In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope has all but complete authority to appoint any priest to the rank of bishop,* and the Catholics in the diocese must accept the appointed bishop's ecclesiastical authority. Last week Jesuit Theologian John Walsh suggested that the upcoming Second Vatican Council might well think about letting laymen have a hand in choosing their spiritual chiefs. Speaking at Massachusetts' College of the Holy Cross to a group of lay Catholics, Father Walsh pointed out that the laity had some hand in electing bishops for the first 1,000 years of the church's history; the custom was...
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