Making ministers.

THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS One of the most far-reaching of the perspectives of the Second Vatican Council was to view the Church ‘from the starting-point of baptism’, so that the ordained ministry is seen not as possessing a ‘higher power’ but as ‘a service at the centre of the Church community’. To say that ‘the greatest day in the life of a Pope is not that of his election or coronation, but the day on which he receives that which the Greek Fathers call the holy and unbreakable seal of baptismal regeneration’, is to reverse the assumption which was causing difficulty in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: that that which is common to all is of less value than that which is committed only to some. For that carries with it its concomitant problems of resentment, and a sense of alienation among those who are not ordained. That had been and remained the nub of the problem about the authority of the ordained ministry in the Church. Waldensians in the twelfth century, Franciscan factions upholding the virtues of poverty from the thirteenth, a growing number of critics both within and outside the ranks of the clergy, contrasted the simplicity of Jesus' life with the pomp and display and wealth of the higher clergy. While the Church was the only alternative to a military career for the well born, and the higher offices in the Church were filled with scions of the nobility, there were bound to be many who entered the Church from worldly motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]