These are anxious times for Catholic Christians, especially in Australia where the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse revealed massive failures of leadership and shameful revelations of sexual abuse. It also revealed a culture of clericalism that resisted change, especially change that would threaten the previously accepted balance of authority in the Church.

We too: The Laity Speaks! is a response to this culture and the challenges that face the church here and elsewhere. In a series of essays edited by Berise Heasly and John D'Arcy May, Australian Lay Catholics - educators, theologians, historians, missionaries, philosophers, lawyers, mystics - offer stories, concerns, reflections, experiences and insights that reflect their own journeys in faith and, above all, their hope that the message of Jesus Christ in the Gospels can be recovered, experienced and lived in the community called the Church of God.

The authors accept that our world is changed and changing.  Contemporary expressions of belief and belonging can no longer be based on understandings and language about God, the cosmos and our place in the created world that made sense in earlier centuries.  Their call is for a Church that remembers the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the emphases of Pope Francis, that welcomes the discoveries of contemporary science and theology, that respects the gifts of scholars to the subtleties of the tradition, that values the rich contribution of women in the Church's history and their legitimate aspirations to be heard and honoured.

Above all, the compilation is an expression of confidence in the Holy Spirit who blows where it chooses.  And a hope that theirs may be a useful contribution to the constant seeking within the Church to be faithful to the gospel tradition they have received and continue to cherish.

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