"as mere laity"!!! You have it wrong. The Church is made up of all it's baptised people and not just the clerics. Looks at the facts. The Church has 1 male  Pope, 70 odd male  Cardinals, some 45 thousand male clerics and 1.2 billion laity. The clerics are just equivalent to an all-male club who arose as an elitist group in the time of the Byzantine Emperors, some 1650 years ago, who used them to administer an empire and gave them privileges far beyond their original purpose. The Church clerics have clung onto those privileges ever since and continually advanced their own cause of elitist, narcissistic clericalism. Are you telling me that some 45,000 clerics have more wisdom  and a greater sense of what is right and wrong than the baptised 1.2 billion Catholics? The Clergy seek only to protect, preserve and ensure the wealth,  dominance and dogmatic elitist "club". The early Church of Christ was a different deal where the slave, poor,  widow, merchant and elder each had their equal say.