By Michel Chambon
Serving the Church to move forward means clarifying how we distribute roles and responsibilities within our ecclesial communities. To continue my reflection on ministries in the Church in Asia, I would like to focus on another instituted ministry that is often neglected: that of the lector.
This is a ministry deeply connected with teaching, one of the three core functions of the Church.
I received this ministry from the hands of a bishop, kneeling, during a quite formal Mass in Paris in May 2008. Yet, since that date, I have never encountered a Catholic community interested in it or even aware of what it might bring to the Church.
Within the Catholic Church, there is no desire for lectors. It is as if the Church wants priests and nothing else.
However, the Second Vatican Council emphasized the importance of the plurality of ministries, including that of the lector, which is one of the six permanent and legitimate ministries in the Catholic tradition. But what exactly is a lector?
In its simplest sense, a lector is one who proclaims the Word of God. More fundamentally, the lector enlivens the Word within the Christian community and beyond. This can be manifested during liturgies by reading the Word of God, but it can also take countless other forms. The Word of God is not limited to written words in a sacred book.
Fundamentally, the Word-Logos is Christ himself and it is revealed throughout the work of the Father and the Son. Thus, explaining nature, as the book of creation that sings its Creator, is also a way of being a lector. It only needs to be assumed as such that is, as a mandate within the Church to make the Word of God intelligible.
Being a teacher in our dioceses or schools to help people better appreciate the Word of God and engage with it as a life-giving message that gives meaning to existence can also be a way of living the ministry of lector.
Being a spiritual director who gives retreats and helps the faithful reread their lives in the light of Scripture, like Christ on the road to Emmaus, can also be a way of living the ministry of lector.
Being a journalist committed to telling the truth and fostering hope can also be a way of living out the ministry of lector. This only requires formal accompaniment, solid preparation, and liturgical institution by the local bishop.
In other words, being a lector is much more than simply reading aloud from sacred texts. Being a lector is far more than a temporary service offered by a devoted individual. Being an instituted lector is a permanent mission and a continuous responsibility. It involves bringing others into an understanding of the Holy Scriptures, and thus into the loving rationality of the divine plan.
This ministry is rooted primarily in the Holy Scriptures, but fundamentally, it is also rooted in what makes God’s action intelligible, whether in physics or paleontology.
Yet, it should be clarified that being a lector is not the same as being a member of a particular religious order. The vocation of religious life is first and foremost to follow the charism of an order and a rule, often within a community setting. Monks, friars and nuns take solemn vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, vows that do not apply to lectors.
Lectors are something different. They do not live in community, they do not embody a particular charisma, but they receive a formal and permanent mission. Along with instituted acolytes and catechists, they help us rediscover the full range of ministries and vocations within the Church.
In my personal case, I chose to live the ministry of lector by dedicating myself to studying and describing the Body of Christ, the Church. This Body also speaks to us of the intelligence of the divine plan. It whispers the meaning of faith. To study and explain this Body of Christ, I embarked on the academic path and, after many years, became an anthropologist and theologian. This is one way to be an instituted lector.
But the paradox is that the Church acts as if she does not need instituted lectors, instituted laypeople who live in the world alongside the entire ecclesial body. What the Church wants, above all, are priests to celebrate Mass and lead, not lectors to explain the intelligibility of the Word of God.
This paradoxical absence of instituted lectors within our ecclesial communities can be explained in many ways. Although often unspoken, there are both well-intentioned reasons and more questionable ones. On one hand, in our liturgies, there is often a desire to make space for all laypeople, and everyone is invited to read. So why designate specific people for this role? Sometimes, a temporary volunteer, serving for a few months, is preferred because she is someone who can be thanked and dismissed at will.
On the other hand, there is sometimes fear that giving permanent and formal responsibilities to laypeople will create more conflicts of authority. There is already enough difficulty managing tensions between priests, bishops, and permanent deacons, and for some people, it seems safer to limit the number of voices with permanent authority.
Another problem is training. Indeed, acquiring a real knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, biblical languages, and patristics, three essential fields for a true understanding of the Word of God takes a great deal of time. Resources are needed to properly train potential candidates for the lectorate and then to evaluate whether their spiritual, psychological, and pastoral profiles correspond to the Church’s needs.
But often, no attempt is even made. We simply give up. There is a refusal to invest in long and complex ecclesial training programs that risk creating authority conflicts. When laypeople are trained, it is without formal responsibility at the end. These trained laypeople may become volunteers or temporary employees but not ministers. The training programs widely promoted by our dioceses are effectively capped by an invisible ceiling — a silent barrier that prevents many from gaining real responsibility but runs counter to the logic of synodality.
Yet the Church urgently needs men and women willing to dedicate themselves to the collective understanding of the Holy Scriptures, whether these are the sacred texts, the ecclesial body, or the great book of creation. All speak to us of the Living God, His Logos, and the beauty of His plan for us.
But this requires that we collectively provide the means to encourage, train, select, and regulate this type of ministers. Lectors aren’t going to just appear out of nowhere. As an institution, we need to invest in the formation of a broader professional body of ministers — men and women who help appreciate God’s plan. – UCA News
This is the first part of a three-part series on Catholic ministers. You can read the first part here.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
