History repeating itself...

www.nytimes.com...

(requires a free subscription... good article)

"This lay movement is the largest we have seen in the history of the American church," said the Rev. Gerald Fogarty, a Jesuit historian at the University of Virginia who has studied Catholic lay movements from Colonial times to the present.

Interesting, indeed, and Fogarty has good credentials as a historian. However, he's a devil of a self-publicist and his views have seemed odd before now -his complete indifference to Hispanic Catholics for example in some of his accounts of US Catholicism.
Also "lay" has a very singular meaning in US terms" the Roman church never looked favourably upon the Ameican separation of church and state -it was indeed an "Error" officially anounced in 1865.
AS a result, much that might not have been "lay", was.
This was finally changed with Vatican II; but any links between contemporary Catholic hierarchies and those of the past need to be considered very carefully.