"The Year of the Eucharist"

The Sacrifice of the Mass and Work
(January 31, 2005)

Introduction:

Précis: In this year of the Eucharist - to identify the Mass as an action that is work. Work must become the action that is the Mass: self-giving. Action that is not self-giving is not "work." It is mere performance.

When St. Josemaria Escriva was asked what chapel he liked best in the recently finished building of Opus Dei in Rome, he answered: The Street!1


Who are the laity?

Why be so concerned with such an uninteresting and uninfluential segment of the Church? Msgr. Talbot, the Pope's British counselor, chided Newman's efforts to educate and energize the laity as a waste of valuable time. The role of the laity, Talbot explained, is merely `to hunt, to shoot, and to entertain not to `meddle in the concerns about Christian mission.
This low view of the laity reflects a long-standing depreciation of the essentially secular character of the lay vocation. Historically, the laity were often seen as second-class citizens whose role was to `pay, pray, and obey. Despite the vigorous efforts of the Second Vatican Council, this negative view continues to cast long shadows over Catholic culture. For most of us, the lay state is not a Christina vocation in any real sense, but merely a default position for those who don't really have a vocation. In the words of one young college student: `You can either choose a vocation, or just remain a lay person. Being a layperson is being someone who `does not have the guts to become a priest, [or] someone too spiritually challenged to enter a religious order.

Today, this depreciation of the lay vocation takes new twists. For example, in many circles lay advancement in the life of the church is increasingly being defined in exclusively clerical terms, i.e. getting the laity to perform offices and functions traditionally exercised by the clergy. Laity are only really active in their faith when they are dong things typical of priests or religious: serving on the altar, giving retreats, offering spiritual direction, leading parish organizations, or doing pastoral animation. This particular type of clericalism sets the benchmark for lay mission by standards appropriate to the ministerial priesthood.2

(2) Magisterial teaching on the Laity:

By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will. They live in the world, that is, they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life, which, as it were, constitute their very existence. There they are call by God that, being led by the spirit to the Gospel, they may contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven, by fulfilling their own particular duties3

This teaching was anticipated prior to the Vatican Council in the pronouncements of St. Josemaria Escriva:

(Y)ou must understand now more clearly that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it4 (emphasis mine).

Referring to this last remark, the successor to St. Josemaria, bishop Alvaro del Portillo, remarked in quoting Pope Paul VI:

This doctrine is so transcendental that the Church has wanted to proclaim it
solemnly in the last Council and to make it into `the most characteristic feature and the ultimate purpose of all the conciliar teaching.'5

3) What is "Secularity?"

Magisterium:

There are two areas in which lay people live their vocation. The first, and the one best suited to their lay state, is the secular world, which they are called to shape according to God's will (Gaudium et Spes 31). `Their specific activity brings the Gospel to the structures of the world; working in holiness wherever they are, they consecrate the world itself to God' (Lumen Gentium 34). Thanks to the lay faithful, `the presence and mission of the Church in the world is realized in a special way in the variety of charisms and ministries which belong to the laity. Secularity is the true and distinctive mark of the layperson and of lay spirituality, which means that the laity strive to evangelize the various sectors of family, social, professional, cultural and political life. On a continent marked by competition and aggressiveness unbridled consumerism and corruption, lay people are called to embody deeply evangelical values such as mercy, forgiveness, honesty, transparency of heart and patience in difficult situations. What is expected from the laity is a great creative effort in activities and works demonstrating a life in harmony with the Gospel?
America needs lay Christians able to assume roles of leadership in society. It is urgent to train men and women who, in keeping with their vocation, can influence public life, and direct it to the common good. In political life, understood in its truest and noblest sense as the administration of the common good, they can find the path of their own sanctification. For this they must be formed in the truths and values of the Church's social teaching, and in the basic notions of a theology of the laity. A deeper knowledge of Christian ethical principles and moral values will enable them to be exponents of these in their own particular setting, proclaiming them even where appeals are made to the so-called `neutrality of the State.'
"There is a second area in which many lay faithful are called to work, and this can be called `intra-ecclesial.' A good number of lay people in America legitimately aspire to contribute their talents and charisms `to the building of the ecclesial community as delegates of the word, catechists, visitors to the sick and the imprisoned, group leaders, etc.' The Synod Fathers expressed the hope that the Church would recognize some of these works as lay ministries, with a basis in the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, without compromising the specific ministries proper to the Sacrament of Orders. This is a large and complex issue and some time ago I established a Commission to study it. In this regard the offices of the Holy See have from time to time provided guidelines. There is a need to promote positive cooperation by properly trained lay men and women in different activities within the Church, while avoiding any confusion with the ordained ministries and the activities proper to the Sacrament of Orders, so that the common priesthood of the faithful remains clearly distinguished from that of the ordained6

The Theology of "Secularity:"

Secularity is a dimension and characteristic of God Himself by the Incarnation of the Son of the Father in Jesus Christ. As time and space are dimensions of God because of the Incarnation, so is secularity. Pope Paul VI said the Church `has an authentic secular dimension, inherent to her inner nature and mission, which is rooted in the mystery of the Word Incarnate...Christifideles laici #15. The Divine Person of the Son of the Father takes the concrete and individual humanity of Jesus of Nazareth to be His very Self. That bit of creation, the humanity of Christ, is the "world" in its redemption.7 It is the locus of God's divinity where the freedom of Christ's mastery of self subdues the sin that He has taken on Himself as His own: "He became sin" (2 Cor 5, 21). By subduing His human will, Christ turns rebellious disobedience (sin) into the radical gift of self by obedience to the Father's will to death on the Cross. Hence, the crucifixion of Christ is the supreme manifestation of freedom: "The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom" (Veritatis Splendor #85). And, with freedom, comes the meaning of the autonomy of the human person and the world as connected or in possible connection to the human person. "If by the autonomy of earthly affairs is meant the gradual discovery, exploitation, and ordering of the laws and values of matter and society, then the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order: it is at once the claim of modern man and the desire of the creator. By the very nature of creation, material being is endowed with its own stability, truth and excellence, its own order and laws" (Gaudium et Spes # 36).
Secularism, on the other hand, is the false autonomy of a radical independence from God, which is tantamount to the denial of God, or, in the modern Western mentality, the trivialization of His existence into a "hobby" exercised in leisure time.

This understanding of secularity derives from the very meaning of the human person as a self determining freedom who decides about himself because he exercises dominion and ownership of self such as to be able to make the gift of self. You can't give what you don't have. You don't have it until you subdue it, by the very nature of the covenant God established with Adam, i.e., that he subdue the earth to make it his own. But since Adam was taken from the earth, he must subdue himself in order to own himself, and in so owning to be able to make the gift. The original covenant commanded Adam to name the animals (to name is to subdue and makes one's own). In doing so, he experienced being a person (a subject, a self) as God is a Self, or a triple Self ("Let us make..." Gen 1, 25). Behold in this the experience of the "original solitude"8 or being alone among all created things that are not subjects or persons. Adam had to subdue himself to make himself a gift to God in obedience before subduing the earth in the form of the animals. Hence, the original revelation yields an anthropology of the meaning of person or self precisely by the experience of work. That anthropology reads,

"Man, the only earthly being God has wanted for its own sake, finds his true self only by the sincere gift of himself "

(Gaudium et Spes #24).

4) What is "Work?"

As we just saw with Adam in his obedience of the original command to subdue the earth by naming the animals, work is the action of self-gift (obedience) that only persons can do since they alone are subjects capable of subduing themselves and taking possession of themselves. Hence,

"Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature" (Laborem exercens, Preface). Later, the Pope emphasizes the subjective dimension of work: "Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the `image of God' he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject of work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process, independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.... And so this `dominion'... introduces us to an understanding of its subjective dimension. Understood as a process whereby man and the human race subdue the earth, work corresponds to this basic biblical concept only when throughout the process man manifests himself and confirms himself as the one who `dominates.' This dominion, in a certain sense, refers to the subjective dimension even more than to the objective one: this dimension conditions the very ethical nature of work. In fact, there is no doubt that human work has an ethical value of its own, which clearly and directly remains linked to the fact that the one who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject, that is to say, a subject that decides about himself"9

Note that this "deciding about himself" as the subject subduing himself (determining self) is the very meaning of work and priesthood. Priesthood always means mediation. After sin and outside of Christianity (pagan or Jewish), priesthood came to be exercised in an extrinsic way whereby the "priest" is always "other" than the thing or person offered.
In Christ, there is a radical change in the mediation. Instead of offering something extrinsic to himself, He offers Himself in an intrinsic way: "But when Christ appeared as high priest... he entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands (that is, not of this creation), nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of his own blood...10 For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the Holy Spirit offered himself unblemished unto God..." St. Paul then says explicitly, "But as it is, once for all at the end of the ages, he has appeared for the destruction of sin by the sacrifice of himself."11

In an illustrious modern day example not unlike Adam in naming the animals, Helen Keller (blind, deaf and dumb) came to a consciousness of self as a person by the "work" of exercising herself - sym-bolizing [throwing {Ballein} the likeness {sym}] - as a sovereign cause. For the first time in her eight years, she not only responded to a stimulus from her teacher (Ann Sullivan), but freely and sovereignly "obeyed" her by "throwing" the word w-a-t-e-r at the cool liquid substance, and "subduing" it. Helen did not simply discover the meaning of language, but rather "the meaning of herself." For the first time, instead of working in the lower registers of her being as a stimulus-response organism, an animal that happens to have intelligence. Now, she discovered herself as a subject subduing herself and experiencing herself precisely as a free and responsible agent and cause.

"We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
"I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow."

Walker Percy remarks (The Message in the Bottle):

"(B)efore, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was a little more than an animal. Afterward she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it, Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.

6) Sin:

Instead of self-gift, work can be an expression of the self turned back on itself. In a word, disobedience. Considered within the horizon of sin, the objective performance of work in itself does not actualize the imaging of God thereby making us holy. What makes us holy is the subjective giving of the self. Work, then, as objective performance is "the place, the environment, the means, or if you prefer, the tools and the language of our response to the caring love of God" (John Paul II L'Osservatore Romano N. 17 -26 April 1995, 3) if we freely do so.

7) Christ Redeems Work:

Jesus Christ is the revelation of not only who God is, but also who man is. He is the prototype in whom Adam and we were chosen "before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish in his sight in love... He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ as his sons...."12And again, "HE IS THE IMAGE of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether Thrones, or Dominations, or Principalities, or Powers. All things have been created through and unto him, and he is before all creatures, and in him all things hold together. Again he is the head of his body, the Church; he, who is the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in all things he may have the first place."13

8) Priesthood:

Before Christ: Priesthood always means mediation. After sin and outside of Christianity (pagan or Jewish), priesthood came to be exercised in an extrinsic way whereby the "priest" is always "other" than the thing or person offered.

After Christ: Jesus Christ is the prototypical meaning of man, He is also the meaning of priest. Christian anthropology and priesthood are one and the same thing. Every person, male and female, achieves the fullness of personhood only in the exercise of priesthood. The common priesthood of the laity and the ministerial priesthood of clerics have the priesthood of Christ in common. The laity are never ministers although they may exercise some ministries for a time and by deputation.14 In Christ, there is a radical change in the meaning of mediation. Instead of offering something outside of himself, He offers Himself. Instead of extrinsic mediation, Christ's is intrinsic. St. Paul reports the difference:

But when Christ appeared as high priest... he entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands (that is, not of this creation), nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of his own blood...15 For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the Holy Spirit offered himself unblemished unto God..."

Paul then says explicitly,

But as it is, once for all at the end of the ages, he has appeared for the destruction of sin by the sacrifice of himself.16

The work of Adam was an exercise of priesthood in that he mediated between himself and the Creator in an act of obedience in the naming of the animals. That intrinsic mediation - that exercise of priesthood - was lost by the disobedience of the first sin, which precisely obliterated work as an act of obedience. Adam failed to subdue himself in obedience to the Covenant, and in that disobedience lost the intrinsic exercise of priesthood. It morphed extrinsic in paganism and in the Old Testament.
Christ's obedience to death on the Cross is the intrinsic recovery of priesthood and work. It is the recovery of freedom as self-mastery - the subduing of the self (taken from the slime of the earth) - and therefore work as redemptive act in restoring the likeness of the act to be image of the Creator. Christ's obedience to death on the Cross is the prototypical work that redeems work as the occasion of the ontological recovery of man as image and likeness of God. "The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom" (Veritatis Splendor #85). Calvary is the "Work" of Jesus Christ.

9) Mass:

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the "instantiation" of that work of Christ's "I - gift" on Calvary. Christ's Persona as Son of the Father - His I AM (Ego Eimi) - never left the intimacy of the eternal Trinitarian relation to the Father. He is the eternal Relation of Self-Gift to the Father while He lived out this relation "economically" in time and space 2,000 years ago through the rendered obedience of the human will of Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, whenever there is the transubstantiation of bread and wine into His Body and Blood in the Mass, the work that took place on Calvary is made present here and now, and can fully inform my work, here and now.

The Mass makes present the sacrifice of the Cross; it does not add to that sacrifice nor does it multiply it. What is repeated is its memorial celebration, its `commemorative representation' (memorialis demonstration) which makes Christ's one, definitive redemptive sacrifice always present in time. The sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic mystery cannot therefore be understood as something separate, independent of the Cross or only indirectly referring to the sacrifice of Calvary. By virtue of its close relationship to the sacrifice of Golgotha, the Eucharist is a sacrifice in the strict sense, and not only in a general way, as if it were simply a matter of Christ's offering himself to the faithful as their spiritual food. The gift of his love and obedience to the point of giving his life (cf. Jn 10:17-18) is in the first place a gift to his Father. Certainly it is a gift given for our sake, and indeed that of all humanity (cf. Mt 26:28; Mk 14:24; Lk 22:20; Jn 10:15), yet it is first and foremost a gift to the Father: "a sacrifice that the Father accepted, giving, in return for this total self-giving by his Son, who 'became obedient unto death' (Phil 2:8), his own paternal gift, that is to say the grant of new immortal life in the resurrection." (Ecclesia de Eucharistia #12-13).

10) The Anthropology of Redemption:

With regard to the metaphysical constitution of the Person of Jesus Christ, St. Thomas asked the question,

Is there only one act of existence in Christ?17

Given that there are two natures in Christ as God and man, and that the act of existence follows on nature, it would follow that that there should be two acts of existence. He counters that that which exists is the subject or person while the nature is not that which exists but that by which the subject exists.

As a consequence Christ rather preserves unity in virtue of the unity of the subsisting subject than acquires duality in virtue of the duality of natures."

And then, concretely, "esse aeternum Filii Dei, quod est divine naturae, fit esse hominis, inquantum humana natura assumitur a Filio Dei in unitatem personae.18 This means that the very Being of the Son of God -the Being of Person - that makes the humanity of Christ be man with autonomy and freedom. Since action follows on being, the stage is set for the redemptive act of obedience that turns all sin ("made sin") into the divinization of man. Thus Josef Ratzinger:

Thus the Logos adopts the being of the man Jesus into his own being and speaks of it in terms of his own I: "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me" (Jn. 6, 38). In the Son's obedience, where both wills become one single Yes to the will of the Father, communion takes place between human and divine being. The "wondrous exchange," the "alchemy of being," is realized here as a liberating and reconciling communication, which becomes a communion between Creator and creature. It is in the pain of this exchange, and only here, that that fundamental change takes place in man, the change which alone can redeem him and transform the conditions of the world Here community is born, here the Church comes into being. The act whereby we participate in the Son's obedience, which involves man's genuine transformation, is also the only really effective contribution toward renewing and transforming society and the world as a whole.... The Eucharist is our participation in the Easter mystery, and hence it is constitutive of the Church, the body of Christ. This is why the Eucharist is necessary for salvation (J. Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, Ignatius (1986) 92-93.

Thus, man is not only restored to the state of likeness to God as image, but he enters into the prototypical state of the perfect image and likeness of the Father who is Christ as divine Person.19 "Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish in his sight in love, He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ as hi sons, according to the purpose of his will...with which he has favored us in his beloved Son"(Eph. 1, 4-6). God had revealed in the Old Testament that His relation to Israel was to be as husband to wife, bridegroom to bride. The Incarnation of the Son is already a spousal relation in which the human and the divine are united in the one flesh of Jesus Christ. But Christ Himself reveals Himself to be the "bridegroom" who enters into a spousal relation with His bride, the Church. St. Paul explicitates this relation when he admonishes,

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church, and delivered himself up for her...For no one ever hated his own flesh; on the contrary he nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ also does the Church (because we are members of his body, made from his flesh and from his bones)" (Eph. 5, 25-26, 29-30).

This double subjectivity of Christ and the Church become One Flesh in the Eucharist whereupon they form a New Single Subject, a New Man - the Whole Christ - made up of Head and Body (members).

The Lord Jesus...is in the Church and the Church is in him (cf. Jn 15, 1ff.; Gal 3, 28; Eph. 4, 15-16; Acts 9, 5)... And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single `whole Christ.' This same inseparability is also expressed in the New Testament by the analogy of the Church as the Bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 11, 2; Eph 5, 25 29; Rev 21, 2 and 9)20 (underline mine).

Also, the radical identity not only of Christ and the Church as Head and Members of a New Subject, but the closeness of being a communio that obtains among the members of the body is not political or sociological aggregation of individuals, but a true communio imaging the Trinitarian Communio of Father, Son and Spirit ("That they be one, as we are one..." Jn 17, 23). John Paul insists that unity is more important than the Church. The Church exists so that we may be one:

God wills the Church, because he wills unity, and unity is an expression of the whole depth of his agape. In effect, this unity bestowed by the Holy Spirit does not merely consist in the gathering of people as a collection of individuals. It is a unity constituted by the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments and hierarchical communion. The faithful are one because, in the Sprit, they are in communion with the Son and, in him, share in his communion with the Father.21

Conclusion
As the Cross is the supreme Action of Christ, the Mass is that same Action of the whole Christ, Head and members. And since this "Action" of Christ is "work," the "work" of His members - all "other Christs" - must become the Mass, i.e., Calvary. This translates into the radical giving of the whole self in ordinary secular work, which is always "for" the other. It is "washing the feet" of the others, which is a "type" for the entire social doctrine of the Church. The Mass, then, is not just spectacle, a vehicle of adoration or a source of strength. It is "mode of being" - the giving of the self - on the occasion of work in the world. John Paul says,

The Eucharist not only provides the interior strength needed for this mission, but is also - in some sense - its plan. For the Eucharist is A MODE OF BEING, which passes from Jesus into each Christian, through whose testimony it is meant to spread throughout society and culture22 (emphasis mine).

What is that "mode of being?" It is the giving of the self on the occasion of work in the secular milieu typified in the washing of the feet:

"It is not by chance that the Gospel of John contains no account of the institution of the Eucharist, but instead relates the WASHING OF THE FEET (cf. Jn 13, 1-20): by bending down to wash the feet of his disciples, Jesus explains the meaning of the Eucharist unequivocally. Saint Paul vigorously reaffirms the impropriety of a Eucharistic celebration lacking charity expressed by practical sharing with the poor (cf 1 Cor 11, 17-22, 27-34).23

It is working for the poor - everyone is poor - that we live out being "other Christs" empowered by the Mass. Again, John Paul:

Can we no make this Year of the Eucharist an occasion... to responding with fraternal solicitude to one of the many forms of poverty present in our world? I think for example of the tragedy of hunger which plagues hundreds of millions of human beings, the diseases that afflict developing countries, the loneliness of the elderly, the hardships faced by the unemployed, the struggles of immigrants. These are evils that are present - albeit to a different degree - even in areas of immense wealth. We cannot delude ourselves: by our mutual love and, in particular, by our concern for those in need we will be recognized as true followers of Christ (cf. Jn 13, 35; Mt 25, 31-46). This will be the criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations is judged.24

At this point, the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" appears, made public immediately after the appearance of Mane Nobiscum Domine on October 7, 2004. It is a conceptual ordering and compiling of the total social doctrine from Leo XIII to and inclusive of John Paul II:

This document intends to present in a complete and systematic manner even if by means of an overview, the Church's social teaching, which is the fruit of careful Magisterial reflection...25

The ontological center and defining principle and value of the entire social teaching is the human person. It is subject, not object; person, not structure.

"This, and this alone, is the principle which inspires the Church's social doctrine."26

And since the human person fulfills and finds self only in the sincere gift of self, i.e., in the action of self giving that is the very action of Christ, the only way to live out the social teaching of the Church is to live Calvary in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
My goal has been - in this year of the Eucharist - to identify the Mass as an action that is work. And that work must become the action that is the Mass. That action is self-giving. In fact, action that is not self-giving is not "work." It is mere performance. Rev. Robert A. Connor



1 Pilar Urbano, El Hombre de Villa Tevere, Plaza and Janes Editores, S.A. (1995) 186: "Padre, de todos los oratorios de esta casa, cual le gusta mas? - La calle!... A me me gustan todos los oratorios de esta casa. Pero...me gusta mas la calle."
2 Daniel Cere, "Rouse Yourselves" Towards a "High" Doctrine of the Laity, Newman Rambler Summer 2000, Newman Institute of Catholic Studies, McGill University.
3 Lumen Gentium #31
4 St. Josemaria Escriva: "Passionately Loving the World" in Conversations with Monsignor Josemaria Escriva Scepter (1968) #114, p. 192
5 Paul VI, Motu proprio `Sanctitas clarior,' 19 March 1969, AAS 61 (1969), p. 150.
6 John Paul II, Catechesis in America #44.
7 "In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is himself eternal" (Tertio Millennio Adveniente #9) (emphasis mine). If "time becomes a dimension of God," so must secularity, since time and the secular world are co-extensive. Hence the explanation of the Church having "a secular dimension, inherent to her inner nature and mission, which is deeply rooted in the mystery of the Word Incarnate..." (Christifideles laici # 15).
8 John Paul II, "Man's subjectivity is already emphasized through this.... Solitude also signifies man's subjectivity, which is constituted through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is `different' from the visible world, from the world of living beings....(H)e asserts himself as a `person' in the visible world (The Theology of the Body Pauline Books and Media (1997) 36. "The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. The fact that man is `alone' conceals within it this ontological structure[subjectivity] and at the same time indicates true comprehension... Consciousness of solitude might have been shattered precisely because of his body itself. The man, `adam, might have reached the conclusion, on the basis of the experience of his own body, that he was substantially similar to other living beings (animalia). On the contrary, as we read, he did not arrive at this conclusion; he reached the conviction that he was `alone" Ibid. 39.
9 John Paul II, Laborem exercens #6.
10 St. Paul Hebrews 9, 14.
11 Ibid. 10, 26.
12 St. Paul, Eph 1, 4-5.
13 St. Paul, Col 1, 15-20.
14 Lumen Gentium, #10: "Though they differ essentially and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are non the lessordered one to another; each in its own proper way shares in the one priesthood of Christ."
15 St. Paul Hebrews 9, 14.
16 Ibid. 10, 26.
17 Summa Theologiae, III-17, 2.
18 Ibid. ad 2.
19 Ephesians 1, 4:
20 Declaration `Dominus Iesus' on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church; see ftn. 49.
21 John Paul II Ut Unum Sint, #9.
22 John Paul II, Mane Nobiscum Domine #25.
23 Ibid. 28.
24 Ibid.
25 Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2004.
26 John Paul II, Centesimus Annus #53, DSP p. 76.