This is another clerical article by NCR.

As anti-clerical and constantly contentious as NCR is, it's paradoxically wholly clerical minded.

It's small box thinking: "Church = clerics"...me not cleric, me not Church."

That's it.

There is a larger world of Catholicism...the entire physical and spiritual world!

The lay vocation is every bit as beautiful, demanding, and - for those raised on 1960-70 sociology "powerful". 

Sanctifying the ordinary of life...the world of the lay...in many senses is far more demanding.

NCR would rather us think of Church as parish or Church as Vatican, shrinking God and His work to the parish or too a tiny area of Rome!  No wonder so many people here are so unhappy all the time.