Vatican News: Vatican Dicastery maintains that a layperson cannot deliver the homily
The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments responds to the request made by the German Bishops, denying their petition for a lay person to preach the homily during Mass, even in exceptional cases, stating that the proclamation of the Word in the liturgical celebration is inseparable from the mission received sacramentally.
Vatican News – link to article
The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has issued a clarifying text regarding who is permitted to deliver homilies.
In a letter dated June 17, 2026 addressed to the President of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Heiner Wilmer, the Dicastery communicated that it is not possible to grant the indult requested on March 30, 2026. An indult is “a special (and often temporary) favor granted to a physical or moral person by the Apostolic See (or the local ordinary) which confers faculties contrary to or beyond the prescriptions of the law.”
The German Bishops had requested “to permit, in exceptional circumstances, a duly commissioned lay member of the faithful to preach in place of the homily during the celebration of the Eucharist.”
While the Dicastery expressed appreciation for the pastoral concerns that inspired the request, it reaffirmed that the current discipline cannot be dispensed from by means of an indult, since the reservation of the homily to a priest or deacon is not a merely disciplinary norm but derives from the very nature of the liturgy.
In the text, the Dicastery reiterated that the homily, which forms an integral part of the Liturgy of the Word, is intrinsically linked to the proclamation of the Gospel and constitutes an exercise of the munus docendi entrusted to ordained ministers through the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
It added that the proclamation of the Word within the liturgical celebration is inseparable from the mission received sacramentally and from the unity that binds together Word and Sacrament in the Eucharistic celebration.
The letter also emphasised the importance of promoting the ongoing formation of ordained ministers so that the homilly may fully express its pastoral and spiritual effectiveness.
Finally, the Dicastery recalled that the Church’s current discipline already provides for numerous forms of proclaiming the Word and preaching that may be entrusted to lay members of the faithful outside the homily and outside the celebration of the Eucharist, in accordance with canon law and the proper nature of these different forms of proclaiming the Gospel.
Can a lay person give a meditation, after communion say? Where is the spirit of synodality in the dicastery’s reply?
Catechists are ministers of the word, they can when appropriate break open the word of God in the Assembly.
This is clear in the directory for children’s Masses 1973.
In fact catechists preach every Sunday all over the world where Eucharist might be celebrated once every two months.
There are many ministries of the word, these need to be developed not curtailed.
How will this pronouncement enable the ministry of reader proposed in the Final Synod Document which is magisterial?
I wonder what French woman Claire Daurelle, if she were still alive, would think of this.
Claire, a parish pastoral worker, was commissioned to preach the homily at Mass by the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Decourtray in the 1980s & 1990s.
She gave her testimony at a seminar I attended back in 1995.
She concluded:
“My greatest hope is that the Church will have a future, not an artificial future laid down by so-and-so; certainly not a stifling future, an imprisonment in Tradition; rather an open future with the Holy Spirit leading us onto new paths.”
https://womenpriests.org/vocation/daurelle-claire-daurelle-2/
The forbidden pulpit: Rome silences lay people at Mass.
“Prohibiting this practice for lay people is not defending the sacramentality of the homily. It is defending the institution at the expense of the Gospel. Because clericalism is not only a moral vice. It is also an ecclesiological heresy. And the pulpit closed to lay people is its most visible monument…
The homily as a clerical monopoly did not originate with Jesus. It originated with the Council of Trent.”
https://www.religiondigital.org/rumores_de_angeles/pulpito-prohibido-roma-cierra-boca_132_1459020.html
From the article: `Exactly what is the basis for a layperson’s inability to comment on the Word of God before a congregation of the faithful? If a theologian with a doctorate in Sacred Scripture can’t gloss the Sunday Gospel, but a newly ordained priest who has never opened an exegetical commentary can, the criterion isn’t competence. It’s the clerical caste of sacred officials, which wants to be preserved at all costs.’ Claire Daurelle is the French Church as I thought it to be and as the whole church ought to be. Canon lawyers straining out gnats is a betrayal of this church. Synodality should have entailed a highlighting of the values at stake here, and open discussion of them in light of the Gospel and the experience of the faithful. Instead — back to Trent! a Council that betrayed itself by handing all authority over to the Pope in its final days; resulting in the crimes of the Roman Inquisition — burnings at the stake — Bruno in 1600, Manfredi in 1610 — other forms of bullying and sectarian fanaticism — until a saner, more secular and peaceful world dawned with the Treaty of Westphalia 1648. For all the noise about synodality, collegiality, and Vatican II, the message coming across is that Canon Law trumps them all and is more sacred than them all. Mary McAleese’s question resounds: QUO VADIS?