Vatican regulates lay movements to prevent governance abuses

The Vatican is taking steps to better regulate lay religious movements by imposing term limits on their leaders and requiring internal elections to be representative of their memberships

ROME -- The Vatican took steps Friday to better regulate Catholic lay religious movements by imposing term limits on their leaders and requiring internal elections to be representative of their memberships. The Vatican’s laity office cracked down on the largely unregulated world of international associations of the faithful after some cases of abuses of authority and bad governance had been reported. Canon lawyers and theologians said the crackdown was perhaps a sign that other lay movements, which have flourished over the last half-century but were largely left to govern themselves, might be similarly targeted. It follows the Vatican's recent decision to rewrite its sex abuse laws to also provide punishments for lay Catholics in positions of authority in the church who commit abuse, rather than to focus exclusively on clerics. The Vatican's laity office oversees some 109 international lay associations, including the Neocatechumenal Way, Communion and Liberation, the Focolari Movement and the Sant'Egidio Community.