"You say your grandmother's a cardinal?"
"Your dad's meeting regularly with cardinals in Rome?"
Maybe not so unrealistic as it sounds.
A recent America magazine editorial advances daring proposals that the magazine itself had to admit might sound "pie in the sky." But they just may be ideas whose time is long overdue: change canon law and/or create structures within the church that place laity near the top decision makers.
The Jesuit publication, in its Feb. 21 issue, editorialized that the "fundamental criticism of the institutional church" in the various crises that have jolted the church in the United States, England and Europe, "is that its clerical, all-male establishment has not made room for other voices. There is no need to list the number of recent policy decisions, from Rome to home, which would have been more prudent if only a variety of laypersons had been consulted."
Read the full proposals here.
