Catholics must create dialogue spaces on key issues, says reporter

Published: 2004-06-28

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholics have to create their own spaces for dialogue on key issues by using such institutions as Catholic universities and the Catholic press, said John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "Such conversations are not going to start with the Vatican," he said June 25 at the sixth annual Catholic Common Ground Initiative Lecture at The Catholic University of America in Washington. "Build from the bottom up," said Allen during a question-and-answer session after his talk. He mentioned such issues as women priests and birth control. At the event, Dolores Leckey, longtime adviser to the U.S. bishops on lay issues in the church, was given the Cardinal Joseph Bernardin Award. Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, in presenting the award, praised Leckey as a "promoter of the role of the laity in the church as a call to holiness." Leckey, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, was executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women and Youth for 20 years and has written several books on the laity in the church.

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