1. Brief Background
1.1 The opening procession of the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, was an impressive sight by any standard: over 2,500 cardinals, bishops, abbots, and patriarchs from all over the world marched across St. Peter’s Square, followed by the pope. To a critical observer, however, the scene was too male, too clerical, and too “pompous” and “churchy,” to have any relevance to the rest of humanity? Where were the women? Where, indeed, were the laity? Who would imagine the very Council this splendid procession walked into would lead to a dramatic rethinking and reshaping of the role of the laity in the life and mission of the Church?
1.2 Yet, the Second Vatican Council was the most important singular event that changed the Catholic Church. In the words of Cardinal Franz König of Austria who oversaw its preparation, the Council was “the watershed event” at the turning point of the Roman Catholic Church towards the modern world. Would it also be a “watershed event” for the development of the Church’s vision on the role of the laity? In his address to the new cardinals on 20th February, 1946[1], Pope Pius XII stressed that “…the faithful, and precisely the Lay, are in the front line of the Church; for them the Church is the vital principle of human society. That is why they, especially they, must be constantly more and more clearly aware not only of being part of the Church but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the faithful.” Would his stunning statement that “They [the laity] are the Church” be met with a splendid echo on the Council floor?
1.3 There was euphoria right after the Council, and understandably so. For suddenly as it were, the future looked promising with Pope John XXIII’s highly significant opening of the Vatican windows. In an ecclesiastical atmosphere that had grown stale and spiritually stifling, the Council raised great expectations, as the rush of fresh air from the outside world signaled the unleashing of new life and energy in the Church. Change was in the air; the Church would soon be brought up to date – aggiornamento was the catch word. There was an excited and surging optimism that, ad intra, the Church would seriously re-structure itself into a more equal and inclusive community of disciples of Christ and, ad extra, the Church would turn towards the world with a more friendly, and certainly a more generous and positive spirit of openness. For example:
- reconciliation was palpable and became a real possibility as ecumenism and inter-faith dialogues could now move ahead by leaps and bounds, free at last from the strictures of prohibitions, restrictions and suspicions;
- intellectual activities would be productive as the Church, now facing the modern scientific achievement with intellectual honesty, was willing to accord intellectual freedom to its own members [even Karl Rahner, S.J. had the Vatican sanction against theological publications hanging over his head lifted and became the most influential official peritus during the Council];
- genuine collegiality and subsidiarity would replace the hitherto top-down church-governance as the Council insisted on [a] due respect and autonomy for the bishops of the world; [b] local decisions free from the interference and dictates of Rome; and
- closer home with regard to our topic at hand, the “passive” laity could lift their heads and walk tall as co-participants with the hitherto untouchable ordained sector from across the great divide within the Church, now that the Council has given the Church a fresh, new, dynamic and biblically-based understanding of herself in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, amongst other documents.[2]
2. Three Implications in Particular for the Laity
2.1 That the Second Vatican Council generated a new spirit of openness and energy about the role of the laity, was attributed to the fact that the Council marked a pivotal point in the development of our present ecclesiology.
2.2 At the beginning of chapter 4 of Lumen Gentium on the laity (LG, 30), the Council gives an indicative marker of the revolutionary understanding of the laity in the Church. It categorically emphasizes the equality of all members of the Church by declaring that
“everything that has been said of the People of God is addressed equally to laity, religious and clergy.”
There are myriad issues on the role of the laity in the Church. For the time we have, I propose to focus on three aspects pertinent to the revolutionary conciliar message that all members – the laity, the clergy and the religious – share equally in the life and mission of the Church.
2.2.1 First, of Being Called to Holiness
The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium, 5) defines the goal of human life as holiness.[3] This call to holiness is universal; all within the Church should live holy lives – the priests, the religious, as well as the laity. In whatever station of life, Christians are called to a lifelong process of seeking God, through the person of Jesus Christ, in obedience to the Divine Spirit.
The key to understanding this universal call to holiness is that it is rooted in baptism.
The fact that Lumen Gentium begins not with the bishops but with the understanding of the Church as the People of God in chapter 2 – that is, all the faithful comprising the laity, the priests and the religious – before turning to the bishops in chapter 3, has been much talked about.[4] Important as it is in stressing what the Church is and who the members are, it is not the most important achievement of that document. The most important point in Lumen Gentium is its Christological focus. Christ is the foundation of the Church, her head, her sustenance, her light. What is of first importance is neither the laity, nor the hierarchy, nor even Rome. That is why Lumen Gentium opens solidly on this Christological anchorage: “Christ is the light of humanity.” And this opening paragraph of chapter 1 immediately continues with the depth-understanding of “The Mystery of the Church”. Thus,
“the Church, in Christ, is in the nature of a sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men.”
If we miss this mystery dimension, on account of Christ, we reduce the Church to its mere sociological dimension, ignoring the deeper implications of its baptismal root.
Through baptism, we are configured, one and all, to Jesus Christ who is God and man, and are united with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, leading us into communion with the inner Trinitarian life.
We are Church – the People of God – on account of baptism. It is not on account of ordination or marriage or the work of any group. The gift of baptism is at the same time a call to live holy lives. This is a universal Christian vocation to the sacred, a vocation that precedes any other vocation, be it Holy Matrimony or Holy Orders or anything else. Many in the Church lament the clergy-laity divide, and the imbalance in our theology and practice of the sacraments, where excessive attention is accorded to the sacrament of Orders and not enough to the sacrament of Baptism. Orders are rooted in Baptism, and whenever our theology lacks depth and breadth in Baptism, the authenticity of our Christian living suffers, not least in the area of Orders.
Question: Is there an undue tendency to give more attention to and even to exaggerate the importance of Holy Orders, resulting in an unhealthy eclipse of the role of the laity?
2.2.2 Of Being Gifted with the Spirit
From this common rootedness in baptism, the Church is one, even though it has been marked from the beginning by a great diversity on account of both the variety of God’s gifts and the diversity of those who receive them [1 Cor 12].
Recognising the gifts and talents of the multitude of the laity, Lumen Gentium speaks of equality between all in the Church, and the demand on all to expend their energy for the growth of the Church:
“Although by Christ’s will, some persons are established as teachers, dispensers of mysteries and pastors of the others, there remains, nevertheless, a true equality between all with regard to the dignity and to the activity which is common to all the faithful in the building up of the Body of Christ.” [LG, 32]
The laity are gathered together in the People of God and make up the Body of Christ under one head. Whoever they may be, they are called upon, as living members, to expend all their energy for the growth of the Church and its continuous sanctification, since this very energy is a gift of the Creator and a blessing of the Redeemer. [LG, 33]
Every child of God is gifted.
All gifts are intended for Kingdom-advancement, both within the faith community and in the larger society.
Baptism, not priestly ordination, is the basis for all mission and ministry, and the mission of those baptized into Christ is to be the sacrament of God’s love in a world rife with strife, violence and inequity. Mission is the work of an adult church. In this adult church, neither does “worldly mission” belong exclusively to the lay people, nor does “church business” belong exclusively to the clergy. The two overlap and they require the combined gifts and collaboration of both the laity and the clergy.
Question: Do we in any way stifle the gifts of the Holy Spirit in ourselves and in others, within the structures of our lives and of the institutional Church?
2.2.3 Of Being Engaged in the Life and Mission of the Church
Again, in view of baptism, the source of our holiness is Christ, who sanctifies us – all of us. The laity in the Church, who previously had been told to “pay, pray, and obey”, and had been reduced to mere passive subjects of the official Church’s ministration, were now identified as an essential component of the “People of God”, graced and sanctified by Christ, and recognized as sharing in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king.
What the Council did on the role of the laity may be seen in three steps.
- First, it canonized the understanding that instead of a passive laity, the apostolate belongs to them as much as it does the ordained and the consecrated members of the Church.
- Second, it exhorted lay persons on Kingdom-advancement by engaging in temporal affairs and by discharging their familial and vocational obligations in a manner faithful to Christ.
- Third, however, the Council did not restrict lay people to their special mission to transform the world in Christ. While it regarded the laity as particularly competent in ‘secular’ matters, it also provided for their active participation in the inner affairs of the Church. The laity have all the right to give God’s gifts to God’s work and to God’s Church. More than just financial capital, the Church has always needed from the laity their intellectual, moral, as well as spiritual capital. So the role of the laity is as much mission ad extra as mission ad intra:
“The faithful who, by baptism are incorporated into Christ, are placed in the People of God, and in their own way share the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ, and to the best of their ability carry on the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world.” [LG, 31; repeated in Apostolicam Actuositatem, 2]
In sum, then, two points deserve reiteration:
- First, we need to stress that to describe the role of the laity as primarily and principally secular is quite erroneous. The Council insists that before anyone can have a lay or clerical vocation, each has a Christian vocation through the sacrament of baptism. This is a vocation to the sacred.
- Second, we need to stress that the laity’s role, according to the Council, has two foci:
- involvement in the world and its transformation; and
- o involvement in the Church and its growth.
The Council went a step further yet, by placing a duty on the bishops in the Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church [Christus Dominus] to accord a meaningful collaborative role to the laity:
“Bishops should preserve for their faithful the share proper to them in Church affairs. They should recognise the duty and right of the faithful to collaborate actively in the building up of the Mystical Body of Christ.” [CD, 16]
Question: How have the laity fared in their role and how have the hierarchy fared in empowering and enabling the laity to discharge their role?
3. What Do We See in Reality after Vatican II?
Without attempting to go into detail analysis, from where I stand, the following short list is indicative of the contemporary experience of the laity:
□ There is now a universal existence of a multiplicity of lay ministries in the Church. This has been spurred by a change in perspective initiated by Vatican II, whereby lay people are no longer considered to be passive objects of the ministrations of the clergy, but active agents who participate in their own right in the threefold mission of Christ and the Church. The degree of this change in perspective varies between different regions in the world.
□ Vatican II has also caused ambiguity in the institutional Church’s approach to the laity, resulting in a divided Church of clergy and laity and an increasing polarization of different sections of the People of God. The ordained are often seen as overly zealous in guarding their perceived territory, the laity in general are often vocal in their frustration, and the women are universally recognized as having been excessively discriminated against in an institutional Church that is long in preaching equality and justice to the rest of humanity but short in its own practice.
□ There is an immense gap between the vision in the Vatican documents and the reality in church life in the 21st century. The Council promised much, but the official church has not only failed to deliver, but has bluntly, and very crudely in recent years, I might add, reverted to the pre-Vatican II mentality in many ways. The colossal clerical sex scandal is a case in point that magnified the acute malaise.
- “Transparency” and ‘accountability”, two concepts insisted by the laity for authentic Christian living in the Church, are steadfastly denied by the ordained in Church-governance. The reigning mentality of the clergy is: “We are the ones to decide.” The “we”, meaning the ordained, are often projected as “the Church”, an acutely erroneous mentality in the light of Vatican II ecclesiology.
□ The understanding of Baptism in its depth and breadth suffers from a gross imbalance compared to Orders. Visible proofs of this imbalance abounds in the contemporary Church everywhere we turn – in an overabundant symbolism in clothing, titles, and articulations in print and in speech in connection with the sacrament of Orders, but with virtually nothing in connection with the sacrament of Baptism.
- The overly pompous liturgical vestments[5] are indicative of the desire of the ordained sector of the Church to accentuate the imbalance between the status of the clergy and the laity in the Church.
- The 1983 Code of Canon Law regularly speaks of “sacred pastors” but never of the “sacred laity”, ignoring the fact that there would be no sacred Orders without sacred Baptism. From cover to cover, the Code actually canonises the superiority of the clergy over and against the laity, ensuring by legal provisions an effective restriction of the laity’s meaningful participation except to “assist” the priest.
- Women faithful regularly suffer from ministry-exclusion and class-reduction.[6]
- There is a general lack of meaningful consultation of the laity on matters of faith [cf. sensus fidei in LG,2[7]], ministry and church administration, reduced as they are in Canon Law to consultative roles in parish and diocesan bodies.
- Theologians with strong pastoral sense have noted a phenomenon of “spiritual gangsterism” on the part of the priests in their behavior towards the laity.[8]
- Professional theologians have also noted a religious “infantilization”[9] of the educated laity within an ecclesial structure that privileges hierarchy at the expense of community. Catholic clergy fosters clerical elitism and condescends to the laity in matters theological, spiritual, ethical and (even) financial and administrative.
4. Concluding Remarks
4.1 The famed ecumenist Yves Congar noted that the Council that was called in order to let the Church breathe in a modern world, failed in one vital area — the empowerment of the lay person.
4.2 In recent years, Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly stressed that the laity are neither mere participants in the ministry of the clergy nor their collaborators. Rather, the laity are ministers in their own right, co-responsible with the ordained for the life and mission of the Church. The insight is splendidly clear. Yet, we must never underestimate the great distance from the clarity of intellectual insights to the revision of practical attitudes and the creation of new structures. What is lacking in the contemporary Church is a proportionate matching of words with actions. Unless mindsets concerning the lay people and pastoral structures are changed to promote the laity’s co-responsibility for the Church’s being and action, the consolidation of a mature and committed laity is never likely to happen. The full capacity of the Church for mission is thereby curtailed.
4.3 In his Inaugural Address at the Second Session of Council on 29 September 1963, Pope Paul VI referred to the enigmatic nature of the Church, that is, as a “reality imbued with the divine presence, hence always capable of new and deeper exploration“. Explore we must. It is decidedly unnecessary that we should stick to existing Church structures and ministries as if all the existing rules have been cast on stone-tablets. Change is warranted so that the Church may conform more closely to Jesus of Nazareth, his Gospel, his life and mission.
Dr. Jeffrey Goh
Associate Professor
De La Salle University-Manila.
[Email: jeffangiegoh@gmail.com. Website: http://www.jeffangiegoh.com]
[1] See Acta Apostolicae Sedis 38:5 (1 April 1946), 149.
[2] Of the four most important breakthroughs of the Council, Cardinal Franz König said: “The third important breakthrough, which in my eyes was of particular momentum for the future of the Church, is the Council’s emphasis on the importance of the lay apostolate. Before Vatican II the Church was often perceived as a kind of two class system with the hierarchy on one side and the laity on the other…. But that was hardly the Gospel view. Vatican states that the Church is one communion.” See Chapter 1 of Open to God, Open to the World, by Cardinal Franz König, [London: Burns & Oates, 2005].
[3] Recall that Pope Benedict XVI, well aware of Vatican II’s universal call to holiness, opened the Bishops’ Synod on the Year of Faith and Evangelisation on 7 October, 2012 with precisely this universal call as the basis of our duty to evangelise.
[4] Herbert Haag, for example, draws the inference that “any and every class division within it is fundamentally rejected”. See Clergy and Laity: Did Jesus Want a Two-Tier Church? [Kent: Burns & Oates, 1998], p.19.
[5] See the final interview of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini: “Translated final interview with Martini,” in National Catholic Reporter, Sep. 04, 2012.
[6] At its 4th General Assembly [1986], the FABC boldly stated a need for a basic change of heart, noting that insofar as the Church is “a communion that tries to liberate others from oppression and discrimination,” it must urgently learn to practice collegiality and co-responsibility. It then urged two things: 1. “the clergy has a duty to make the initial moves to foster involvement and to recognize the emerging leadership of the laity,” and 2. to be a sign of the Kingdom, there must be due recognition of the gifts of the Holy Spirit to women who share in the “freedom of the children of God.”
[7] “The whole body of the faithful who have an anointing that comes from the holy one (cf. 1 Jn. 2:20 and 27] cannot err in matters of faith.”
[8] See Pastor Ignotus’ column in The Tablet.
[9] See Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In search of an Accountable Church [NY: Continuum, 2002].
* This was a paper delivered at the Marymatha Major Seminary, Trichu, Kerela, India on 4 February, 2013. It was part of a conference on “Vatican II and the Pastoral Practice of the Church Today”. This paper, distributed before hand, was not read. The actual talk was Powerpoint presented and now transcribed and posted in the “From Our Perspective” category of 1 March 2013.