Reader (liturgy)

In some Christian denominations, a reader or lector is the person responsible for reading aloud excerpts of scripture at a liturgy. In early Christian times the reader was of particular value due to the rarity of literacy.

Western Christianity

Catholic Church

In the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church, the term lector or reader means someone who in a particular liturgy is assigned to read a Biblical text other than the Gospel (singing or reading the Gospel at Mass belongs to the service of the deacon or, in his absence, to the priest). But it also has the more specific meaning of a person who has been "instituted" as a lector or reader, and is such even when not assigned to read in a specific liturgy. The Second Vatican Council's Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, confirmed that lectors belong to those who exercise a "genuine liturgical function" and should therefore "discharge their office with the sincere piety and decorum demanded by so exalted a ministry and rightly expected of them by God's people."

The office was formerly classed as one of the four minor orders in the Latin Church. However, since 1 January 1973, the apostolic letter Ministeria quaedam decreed instead that:

What up to now were called minor orders are henceforth to be called ministries.

Ministries may be assigned to laypeople; hence they are no longer to be considered as reserved to candidates for the sacrament of orders.

Two ministries, adapted to present-day needs, are to be preserved in the whole Latin Church, namely, those of reader and acolyte. The functions heretofore assigned to the subdeacon are entrusted to the reader and the acolyte.

The reader is appointed for a function proper to him, that of reading the word of God in the liturgical assembly.