Catholic Minister
Unlike in several Protestant churches, in the Roman Catholic Church the term minister is not commonly used to refer to a member of the clergy nor is it a common term of address.
In some parishes of the Catholic church in the USA there are Ministers of Hospitality, Ministers of Music, etc. Lectors who read scriptural passages to the congregation are also among those called lay ministers or liturgical ministers. These are lay persons; they are not ordained, nor is the word minister used as a form of address in speaking to them. In the USA, and to a lesser extent in other countries, Catholic deacons, priests, and bishops are sometimes called ordained ministers.
One who administers a sacrament is a minister of that sacrament in the sense that he is a provider or conduit of the sacrament.
The term minister is used in that sense to refer to the following:
- Ordained persons, i.e., deacons, priests, and bishops.
- Ministers of baptism: Deacons, priests, and bishops may licitly baptize. A lay person may licitly baptize in emergencies, i.e., may baptize a person who is about to die when no clergyman can be summoned. A properly performed baptism by a lay person is valid even when it is illicit, and that person is then the minister of that sacrament.
- Only a priest or a bishop can consecrate the eucharistic elements -- bread and wine. (Can as opposed to may means that we speak here of validity rather than of licitness. Unlike an illicit baptism by a lay person, an illicit eucharistic consecration by a lay person has no validity, and the same is true of four of the other sacraments, matrimony being the one exception.) Deacons may ordinarily distribute communion after the consecration by a priest. Only a priest or bishop can validly administer the sacraments of reconciliation and anointing of the sick.
- Only a bishop can validly ordain. Normally only a bishop can licitly confirm, although in unusual circumstances a parish priest may do so.
- In the case of matrimony, the deacon, priest, or bishop who officiates is not the minister of the sacrament; the bride and groom administer that sacrament to each other.
- Extraordinary ministers of communion are lay persons who help distribute communion to parishioners when there are not enough "ordinary" ministers of communion, i.e., priests or deacons.
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