AUSTRALIA
Sky News
The Catholic Church should consider getting rid of honorifics such as ‘your lordship’ and give lay people more power over parish priests, a NSW bishop says.
Parramatta Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that titles, privileges and the Church’s institutional dynamics ‘breed clerical superiority and elitism’.
He said he cringes when parishioners call him ‘your lordship’ and the church needs to review mandatory celibacy, which he thinks separates the clergy from parishioners.
‘When they (faithful Catholics) come to see me, they kiss my ring,’ Bishop Long, who is the first Australian bishop of Vietnamese background, said in Sydney on Tuesday.
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