About

My name is Bill Leach. I am a layman — not a priest, not a theologian with a chair, but one of the ordinary faithful this site is named for. I was born into the Church and left it at fourteen. For nearly two decades I looked for light elsewhere — in the New Age, in Protestant communities, in most of the places a restless soul looks — and found that the lamp I had set down as a boy was the one I had been missing. I came home to the Catholic Church in 1999 and have not left since.

In the years since, I have tried to give back what I was given: more than twelve years teaching Parish School of Religion, service to my parish as a lector, a year of graduate theological study, and the raising of five children in the faith with my wife of more than thirty years. By trade I work in computer science and cybersecurity, which is partly why this site is built the way it is.

None of that makes me an authority. It makes me a catechist — someone who has carried this material for a long time and wants to hand it on plainly, to the layman, without apology and without dilution.

Everything here is written in submission to the teaching of the Catholic Church. The sources are the ones the Church has long trusted: Sacred Scripture, the Catechism, the councils and the Fathers, and the prayers and devotions of the faithful.

Where my own words wander from the mind of the Church, the Church is right and I am wrong, and I will correct it gladly. If you find an error — of fact, of doctrine, or of spelling — write to me at bill@laymanslantern.org.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam.