[Rich Leonardi]

It's more about bad instruction coupled with warped theology than power. Catholics have been told for decades that serving as a "Eucharistic Minister" is a vocational gift granted by Vatican II to the faithful. For a glimpse of this mindset, read the following:

http://www.saintmaryhydepark.org/uploads/docs/TheBellofStMary-May2009.pdf#page=8