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Catholic schooling, the concept of laity, and the future church

Abstract The Catholic laity currently faces some concerns that are of importance to its future. The current decline and ageing of clergy affects the availability of sacraments and leadership. Moreover, the plurality of views among Catholics on ordination, ethical issues and Church governance suggests that controversy may accompany concurrent increased lay involvement. Finally, in recent years theorists have argued that the traditional establishment of clergy and laity as distinct categories unhelpfully sustains the laity in a passive role. So if the Catholic school wishes to respond to these challenges, it would be prudent to have some awareness of how Catholic school adolescents are currently establishing themselves within the Church. This paper uses semi-structured interviews with 16 Catholic high school students to focus on the questions of (1) what images and expectations adolescents have of the laity; and (2) how they respond to the fact of an ageing and declining clergy. These questions are coordinated so that conceptualising about the laity leads to indicating participants’ assumptions about the basis for any action in the Church, thus illuminating how one might think about Catholic education contributing to ecclesial structures.