Calling it the best description of VOTF, Dr James Muller cites an article by Eugene Kennedy reported in the Religious News Service of November 6, 2002.

Cardinal Law's decision (to meet with VOTF) grants status to Catholics and priests everywhere who are dedicated to being the Church in a lively and relevant manner in their daily lives. This identifies these movements for what they are, the new religious orders of the 21st century, organized in the tradition of the great religious orders, such as the Jesuits and the Dominicans, to respond to the needs of the Church at a specific moment in history.

As one historical form of religious life is passing away, these groups emerge, unencumbered with the need to train, live in, or maintain monasteries or convents, to serve the Church by fulfilling its calling to be a People of God who bring a sacramental faith and an internalized sense of morality to a world that longs for both.

As at Pentecost, these Catholics come from cities near and far, bearing the gifts of their talents as their offering to the work of the Church. They speak, as the apostles did under the breath of the Spirit, in "entirely new languages," that is, in the vocabulary of the times, with the inflections of faithful who behold the world as a paper lantern lighted by the Divine, a sacramental universe spread in unbounded galaxies about us.

The rise of these religious orders outside-the-walls to minister to their communities is the up-to-now unrecognized answer to years of anguished prayers for vocations. The Catholics in these groups have a calling to ministry and, in such organizations rather than in half shut religious houses, they pursue them in feeding the world with the bread of life.

The identifying characteristic of the Voice of The Faithful and similar groups is their fundamental healthiness, their personal soundness, their spiritual normalcy, their lack of the developmental problems found in so many clergy who were thereby handicapped in their ministry and often, as if driven by devils whose names they never knew, catapulted into conflicted and destructive sexual behaviors that harmed others and ruined their own lives.