I believe it is a great
thing to reflect on the mission and life of the Church. I am thankful for being
invited by Father Michael Hayes,[1] to
give one of the lectures in the series on Mission and Evangelisation.
They are sponsored by Saint Mary’s College, whose honourable reputation of
being the oldest Catholic College, founded in 1850, is well known.
I must add that there is a
beautiful symbol of special communion. Saint Mary’s College and the Christian
Life Movement Feast Day are celebrated on the Solemnity of the Immaculate
Conception, on December 8th. This emphasises a filial devotion to Holy Mary —as
asked of us by Our Lord on the Cross— and at the same time the importance of
Her Immaculate Conception in Christian life and theological thinking.
Being a reflection on the lay
faithful we should remember Holy Mary was a lay woman, and what is more, the
paradigm of all lay faithful. In Her own life, in the things we know about Her,
we can see the light of the Sun of Justice reflecting in the Beautiful Moon,
Mary. She shines in such a way that, in Her, Christian life is shown in all its
wonderful splendour.
I. The layperson
To reflect on the laity is to
adventure into a vital theme. Even more if it is seen in relation to the
mission of the Church. For us all to reflect on the mission of the layperson is
to deepen the relation of one's own Christian life, the New Evangelisation in
which we all are called to work, and the construction of a more just and
reconciled world.
1. Confusion and clarity
The reflection on the
laity certainly is an exciting topic. In spite of how much writing and speaking
has been done, who or what is a layperson seems not quite understood yet.
To better clarify our
ideas we must always explore the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. If we
look carefully, we discover a wonderful panorama about the identity, mission
and spirituality of the lay faithful. One cannot doubt that the Council
Fathers, guided by the Holy Spirit, have splendidly deepened in their teaching
on the mission of the laity in the Church and in the world.
It is also necessary to
highlight the homogeneous development of the teachings of the Magisterium. It
is also worth noticing the light shone on the ecclesiastical identity of the
laypersons in the reflections of successive Synods of Bishops, as well as in
the General Conferences of Bishops in Latin America, where almost half of the
world’s Catholics live.
So much has been said and clarified.
One should think everything has been covered and what remains is just to put
those teachings into practice. Maybe that is the main issue: Action now! Yet, I
believe that a consciousness of the lay identity has to be internalised on
one’s life before active commitment. Maybe it is due to the lack of a clear
conceptualisation and personal internalisation that we can find one of the main
clues to explain the passivity of laity in the mission of the Church.
Obviously, action should follow the process of internalising faith.
The Council Fathers taught: "The
Christian vocation by its very nature is also a vocation to the
apostolate"[2]. Have
we seen a general lay commitment to apostolate? Obviously, there are wonderful
exceptions, among them the ecclesial movements. However, the question in its
general sense stands. Notwithstanding other causes such as subjectivism,
functional agnosticism, secularism, and others, or even taking them in account,
we would certainly see a very different world if the lay Catholic understood
his commitment to the apostolate.
However it should be
understood that following Lord Jesus cannot be restricted to the apostolate.
Pope John Paul II said recently: "Faith is often confined to episodes and
fragments of life. Certain relativism tends to feed discriminating attitudes
toward the content of Catholic doctrine and morals, accepted or rejected on the
basis of subjective and arbitrary preference. So the faith received ceases to
be lived as a divine gift, as an extraordinary opportunity for human and
Christian growth, as a meaningful event, as conversion of life. Only a faith
that sinks its roots in the Church's sacramental life, whose thirst is quenched
at the sources of God's Word and Tradition, that becomes new life and a renewed
understanding of reality, can make the baptised effectively capable of
withstanding the impact of the prevailing secularised culture"[3].
If we look at history, we
can say that the fact that there are non-practising Catholics is nothing new.
In this context practice is understood as the commitment expected of a son or
daughter of the Church, not including supererogatory activities which some
faithful practise. The actual phenomenon is referred to the great numbers of
non-practising baptised members of
the Church.
In our time, Catholic
identity is suffering in many a corrosion tending to undermine it and replace
it with a vague selection of usually self chosen Christian values and beliefs.
These people formally do not fall away from
the Church. But in their practice and daily life they do. Faith and life are
divorced. This is one of the serious ailments the people of God are suffering
at the present day.
However
we must speak of the active lay faithful. Here we also find a lack of identity,
which could be called lack of consciousness. This results in a notorious
weakening of the laity. Latin American
Bishops said these people's "lives reveal an inconsistency between the
faith they claim to profess and practice on the one hand and the real-life
involvement they assume in society on the other hand".[4] The rupture
in Christian life is expressed in the four
fundamental rifts: "of man with God, with self, with the brethren and with
the whole of creation"[5].
Laity is particularly fragile in relation to these four deep clefts or
ruptures, especially because of the insertion of laypersons in the world.
Anyway, the lack of identity and coherence is expressed in lack of unity
in personal life and apostolic commitment.
How else can we explain
the phenomenon of the "the
de-Christianization of countries with ancient Christian traditions".[6] Since the communion ecclesiology of
Vatican II implies quite clearly that each member of the Church has a mission
in working so all humankind will enter into a relationship with Lord Jesus, it
is obvious that each one is also to be concerned with those peers in danger of
losing their faith. So the "de-christianised" reality of many
countries that used to have a Catholic identity is a clear sign of what is
called active omission on the part of numerous laypersons. We could analyse how
this responsibility extends to members of the Hierarchy, but that would lead us
away from our main concern in this lecture.
On the other hand, how else
can we explain what I venture to call "a new" distinction between
quantitative and qualitative secularism —the former to indicate the number of
people who declare themselves Catholics or comply with the precept to support
the Church[7]; the
latter, referred to practising Catholics? If we applied this measure of
qualitative
secularism to those brothers and sisters alluded to by John Paul II in
Ecclesia in Europa, the numbers of people affected by qualitative
secularism would rise geometrically. The Pope says: "Many of the baptised
live as if Christ did not exist: the gestures and signs of faith are repeated,
especially in devotional practices, but they fail to correspond to a real
acceptance of the content of the faith and fidelity to the person of Jesus."[8]
Being
in England, we can get some help from Cardinal Newman to go deeper into the
concept of lay men and women. Speaking of the laity, he said in his Ninth
Lecture they should be people "who know their religion, who enter into it, who know
just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know
their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of
history that they can defend it"[9].
Twenty years after the
Council ended, a prestigious Spanish magazine published a strong statement: the
"rediscovery and promotion of the laity, with its unpredictable
possibilities, has just begun"[10].
After twenty years, it said that the process had just begun. Was it just a
figure of speech? Or did it really mean what it said? We all know that a great
deal of progress has been made in clarifying lay identity, but a lot more work
is still necessary to deepen this understanding in lay men and women as well as
in members of the Hierarchy. Moreover, it seems that the main idea of the
aforementioned
phrase still needs to be repeated almost forty years after the Council.
The rich communion ecclesiology of
the Second Vatican Council, the perspective of the People of God, as well as
the Pauline image of the Church as the Body of Christ, have been a wonderful
ambience in which one can get a deeper understanding of the Mystery of the
Church, as well as of the identity of the lay faithful and the cleric faithful,
all called to be real Christifideles. This, I believe, is the core of
the issue. Laypersons and clerics, we all are members of the People of God,
Christifideles.
"But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who
is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by
every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly,
promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love."[11]
2. Faithful and lay
An anecdotic example will
help us to highlight the urgent need there is to define the identity of the lay
faithful. Nearly forty years after the Council, one can still read some
Pastoral Letters addressed: "To priests, religious, pastoral agents and
faithful".
Some humorist could say:
Are all those that precede the faithful unfaithful? Obviously the
intention is not to deny the fidelity of the clergy, religious and pastoral
agents in general. But it certainly reveals confusion and a tendency to
identify faithful with lay. It could also hide, at least in some cases, a
non-conscious difficulty to recognize the specificity of the laity as having a
mission in the Church. That approach does not seem in harmony with the teaching
of the Church that says that all baptised are the faithful, from the Holy
Father to the youngest baby. For example if one reads the last documents of the
Pope one can see time and again how the Holy Father is calling the layperson
lay faithful, Christifidelis laicus.
The Code of Canon Law has
in its favour the synthetic expression of its canons. So I will just quote what
it says in relation to who are the faithful in the Roman Catholic Church.
"Christ’s faithful are those who, since they are incorporated into Christ
through baptism, are constituted the People of God. For this reason they
participate in their own way in the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of
Christ. They are called, each according to his or her particular condition, to
exercise the mission which God entrusted to the Church to fulfil in the
world".[12]
So we can easily see that
all the baptised are the faithful. Lay and faithful are not synonyms. Without
the distinction between faithful and lay, the last may become in practice those
that have no mission in the Church. The history of passing over the lay
faithful in the Church is a very long one and it is worth taking a moment to
examine some aspects of the way the role of lay men and women has been
curtailed.
Clericalism is still very
strong in several parts of the world. The clericalisation of the lay faithful
goes to such extremes as to project clerical spiritualities and practices on
laypersons. What is obligatory to a cleric might be supererogatory to a lay man
or woman.
But clericalisation has
another side —the aspiration of the lay faithful to a more intense
participation as a pseudo cleric—. Deprived of his lay identity, or this having
been weakened or diminished, some laypersons do all they can to substitute the
ordained ministers, whom they consider in some way the authentic Christians.
There is also the danger
of laicising the clergy. The base for this is a misconception of the clerical
state. We can see in this that the identity crisis is extended even to the
ordained ministers of the Church.
Reaching again to the Code
we can read that: "Since lay people, like all Christ’s faithful, are
deputed to the apostolate by Baptism and Confirmation, they are bound by the
general obligation and they have the right, whether as individuals or in
associations, to strive so that the divine message of salvation may be known
and accepted by all people throughout the world. This obligation is all the
more insistent in circumstances in which only through them are people able to
hear the Gospel and to know Christ"[13].
"They have also,
according to the condition of each, the special obligation to permeate and
perfect the temporal order of things with the spirit of the Gospel. In this
way, particularly in conducting secular business and exercising secular
functions, they are to give witness to Christ"[14].
So we can say that we all
are bricks of the Church and also Church’s builders.
In the realm of
laypersons, the vocation to marriage receives a dignified attention in the
teaching of the Church. The ones called to it are to strive to contribute in
building the Church through their marriage and family. Marriage is recognised
as a special vocation. There is a calling to be married. And in the Christian
life of couples, not excluding there general identity, rights and duties, as
lay faithful, marriage and the bringing up of a family has a defining role.
Marriage is a vocation to
holiness. That is something to be remembered. People called to marry or married
couples are to strive for their sanctification in the construction of a cenacle
of love as a couple and as a family. The family is like a "domestic
church", where husband and wife, living a Christian life, should help each
other in their way to holiness, and by their teaching and example educate their
children in the faith of the Church. They should respect the freedom they have
as children of God, and encourage them to follow the vocation to which they are
called, having special care to give them support if God calls them to follow
the path of consecrated life or sacred orders in their way to holiness[15].
Our world is crying out
loud asking for the testimony of Catholic couples and of Catholic families. The
family is the first school of Christian life, as well as the nursery to begin
the learning of what the universal call to holiness means, and what it stands
for. Family and marriage is the vocation for the majority of lay faithful. If
only for that reason, it deserves to be taken even more seriously. As the Holy
Father teaches, there should be a preparation for marriage, a remote, proximate
and immediate preparation. Marriage and bringing up a family is not something
to improvise. And, afterwards, the couple should engage in a permanent
formation process.
3. A Spiritual Family
Basically in the Church
there are two states or ways of being. We have the sacred ministers or clerics
and the lay people. There should be no confusions here.
From both these general
vocations, as basic ways to follow Christ, some faithful are called to
consecrate themselves to God and to fully dedicate their lives to the mission
of salvation of the Church. These consecrated faithful have their own special
ways of life which are recognised and approved by the authorities of the
Church, and finally by the Holy Father. So, in consecrated life in the Church
there are consecrated clerics and consecrated laypersons. The name by which
they are called, religious, consecrated or any other, depends on traditions,
styles, emphasis.
The inspiration that both
general vocations, clerical and lay, are not opposites but complementary in the
Church was at the bottom of the birth of Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, back in
1971. Now it is a Society of Apostolic Life approved by the Holy Father in
1997.
The Sodalitium is
integrated mainly by consecrated laymen and a less number of priests. Since
2001, by special authorization of the Holy Father, the priests are incardinated
in the Society.
It is a secular Society,
with communal life and dedicated to the apostolate. The way for its members to
walk the road of perfection in charity is through the apostolate. Members
profess obedience, celibacy, and communication of goods according to the
Constitutions approved by the Church.
The experience of mutual
respect and collaboration among clergymen and laymen is an expression of the
common dignity as children of the Church, and of the understanding of how
laymen and clerics hold in high regard the vocation and mission each one has
and the common call that has taken them to consecrate their lives to God under
a distinctive spirituality.
From the experience of the
Sodalitium, a Society for men, two associations for consecrated women have
developed, each one with its own accents in the unity of the common
spirituality.
The two societies for
women came into existence precisely through the experience of the Christian
Life Movement, which is one of the ecclesial movements the Holy Spirit has
called into being in the 20th century to face the challenges of the Third
millennium. The Pope has said that one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit for our
time is certainly the flourishing of ecclesial movements. "The movements
and new communities, providential expressions of the new springtime brought
forth by the Spirit with the Second Vatican Council, announce the power of
God’s love which in overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind, renews the
face of the earth to build the civilization of love"[16]. "Ecclesial movements, every
one of them from their own unique experience and style, are called to
contribute to the renewal of Christian life in the People of God (…) In these
expressions of associated life, creative and original ways to live Christian
life, to reach peoples and cultures, can be discovered. But this, certainly,
demands new adaptations, accommodated to the needs of human beings today, and
at the same time coherent with the truth revealed by the Lord Jesus, who is the
same yesterday, today and always"[17]
All these institutions and
some others form a Spiritual Family where lay people and clerics can deepen
their faith, share their spiritual experience, walk the path to holiness, work
for establishing the Kingdom of God, evangelise the culture, transform this world
according to what God has in his divine Plan and the Church teaches.
Each person, lay or
cleric, participates in this endeavour according to his or her vocation,
condition and state of life. Priests as priests, consecrated men and women as
such, and married couples and young people according to their Christian life as
lay faithful. All of them present in the heart of the world[18] searching to answer in everything to
God's Plan[19].
4. Conclusion of this first part
I hope this brief
exposition has given us all an idea of who a lay faithful is, and how, as a
baptised member of the Church, he or she has a genuine equality of dignity and
action among all of Christ’s faithful, a horizon to work for his own holiness
according to his or her vocation, to help others walk the path to holiness, to
announce the Good News to the best of his capacity, and to help build a better
world and evangelise the culture.
II. Christian life
Now I believe we can go on
to reflect on the other element, Christian life, lived by lay faithful.
1. Life
So we enter the topic of
life. Jesus himself speaks to us of His mission. By faith we know that He, the
Eternal Word of God, incarnated in the Virgin of Nazareth, our Blessed Mother,
is the Life[20]. He
also reveals us that He came to us so that we would have life and so that we
have it in abundance.[21]
When one speaks of life it
is usually in reference to the natural life of the human being. However, in the
biblical conception of the Old and New Testaments life is not restricted just
to existence, or to being in the world. It is not only a concept limited to the
natural horizon, but rather goes beyond it.
In the Old Testament as in
the New Testament’s Revelation, life transcends that first concept that we
shall call "primary", and refers rather to life as fullness of
health, as an integral concept that embraces all the good that there is in
the human being. When speaking of life we are referring to the sum of goods
that the human being can have.
Therefore, life is opposed
to what doesn't exist —because what is inexistent doesn't have life—, as well
as it opposes death — because it is the termination of a certain life—, illness
—that is an attack or limitation of life—, but in its higher sense it is also
opposed to evil, wrongdoing, that are basically anti-life in a deeper sense.
As we understand this we
advance towards what Jesus' Revelation presents to our minds and hearts. It is
in that Revelation where we understand life acquiring its full sense. In fact,
life in Christian terms is not a latent life, some type of vegetative
existence, but rather it is a qualitatively intense life, an authentic
experience of fullness.
Lord Jesus, God made man
in the Woman for the salvation and reconciliation of the mankind, shows Himself
as the paradigm and content of Life, I mean of the authentic life: Christian
life. Christ shows Himself as the Life open to share himself generously with
all human beings that are hungry and thirsty for a truly full life, and
introduce them to his His vital dynamism.
This way of understanding
Christian life summarizes God’s bounty goodness as received by us through and
in Jesus Christ.
2. Mary, bearer and
educator of Christian life
Our Lord invited us to
recognise Mary as our Mother, being one of a mother's responsibilities to
educate her children. Mary, the same as all responsible human mothers, and even
more so, stays close to her children, and respecting their freedom and dignity,
cares for them with fine discretion. She helps and accompanies them in their growth
and maturation in the faith. In this way, together with her intercession, and
her obtaining blessings, the Mother of kindness intervenes in the education of
her children in the faith, to be the Church. "While we are on pilgrimage,
Mary will be the Mother who educates us in the faith[22]. She sees to it that the Gospel
penetrates us, shapes our daily lives and produces fruits of holiness. More and
more she must become the teacher of the Gospel"[23].
Let us look at Mary,
paradigmatic Christian lay person. As we do that, let us let ourselves be
educated by her.
The Virgin of Nazareth is
a prayerful young woman. She is a searcher for God’s Plan. She asks the
fundamental questions about human existence and finds that God is the only
answer. In her interior silence she hears the promises of God to his people,
and maintains a lively echo. Filled with wonder, she experiences the angel
transmitting her the Plan of God. In total freedom and with intense faith, she
answers: "genoito", "fiat", "let it be
done".[24] And
by doing so she receives the Life in her virginal womb. At the same time the
Life comes to Her and flows in Her giving the fullness of life. She feels the
urge to always answer with coherence to the blessing she has received. Trying
to declare the greatness of the mother-child relation in Mary and Jesus, one could say that as the Eternal Word of God
incarnated in her womb, Her Heart was made full with the presence of Her son.
In any case, we should understand that the Virgin Mary lives the Christian life
received from her Son. That is why one can say she was the first Christian,
from the time She conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit.
The praying Virgin never
ceases to be filled with wonder. On the Annunciation She humbly and fully
opened her Heart to the mystery. During the rest of her life She takes all of
her Son’s words and deeds into her Immaculate Heart. For her, meditation is a
permanent attitude. She is constantly receiving Christ’s Life and going deeper
into the meaning it has for her own path towards the perfection of charity in
lovingly following Jesus, as the expected reconciler of humanity. Mary’s life
is a constant sign of coherence. She assimilates and cherishes the Life, her
Son. She freely allows the Life she is receiving to express itself unhindered
in herself. Before the Apostle Paul wrote she was living the reality of his
words: "I live, but not me, Christ lives in me".[25] Mary is a docile collaborator of the
Plan of God. And her coherence overcomes the test of duration and hardships,
all the way to the Golgotha. Her "fiat" in the Annunciation
finds its fullness in the silent "fiat" that she repeats at
the foot of the Cross and afterwards in the Cenacle of Jerusalem.
As she humanly educates
Jesus, she is educated by Him, since the first moment. She has a treasure and
she wants to share it immediately. The Visitation could be the expression of
the Virgin of action. Mary’s life is nurtured by the Life that is Christ. She,
the "full of grace", answers to the miracle in which she is a special
part. As Life flows through her she perceives the impulse to visit her relative
Elizabeth. She carries in her womb Life itself. So she hurries to the highlands
of Judah to the house of Zachariah. She brings with her the Living Gospel,
Jesus. And she presents Him to Elizabeth, who filled with the Holy Spirit
loudly exclaims: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of
your womb!"[26]
Immediately she bursts out ardently pronouncing the first confession of faith:
"How is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me"[27].
Christian life, lived in
one's existence, demands to be communicated. That is the apostolic dimension to
which all of us Christians are called.
At the same time that Mary
evangelises the members of the house of Zachariah, she serves the needs of
their relatives with great charity. We can see that in the union of life in
Mary there is neither divorce nor opposition of any kind between announcing and
testifying to the Word and serving humanity and promoting the good of mankind.
Mary is a vital synthesis of how evangelization and human service and
transformation of human realities should be lived. Once again we can see what
coherence means in Mary’s paradigmatic Christian life.
Mary's role in our
education is a continuation in time and in space of the education that she gave
to Jesus. It is also a projection of the Christian life in which she was
educated by Our Lord. All her actions are directed towards the configuration
with the First-born, in such a way that the faithful acquire the likeness with
Him who is the Way, Truth and Life[28].
With the sweet fondness of her spiritual maternity Mary becomes present in the
life of her children. Cooperating with God’s grace She helps us, her children,
to open ourselves up to Jesus so that He is born in us. She watches how the
fundamental dynamisms of her children are freed from the obstacles that enslave
them and are guided thru the path of reconciliation towards the discovery of
their true identity and of the full conformation with the Lord of Life.
As we look at Mary, as we
answer to the words Christ pronounced from the Cross high, "She is your
mother", we should open ourselves to the reality Mary shows us as paradigm
of Christian life in her reality of layperson.
III. Horizons
The lay faithful is invited
to holiness. That teleological horizon should permeate the whole Christian life
of the layperson. It should be an element of unity such as to give one a
continual element to overcome divorce between faith and daily life.
The Blessed Virgin Mary
shows us an integral perspective of the life of a layperson, opened to the
configuration with the Lord Jesus and addressing human responsibilities from
such a fundamental life.
If we are to try to answer
the identity crisis of the layperson that moves him or her to auto-exclude from
the mission given in Baptism, we should begin by understanding what being a
baptised person means.
The horizons opened by
such awareness should help the lay faithful in his way to holiness, helping him
or her to understand that Christian life can not be suspended at will, but that
one must let it flow vitalising all of our daily actions.
There are many aspects I
have had to skip or briefly develop. However, they are open for your inquiry. I
am worried because there are so many of us Catholics that do not understand
their call and the great gift it means. The world needs witnesses. People that
do not fall into the trap of functional agnosticism, putting a parenthesis to
their Christian life while acting different roles in the world. We cannot be
absent. We must be conscious of our identity as lay faithful and act with
coherence in the different responsibilities we have in life. As Cardinal Newman
said so succinctly and yet so truly: "In all times the laity has been the
measure of the Catholic spirit".[29]
So each one of us has the
responsibility to live his Christian life and let it express itself in the
different areas of our world and culture. The faith that is blazing in our
hearts should irradiate in our actions helping the coming of the Civilization
of Love.
God bless you all.
NOTES
