This past Sunday, I was “installed” as a lector at St. Peter’s Parish. The ceremony consisted of a simple blessing with holy water at mass.
(Pictured: The newly-blessed lectors and eucharistic ministers of St. Peter’s.)
I lectored all through high school without an official blessing, so I’ve been poking around online to learn more about the significance of this ceremony.
Apparently there was a pre-Vatican II “minor order” for lectors, but this is not that. According to The Duties and Ministries in the Mass, I think my role is “a layperson who happens to be reading”:
101. In the absence of an instituted lector, other laypersons may be commissioned to proclaim the readings from Sacred Scripture. They should be truly suited to perform this function and should receive careful preparation, so that the faithful by listening to the readings from the sacred texts may develop in their hearts a warm and living love for Sacred Scripture.
At the same time the lectors were installed, eucharistic ministers were commissioned, which seems to be a more formal blessing from “Book of Blessings, chapter 63.”
Congratulations.
(The minor order of lectors required celibacy.)
Congrats!
So — no tonsure of readers in the Catholic Church, I assume?
Yeah, being a lector was a big deal once upon a time. I met an Orthodox priest who said that his father had been a lector in their village back in Ukraine and that being a lector involved something of an elevated social status.
I believe that one of the steps to ordination in the Latin rite is still referred to as “lector”, and it likely means that once upon a time reading at mass was reserved to ordained ministers.
In recent years the Vatican has been trying to re-emphasize some of this idea of a lector as someone “called apart”. It certainly seems to me that more prayerful reading, and more reverent clothing, would add to the awareness of the mass as a sacred event.
Congrats Mike!
Congratulations!
We have now hybridized the Catholic Church into a Protestant/Catholic service. I do not blame the lay people. I blame weak priests who have allowed their role as shepherd to be diminished. Get up off of your butts and speak the Epistle and the Gospel. Stop the sitting in the chair. This is all about the vanity of the lay. Join a protestant church. Leave the “in persona Christi” to the priest. The Eucharistic Ministers with their unconsecrated hands are a real sacrilege. The lectors– not so much.