The Vocations of the Laity Continued from page 3
the laity skyrocketed—exploding across the Catholic world, and transforming the experience of church in the United States. Some of the theological stasis came from the recognition that, despite all the positive things Vatican II had to say about the laity, the category itself was still basically a negative one. It is essentially a remainder concept, understood as one segment of the Church defined over and against the clergy. (If you don’t believe me, try to define the word laity without using the word “not.” It’s not as easy as it sounds.) Thomas O’Meara reminds us that, in ordinary English, “lay person” refers to somebody outside their area of expertise, an amateur. (“Put it in lay man’s terms.”) The word carries negative connotations. And yet, even given the constraints of this category, there is a way in which the word “laity” has gathered a more positive aura in the post-conciliar Church—thanks to the phenomenal contributions of active lay women and lay men both in the Church and in the world. They have made what is a negative English word into a positive Catholic one. When I think about my own local context—teaching theology at a Catholic university—it is hard to overstate the transformations brought about by the rise of the laity. Fifty years ago, most Catholic colleges and universities were led by a small group of priests or women religious. Today, this leadership has been totally transformed, as boards of trustees are now regularly comprised of mostly lay men and women, professionals who bring their “secular” expertise to serve the Catholic educational enterprise. (Fr. Hesburgh always said that his own decision to transfer control of Notre Dame to a lay board of trustees in 1967 stood alongside the admission of women to the university as his greatest achievements as president. Might we see these decisions flowing from a vision that can be traced back to his early doctoral work on the laity?) As the number of priests and religious decline, a variety of programs have been built up to help draw lay administrators, faculty, and staff into the charism of these Catholic institutions. The goal is to encourage lay people to take ownership of the Catholic mission of these schools. In my own discipline, theology, I see another level of this lay transformation. The largest professional association of Catholic theologians in this country, the Catholic Theological Society of America, was once an exclusively male clerical club. Now its membership is largely lay. In my own parish, another level. Once, a priest pastor would have reigned supreme in my parish, helped out by one or two assistant pastors, with sisters in the school and a few lay people employed to answer the phone or clean the church. 4
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Today, our pastor is surrounded by (and held accountable to) a large team of lay ecclesial ministers, full-time professionals who plan liturgies, direct religious education programs, lead youth groups, head social outreach, and coordinate thousands of lay volunteers serving in dozens of parish ministries. These examples can be multiplied. And this issue of C21 Resources offers just a glimpse of the diversity of ways lay Catholics are living out their faith in the Church and in the world today. Look around. Who is running our Catholic schools and diocesan offices? Who is leading our hospitals and social service agencies? Who are our canon lawyers, our social commentators, our chaplains, our youth ministers, our models of the committed Christian? Bishops and priests may still be the public face of the Church. But Catholics inspired by the Second Vatican Council know that, together, we are all the Church. In light of the multiple crises facing the Catholic Church today, in light of scandal and disillusionment, apathy and anger, in light of the institutional reforms that are so desperately needed but that seem to be going nowhere, it is good to keep this broader ecclesiological vision in mind: We are all the Church. Yves Congar, whose early research on the laity was so influential at Vatican II, recognized that thinking about the laity forces us to think about the Church itself, the whole people of God, a pilgrim people on the way to the reign of God. It is not just a matter of adding a paragraph or a chapter on the laity to a narrative about the Church that revolves around the hierarchy. “At bottom,” Congar concluded, “there can be only one sound and sufficient theology of the laity, and that is a ‘total ecclesiology.’” Almost 50 years after the council, we still face the challenge of living out that total vision of the Church, that total ecclesiology. We are still working to embody that vision concretely in the structures of our Church and in the rhythms of our lives. The following essays are a small sample of attempts to do this—to live out the grace and commitment that mark the vocation of the laity. — Endnotes EDWARD P. HAHNENBERG is the editor of this issue of C21 Resources.
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