Over the centuries, the crisis of ordained ministry has t been exclusively about the problem of celibacy, even though that is important, and this book certainly includes a reflection about it. The crisis is, above all, a crisis of identity due to the progressive disfiguring of the sense of the mission which Christ left to his apostles and which made of the early church as well as the later church an essentially missionary institution. All ministry, and specifically the ordained ministry, must express this same missionary spirit in order to avoid a relapse into pre-Christian religious beliefs, such as the belief in 'sacred mediators' that threaten the exclusivity of Christ's mediation, as it is ascertained in the New Testament. It is exceedingly possible that the Church might be reaching what has been called 'the time of the laity', and yet is also possible that we might pass through this time in a sterile way, t because of t having kwn of its arrival, or what it was about, but because of t having understood the specificity of the ordained ministry and that of other ministries within Christian communities.
