According to the current discipline in the western part of the Catholic Church, only bishops, priests and deacons may preach the homily at Mass. I fail to see any theological justification for this ruling. In the early 1960s, I was a member of the World Council of Churches’ team in northern Greece. One of the ways in which we tried to help the local Orthodox diocese was by offering transport so that their lay preachers could get to remote villages where the priest had too limited an education to be allowed to preach. These lay preachers were usually men with theology degrees who were teachers of religious studies in high schools in the diocese.In [the UK] we have men teaching in our schools who have theological education, sometimes to a high level. Why could we not follow the exampl