From Communio 29 (Summer 2002) 258-285.
Are
laymen ever ministers? It seems so. Today, every activity performed as a
service within the Church, from distributing Communion to organizing the parish
four-ball golf tournament, is considered a “ministry” executed by “lay
ministers.” The very mission of the Church to the secular world is also
considered “ministry.” At a leadership education conference in Washington, D.C.
last January, Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester affirmed that “Communion [in
the Church] has an inexorable orientation to mission, or if you prefer,
ministry.”[1]
There is seemingly good reason to call lay people
“ministers,” since the Motu Proprio Ministeria Quaedam[2]
of Paul VI replaced the former minor
orders of porter, reader, exorcist, and acolyte with the “ministries” of reader
and acolyte. The document declared that “it is fitting to preserve and adapt
these [the minor orders] in such a way, that from this time on there will be
two offices: that of reader and that of acolyte, which will include the
functions of the subdiaconate.”[3] Then, seemingly opening up the possibility of
the multiplication of ministries among laity, the document continues:
Besides
the offices common to the Latin Church,
there is nothing to prevent episcopal conferences from requesting others of the
Apostolic See, if they judge the establishment of such offices in their region
to be necessary or very useful because of special reason…. It is in accordance
with the reality itself and with the contemporary outlook that the
above-mentioned ministries should no longer be called minor orders; their
conferring will not be called ‘ordination,’ but ‘institution.’[4]
Although
Ministeria Quaedam makes clear reference to Lumen Gentium ,
paragraph 10, concerning the essential difference between laity and clergy, the
tenor of the document is the transformation of what was once a clerical
ministry (subdiaconate) into a ministry of the laity . And since doing
follows on being, if one acts like a minister, it seems that one is a minister.
The meaning of the word “ministry,” which until now was reserved for Orders,
seems to have changed. Officially, “what up to now were called minor orders are
henceforth called ‘ministries.’”
Significantly,
John Paul II has shown a resistance to the tendency of Ministeria Quaedam.
Indeed, Christifideles Laici (1988), raises a red flag concerning the
earlier document. The pope suggests that the document “be reconsidered, bearing
in mind the present practice of local churches and above all indicating
criteria which ought to be used in choosing those destined for each ministry.”[5] In what follows, I want to probe for the
noetic, ontological, and theological roots of John Paul II’ s reticence. Along the way, I hope to show that insistence
on the difference in essence between the lay faithful and the ordained on the
level of sacramental office , far from reinstating a new clericalism,
actually goes hand in hand with a new valorization of the existential
priesthood that the laity are called in a special way to exercise in the middle
of the world.
The Magisterium of John Paul II
In an address entitled “The Diversity of Charisms”[6] to
participants at a symposium on “The Participation of the Lay Faithful in the
Priestly Ministry,” organized by the Congregation for the Clergy in 1994, John
Paul II raised a note of warning concerning the present state of ambiguity in
the use (and therefore meaning) of the word “ministry,” inasmuch as this use
blurs the difference, which the pope insists is “ontological” and not merely
“functional,” between laity and ordained priests. In this context, the pope
makes a significant remark: “We cannot increase the communion and unity of the
Church by clericalizing the lay faithful or by laicizing the priests.”
The meaning of the term “ministry” is an issue of
significant concern in Christifideles Laici. Consider the following key
text:
[T]o speak of the participation of the lay
faithful in the pastoral ministry of priests it is first of all necessary to
reflect carefully on the term “ministry” and on the various meanings it can have
in theological and canonical language.
For some time now it has been
customary to use the word “ministries” not only for the officia and munera
exercised by pastors in virtue of the Sacrament of Orders, but also for those
exercised by the lay faithful in virtue of the baptismal priesthood. The
terminological question becomes even more complex and delicate when all the
faithful are recognized as having the possibility of supplying—by official
deputation given by pastors—certain functions more proper to clerics, which,
nevertheless, do not require the character of Orders.
It must be admitted that the language becomes
doubtful, confused and hence not helpful for expressing the doctrine of the
faith whenever the difference “of essence and not merely of degree” between the
baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood is in any way obscured.[7]
The pope specifies that the failure to make the
ontological distinction between ordained priests and laity “runs the risk of
underrating the theological proprium of the laity,” that is, secularity,
and “the specific ontological bond, which unites the priesthood to Christ the
High Priest and Good Shepherd.”[1] Concerning the latter, John Paul II clarifies
that the laity do not share “in an ontological participation (either temporary
or partial) in the ordained ministry proper to pastors.” Rather, their “every
ecclesial action or function—including those for which the pastors ask them to
stand in, where possible—is rooted ontologically in their common participation
in Christ’s priesthood.”[8]
The pontiff insists in Christifideles Laici that
the laity can, indeed, exercise ministries, and this “with constant reference
to the one source, the ‘ministry of Christ’—the ‘holy diakonia’ he lived
for the good of his Body the Church and, through the Church, for that of the
whole world.” But he issues a caveat: “There is an urgent pastoral need to
clarify and purify terminology, because behind it there can lurk dangers far
more treacherous than one may think. It is a short step from current language
to conceptualization.”[9]
Finally, at the end of the document, the pope revisits the 1987 synod’ s call
to revise Ministeria Quaedam: “a great variety of consequences follow
from these reflections and should find expression in the revision of the Motu
Proprio Ministeria Quaedam, as explicitly requested by the Fathers
attending the 1987 synod.” He then enjoins the Congregation for the Clergy to
continue in this work of revision.
The danger that the pope sees, we would argue, is the
destruction of the Church as a communion of irreducible personal services—services
that originate in and from different ontological configurations of the person
that are nonetheless identical with Christ’s self-gift. What the Pope is resisting, then, is the
“dumbing down” of the Church into a political-democratic society of univocal
performances.[10] We will explore the reasons for this
resistance in greater detail in the next section.
The Note to the Instruction
Regarding Collaboration of
Nonordained Faithful in Priests’ Sacred Ministry
In 1997, an Instruction appeared under the
ungainly moniker of Certain Questions Regarding Collaboration of Nonordained
Faithful in Priests’ Sacred Ministry;[11]
it was published, unprecedently, over the signatures of all eight Dicasteries
of the Roman Curia. A French-language report, entitled Note, which was
sent by the Vatican to bishops’ conferences regarding the document’s
presentation, opened with the following words:
It ought to be made clear that this document contains
nothing new: it simply repeats the norms laid down by the council, by canon law
(which is simply the same thing expressed in juridical terms), etc., and above
all it builds on all that the magisterium of the Church already had to say in a
positive way about the role of the laity, and especially that of women,
in the mission of the Church and evangelization[12]
(emphasis mine).
It
is important to understand the Note as the interpreter of the Instruction;
the Note is not an authoritative document, but it is significant because
it was issued from the Vatican precisely as an explanatory statement along with
others related to the Instruction. What is most conspicuous is the Note’s
ontological and epistemological incisiveness. The Note points the
reader, not toward a discussion of ministry as activity, but toward the theological
principles concerning ministry. These theological principles reflect the
bi-millennial faith-experience of the at once radical identity, and yet
essential difference, between the ministerial priesthood and the common
priesthood of the laity.
The Note
points first to the fact that “the church lives the sacrament of Orders as a
freely given gift”[13]
whereby “ministers … are ontologically configured to him (Christ).”[14]
It insists that “it is only on the basis of the relevant theological principles
(i.e. about being) that it can be understood why certain abuses against the
church’s discipline are dangerous. This is why it is the first part of the
instruction, which presents these principles in a positive way that should be
stressed.”[15] The Note
is then equally incisive and strong in asserting that “the laity, by virtue of
the holiness of their baptism, have an urgent duty toward the material and
spiritual world.…”[16]
Further on it adds, “may this document lead the laity to become fully aware of
what is specific to them and prepare
them for the task that is truly theirs in the world and in the church, rather
than encourage them to view as a promotion the fact that they fulfill other
tasks that they exercise as substitutes.”[17]
The
implication of the statements cited above is that, as gift, the ministerial
priesthood is an ontological reality freely given to the Church that is
not already present simply because of being a Christian. Baptism gives all a
share in the priesthood of Christ, which is self-giving, but it does not give
all the power to act as ordained ministers in the office of representing the
Bridegroom vis-Ã -vis the Bride. John Paul II had said as much in Pastores
Dabo Vobis 13:
the
priest shares in Christ’s consecration and mission in a specific and
authoritative way, through the sacrament of holy orders, by virtue of which he
is configured in his being to Jesus Christ, head and shepherd, and
shares in the mission of ‘preaching the good news to the poor’ in the name and
person of Christ himself”[18]
(emphasis mine).
The Note
not only affirms the ontological configuration of the priest to Christ to act
in his Person, it also affirms the unique and different ontological
configuration of the laity to Christ the priest, enabling them to perform “an
urgent duty toward the material and spiritual world.”[19]
This, the Note says, is something distinctively “lay—that is, the
consecration of the world,”[20]
which is different essentially, and not only in degree, from ministeriality.
The laity do something radically different because they are priests in a
radically different way.
The Note
confronts and rejects the advocacy of ministries for the sake of “functionality
and good organization.” Its criterion is, as we have seen, the “ontological
configuration” of the minister as “freely given gift.” The document reads: “The
ordained ministry of bishops, priests and deacons belongs to the very structure
of the Church.” This structure entails, moreover, a differentiation in modes of
participating in Christ’s priesthood. As John Paul II says, the layman, while a
priest, is not so because of an “ontological participation (either temporary or
partial) in the ordained ministry proper to pastors,”[21]
but because “the laity’s every ecclesial action or function—including those for
which the pastors ask them to stand in, where possible—is rooted ontologically
in their common participation in Christ’s priesthood.”[22]
St.
Paul affirms that the fundamental structure of the Church is defined by Christ,
the Bridegroom, in his relation to his “Thou,” the ecclesial Bride. The “laity”
participate in the priesthood of Christ primarily through the bridal
“fiat” of the Church. In this sense, all Christians are and remain lay
people. So much so that the pope can turn a still quite clericalized account of
priesthood on its head with the startling affirmation that the “Church of Mary”[23]
exercises and enjoys a priority over the “Church of Peter”:
This Marian
profile is also—even perhaps more so—fundamental and characteristic for the
Church as is the apostolic and Petrine profile to which it is profoundly
united…. The Marian dimension of the Church is antecedent to that of the
Petrine, without being in any way
divided from it or being less complementary. Mary Immaculate precedes
all others, including obviously Peter himself and the Apostles. This is so, not
only because Peter and the Apostles, being born of the human race under the
burden of sin, form part of the Church which is ‘holy from out of sinners,’ but
also because their triple function has no other purpose except to form
the Church in line with the ideal of sanctity already programmed and prefigured
in Mary”[24]
(italics mine).
The real ontological structure of the Church—its true
hierarchical structure—is not a clericalized pyramid of power[25]
in which “advancement” means “raising the laity ‘upwards’ into the structural
level of the hierarchy, promoting them into the ranks or at least into the
function of the clergy.”[26]
“The ‘ontology’ of Church structure indicates the substantial priority
of the ‘Christian condition’ (the common priesthood). ‘With you I am a
Christian; for you I am the bishop,’ said Augustine of Hippo. With respect to
the common priesthood, the ‘priestly ministry’ element has a relative
character, theologically subordinate: ‘Christ instituted the hierarchical
priesthood for the benefit of the common priesthood.”[27]
The common priesthood belongs to every member of the
Church as such. It is a specific existential participation in the priesthood of
Jesus Christ. Its pattern is Mary. The
crucial point is that this is the basic condition of all christifideles—from
the Pope down—and is in a sense the love of the Church. Consequently, “layman” no longer means merely
one who is not an ordained priest. Rather it means, positively, one who
embodies the reality of the Church in a specific sharing in Christ’s
priesthood. This takes away nothing of
the fact that the ordained priesthood is an office, requiring a distinct
ontological configuration, representing Christ vis-Ã -vis his Bridegroom.
What
is at stake here, then, are not functions of power in an objectified structure,
but an “organic convergence”[28]
of service performed by subjects oriented in distinct ways toward
the common mission of evangelization.[1] The Note rejects the notion that
priests and laypeople fall under a sort of general rubric called “ministry,”
differing only in their function. Rather, “layman” and “minister” are
irreducible ontological configurations of the human person as Christifidelis.
Consequently, laity and ordained priests simultaneously share a common
experience of the one priesthood of Christ, even as this common experience is
intrinsically differentiated in terms of the irreducibly distinct dimensions of
the self-gift that this one priesthood implies.
“Ontological Configuration”
of Laymen and Priests
The
positivism that has us all enthralled deflates ontology to function and
inflates “ministry” to a “mission” that reduces the Church to a clericalized
structure apart from the world. The mission that is the proprium[29]of
the laity then becomes “ministry,” while the world is emptied of the presence
of Christ. The Church becomes clericalized, while the world becomes
“secularized” in the pejorative sense. By calling us to transcend the “level of
our categories,”[30] the Note
encourages us to cease replacing the layman’s experience of being within
the horizon of the existential priesthood with an abstract and objectivized
category of “ministry” as a functional performance. The Note touches the
epistemological root of the problem when it says, “our modern frame of mind
leads us to understand far more easily the concept of function and far less
easily to understand what is meant by ontological configuration.”[31]
Let us then in what follows use this notion of ontological configuration to
explore more deeply the unity and distinctness of laity and ordained priests as
christifideles.
1. Identical
in Christ and therefore equal as priests… In order to deal adequately with
the ministry problem, we need an ontology of the “I” that recognizes both its
freedom—understood itself as a matter of ontology—and its continuity with
cosmic being. Otherwise, we lose the identity of the person and the distinction
of priesthoods. Now, meaning comes from the experience of being.[32]
The correct strategy for disengaging the respective ontological underpinnings
of both layman and priest will, therefore, consist in going to the millenary
faith-experience of the Church progressively disclosed through the
consciousness and voice of the Magisterium, which has accelerated into a
notable development of doctrine during the Second Vatican Council. There we
find at least two hard distinctions begging for ontological profiling: 1)
ordained ministers and laity share in the one priesthood of Christ but in
essentially different ways, not just by degree, and 2) secularity is the unique
characteristic of the laity.
The grounding
Magisterial text for the simultaneous equality and dissimilarity of priests and
laymen is found in 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 none the less ordered one to another; each in
its own proper way shares in the one priesthood of Christ.” This sharing “in
the one priesthood of Christ” highlights the radical equality of all the
baptized, baptism being the sacrament of faith. The reason for this equality
lies in the fact that sharing in the priesthood of Christ and Christian faith
are one and the same.
We
must understand this unity of faith and priesthood against the backdrop of the
development in consciousness, and therefore doctrine, in the Second Vatican
Council’s epistemological integration of the subject into the meaning of
Christian faith. The Fathers of the Council were particularly concerned to
retrieve what it means to be a believing subject. Specifically, they sought to
highlight the anthropological profile of faith as a person in fact exercises
it. Once the noetic horizon came to include the believing subject, what emerged
was a specific “attitude”: “the obedience of faith.” This “obedience” enfolds
the response of the mind to propositional truth within a more fundamental act
of total abandonment to God: self-gift.[33] This understanding of faith as radical gift
of self moved the Council out of the intellectualist-rationalist tradition of
the Enlightenment into the experiential phenomenon of priesthood in ontological
conformity to Christ.
Against
the backdrop of this development, we propose the following thesis, which we
will then develop in the rest of this section: to be a fully realized human
being, a christifidelis, and to be a priest in Jesus Christ, are one and
the same thing as self-gift. Christological anthropology—which understands that
“man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the
sincere gift of himself”[34]—consists
in a unity of Christian faith and Christian priesthood grounded in the same
christological forma essendi : self-gift.
The Church has understood the priesthood of
Jesus Christ to be a unique kind of mediation. Unlike pagan priesthood, in
which something is given by a
mediator, or even the Old Testament priesthood, in which the victim is still a
“thing,” or another, offered by a priest, the priesthood of Christ
uniquely brings together the giver and the given in the same “I” of a divine
Person. In dynamic terms, the divine “I” of the Logos makes his own the human
will of the man Jesus of Nazareth (who he is) and speaks with it as his very
self: “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.”[35]
Christ is mediator, then, insofar as the “I” of the Logos makes the humanity of
the man Jesus his own by an act of self-determination in order to take—and
subdue—the sin of all human history by the gift of self to death in obedience
to the Father. In this way, Jesus Christ is priest of his own existence in a
manner paradigmatic for the believer who is called to walk “the way” of Christ.
Jesus Christ is priest insofar as he is the
Son made man. Moreover, for Christ to be man and to be priest is for him to be
self-gift. Consequently, if every baptized person is empowered by the sacrament
of Baptism to make and become the gift of self, then to become a person, to
become a priest, and to become Christ are all one and the same thing for every christifidelis.
As the Vatican Instruction insists: “The essential difference between
the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood is not
found in the priesthood of Christ, which remains forever one and indivisible,
nor in the sanctity to which all of the faithful are called.”[36]
Priest and layman are equal in their sharing in the one priesthood of Jesus
Christ as self-gift. This does not mean that they are no longer irreducibly
different, but only that the differentiating factor presupposes the self-gift
of the existential priesthood of Jesus.
2. …But differently. Self-Gift as an
Ontologic of Dis-similarity: The Magisterium asserts that layman and priest
equally share in the one priesthood of Christ, but in essentially different
ways. As we saw above, “each in its own proper way shares in the one priesthood
of Christ.” The task is to see how laymen and ordained priests are radically
equal as priests of Jesus Christ, yet different in essence and not merely in
degree. It is most challenging to try to grasp ontologically how two things can
be equal to a third thing, but not equal to each other.
The answer lies in the fact that the relationality of the
person is constitutive, and not merely accidental, to his
character as substance-in-self. But relation is always a specific orientation
differing from person to person. For example, Father and Son are relations in
the Trinity, but they are opposite, as engendering and as generated obedience,
respectively. Thus, analogously to the way in which the trinitarian Persons are
equal as God, but different as Persons, the self-gift of priest and layman can
be equal, even as ministerial priesthood and common priesthood differ
(essentially). In other words, they are equal as self-gift, yet they are
different in the orientation of the gift.
As
with the difference of Father, Son and Spirit in the Trinity, or between Christ
as Bridegroom and the Church as Bride (Eph 5:25) (which is the prototype of the
relation between the two priesthoods), we are dealing here with an
opposition/complementarity structuring the relation of persons as gift. As we
saw above, John Paul II has offered his version of this “vectorial” difference
through a distinction between the “Church of Mary” and “Church of Peter”
(which, of course, interpenetrate circumincessively). He plays on the image of
the Church as body and bride of Christ in the tension of being one with Christ
and yet at the same time being in relation to him. In other words, layman and
ordained priest are equal as priests of Christ, yet dis-similar
as complementary (opposing) relations.
The
Church is indeed the body in which Christ the head is present and active, but
she is also the bride who proceeds like a new Eve from the open side of the
redeemer on the cross. Hence Christ stands before the Church and nourishes
and cherishes her (Eph 5:29), giving his life for her. The priest is called
to be the living image of Jesus Christ, the spouse of the Church.[37]
The
pope reaffirms the equality of ordained priest and laymen when he says, “of
course, he will always remain a member of the community as a believer alongside
his other brothers and sisters who have been called by the Spirit,” but he then
goes on to assign a difference based on differing modes of ontological
configuration to Christ: “but in virtue of his configuration to Christ, the
head and shepherd, the priest stands in this spousal relationship with regard
to the community.”[38]
George
Weigel, summarizing the pope’s thought on this score, points out that sanctity
occurs in the exercise of self-giving that is the sharing in the priesthood of
Christ via the sacrament of Baptism, while the participation in Christ’s
priesthood through the sacrament of Orders implants the power to act in
persona Christi, but in no way guarantees personal holiness in the ordained
priest. “The message was unmistakable. Discipleship came before authority in
the Church, and sanctity came before power, even the apostolically transmitted
priestly power to ‘bind and loose’ sins.”[39]
The upshot of this is the rarely heard, but critically important “substantial
priority”[40] of the
priesthood of the laity over the ministerial priesthood.
A
helpful way to illuminate this “substantial priority” theologically is to see
that, in the one priesthood of Christ, office and self-gift are one, with a
certain priority of self-gift. The Church, as Church, shares in Christ’s
priesthood primarily under the profile of self-gift. Hence the priority of the
Marian dimension of the Church. All the baptized as such share in Christ’s
priesthood in this ecclesial way. Thus, rather than defining the laity
negatively as those who are not ordained priests, we can define them positively
as the basis of an ontological configuration to Christ’s priesthood in this
Marian mode. At the same time, this leaves room for another complementary
ontological configuration to Christ’s priesthood in the mode of sacramental
office as representation of the Bridegroom vis-Ã -vis the Church; Hence the
Petrine dimension of the Church. Of course, the two priesthoods are
inseparable, and interpenetrate circumincessively—even as they never lose their
ontological distinctiveness.
3. Beyond
Functionalities of Power. As equal,
yet essentially different, the priesthood of the laity and the ministerial
priesthood enjoy an “organic convergence”[41]
in a “spirituality of communion”[42]
whereby their irreducible differences become a mutual support in the common
apostolic mission of the Church.
We
are far from the homogeneity-in-functionality of ministries here. It is
imperative to understand that the relevant epistemological horizon is indeed
that of the communio personarum. Persons are not first persons
and then relate to one another in some accidental fashion; persons
achieve personhood precisely by being in communion with others, and more
exactly, by being loved by others and serving them. If persons were not
self-gift, if they were not relations, they would not be who they
are.
The
prototype of this relational personhood is the Trinity. The Father is not
Father except as engendering the Son. He is not first Father and then engenders
the Son. He is Father insofar as He is the act of engendering the
Son. Something analogous obtains in the Church. We do not enter the Church as
individuals but as faithful; the act of faith is a death event of
self-giving adherence to the Person of Jesus Christ. We are members of the
Church, not as object-like individuals, but as subjective selves,
i.e., self-giving faithful, who have passed three times through the water of Baptism,
the symbol of death-to-self, and been inserted into the new “I” of Christ
himself. Ratzinger, speaking of the event of becoming a Christian, says:
In other
words, it is an exchange of the old subject for another. The ‘I’ ceases to be
an autonomous subject standing in itself. It is snatched away from itself and
fitted into a new subject. The ‘I’ is not simply submerged, but it must really release its grip on itself in
order then to receive itself anew in and together with a greater ‘I.’ The
Church is in no wise a separate subject endowed with its own subsistence. The
new subject is much rather ‘Christ’ himself, and the Church is nothing but the
space of this new unitary subject, which is, therefore, much more than mere
social interaction. It is an application of the same Christological singular
found in the Letter to the Galatians.[43]
It is only when we understand the Church
primarily in the dimension of self-gift in act that we can understand the
radical equality of priests and laity as such self-gift, while realizing
that equal gifts can be oriented in essentially different ways. We also
understand that where the gift is reduced to the external performance of
certain functions, we have a “dumbing down” of “ministries,” to the lowest
common denominator—and, as a result, a conception of the layman as a mere
helper of the priest, rather than as one who is in an organic convergence with
him on the basis of a proper and positive relational identity.[44]
The major point to keep in mind is
the irreducibly different ontological configuration[45] of layman and priest. The layman has an
indispensable positive role in the Church. But the layman is never a
minister. To be a lay minister would be an oxymoron. One becomes a minister only
through the sacrament of Orders (LG, 10), whose “vector” points towards
service of the laity, just as the “I” (Logos) of Christ points as gift to death
for the Bride (Church). If the layman exercises ministry, it is always
by deputation, for a period of time and never in an activity that demands the
unique empowerment of Orders.[46]
Yet this is not to put the layman in
a second-class status, but to highlight the “substantial priority” of the
existential priesthood of all the christifideles as the Marian
sharing in the priesthood of Jesus Christ that pertains to the Church as
such. Once again, the irreducibly distinct ontological configurations of
laymen and ordained have to do, not with functionalities of power, but with
Christ’s self-gift—which laymen already share in a unique (Marian) way by virtue of
Baptism.
Secularity
After sketching out the conventional model of the “power
pyramid” with God on top, followed by Pope, Bishops, clergy, and finally, at
the bottom, lay people, Cormac Burke was asked by one of his students: “But,
where is the world?” He remarked “Where indeed is the world?” “The theory that
clergy and laity are competing for ‘power’ takes energies—the salt and light
and leaven of Christianity—that are meant to be directed towards the world, for
its transformation, and turns them inwards, to be consumed in sterile and at
times acrimonious debates about church organization and structures and
functions.”[47]
Until we disentangle the proprium[48]of
the layman from “ministries,” we will fail to see how secularity organically
flows from the positivity of the layman’s baptismal priesthood. This is not to
say that laypeople have no role in the Church. Both clergy and laity have
responsibilities for both the world and the Church— differently. What we must
challenge is precisely the dualism between the world and the Church conceived
as a clerical power structure—of which the attribution of “ministries” to
laypeople would only make them a part. But this would only keep laypeople from
being the (Marian) heart of the Church in the middle of the world. And it is
precisely the clericalization of the laity that has progressively dried up the
presence of Christ at the center of society for a millennium and a half—and is
now making this absence even worse.[49]
Secularity is a term that is
hardly ever used in the contemporary Church. And when it is, it is improperly
confused with secularism, which connotes, pejoratively, a separation of
the world from God. The starting point for evaluating the meaning of secularity
as found in the documents of Vatican II[50]
is the address of Paul VI on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Apostolic Constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia. Addressing members of
secular institutes, he said—and John Paul II builds the core of Paul VI’s
remarks into Christifideles Laici[51]—that
secularity
is not simply your condition as people living in the world, an external
condition. It is rather an attitude, the attitude of people who are aware that they
have a responsibility, being in the world, to serve the world, to make it as
God would have it, more just, more human, to sanctify it from within.
Paul VI goes on to say that
This
attitude is primarily one of respect for the world’s rightful autonomy, its
values, its laws (cf. Gaudium et Spes 36) though of course this does not
imply that the world is independent of God, Creator and final end of all. One
of the important dimensions of this characteristic quality of your secularity
is that you take the natural order seriously, working to bring it to perfection
and to holiness so that things which are necessarily a part of life in the
world may be integrated into the spirituality, the training, the ascetics, the
structure, the external forms, the activities, of your Institute. Thus is will
be possible to fulfill what Primo Feliciter expresses in these words:
“(that) your own special character, the secular, may be reflected
in everything”[52]
(emphasis mine).
The key word in these passages
is “attitude.” Attitude denotes something personal and interior. Paul VI is
thus affirming that secularity is not something “out there” that so to say rubs
off on one or to which one conforms in order to become “secular.” As an attitude
that is interior to the person, secularity, with all that it implies (work,
occupations, outlook, lifestyle, ways of acting and behaving), is not added on
to the Christian vocation from outside but flows from its very core as a
sharing in Christ’s priesthood.
As we have seen above, Jesus Christ
is priest par excellence as mediator between men and the Father through
his unique gift of self. The baptized person shares in this priesthood by
making the same gift in the context of work in the world. The laity fulfill
their calling to be persons through the creation of secularity by living out
their unique way of sharing in Christ’s priesthood. It is the world, and work
in it, as the proprium of the layman, not ministries, that delivers to
the layman the radical call to priestly existence. And it is in this vein that
we are called to love the world passionately.[53]
The laity have what might be called
an existential priesthood, rooted in baptism. The locus of this priesthood is
the act of self-gift. This self-gift, we have seen, is to be performed in the
world, which thus becomes intrinsic to the priesthood of the laity. But it may seem
strange in this context that the Magisterium refers to secularity in terms of
autonomy. How, indeed, can self-gift and autonomy stand together?
Autonomy, of course, has the
connotation of self-determination. I want to propose that this self-determination
is the locus of the self-gift that is the core of the existential priesthood of
the laity. Conversely, the existential priesthood of the laity is personal
self-determination seen in its fullest, most paradigmatic form. But if this is
the case, it must be true that self-gift and, indeed, obedience, is not
extrinsic to what we mean by self-determination. Obviously, it exceeds the
scope of the present reflection to explain in detail why and how this is so.
One could certainly make a compelling philosophical case for this claim. But
there is also a Christological dimension to this claim that inwardly completes
the philosophical one. Christ, the Second Vatican Council teaches us, reveals
man to himself.[54] In Christ, we see the unity of freedom as
self-determination and obedience; Christ is perfectly free precisely to the
extent that, in love, he obeys the Father, a prior relation to whom shapes his
freedom from the outset. The prototype of self-determination, then, is the free
human obedience in love of Jesus Christ.
That self-gift in loving obedience
and autonomy are two sides of the same coin brings us back to the assertion the
laity have an existential priesthood, expressed in self-gift in the world. We
now see why this connection between existential priesthood and the world is so
fundamental to the proprium of the laity: the existential priesthood of
the laity, exercised as self-gift in free obedience, is the fullest meaning of
autonomous worldly activity. Note, however, that we can say this precisely
because the paradigm of freedom is Christological. The laity’s existential
priesthood, with its self-gift in loving obedience, is a participation in
Christ’ s own priestly self-offering in a free obedience, a free obedience that
we see in the priestly gesture of submitting to the Father, rendering the
cumulative sinfulness of all men concentrated in that will.[55]
In other words, the existential priesthood of the laity is the full paradigm of
man’s autonomous worldly activity precisely because it is a specific mode of
sharing in Christ’s priesthood. If, in fact, Christ reveals the primordial
figure of freedom[56] and of
autonomy,[57] he is
also the paradigm of secularity.[58]
Secularity, then, is a fundamental dimension
of the human person enlightened by the revelation of Jesus Christ. It is
“respect for the world’s rightful autonomy.” But what is thus respected is not
some “thing” out there that has “autonomy.” The only autonomy that we are privy
to experientially, and therefore know in the biblical sense, is
in fact our own as persons when we experience the freedom, the joy, and the
agony of self-determination. The import of Gaudium et Spes 24
underscores that the human person, “man,” is “the only earthly creature God has
willed for itself.” This means that only the self—the “I”—has autonomy. The
truly autonomous self, however, is not the Cartesian cogito. It is
rather the self of the human person who “fully discovers his true self only in
a sincere giving of himself,” i.e., in action. However, precisely because what
is in play is not the Cartesian cogito, this action of self-gift can
only occur in an encounter with another
who awakens, sustains, and brings to light the full meaning of
self-determination as a response to love in free obedience. This other is,
ultimately, Christ, the “I” who is the Revealer of the Godhead and of humanity.
By the same token, the true “I” of man is the believing self as gift from and
back to this Christological “I.” The paradigmatic act of autonomy is the act of
divinized human freedom as seen archetypically in Christ’s self-gift in
obedience-to-death to the Father and, from our side, in Mary’s unconditional fiat.
Secularity, in this perspective, is an attitude of respect for the autonomy of
the person, and his world—as autonomy is illumined in its fundamental meaning
by Jesus Christ.
The true autonomy of created being is
discovered only in the historical encounter with Jesus Christ wherein
the “I” says Yes, in free obedience, to his giving me to myself as gift. This
historical encounter, in fact, is “the privileged locus of the encounter with
the act of existence, and with metaphysical inquiry.”[59]
It is only when the whole of reality lights up in this encounter that it
becomes a world---a secularity with an “autonomy” of its own. And so secularity
is essentially Christian. Secularity is a priestly way of being and living
because it flows from Christ’s own freedom of self-determination as self-sacrifice
before the Father. It is lived out in an attitude of respect for the freedom of
others—which finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ’s Paschal mystery.
Secularity, then, must be interpreted primarily in terms of Christian faith and
morality, and not by a given state of affairs that is taken as an a priori
that is exterior, and perhaps contrary, to the meaning of the person as
revealed in Jesus Christ. In other words, secularity should be judged and
valued—or rather, discovered— from the starting-point of a lived Christian
faith, and of what Christian faith reveals to us about man, about the world,
and about our destiny. What we mean by self-determination and the autonomy of
worldly activity must take its basic shape within Christ’s revelation of man to
himself.
Thus, secularity—not ministerial
functions within the Church as institution—is the proper context, “the
theological proprium,”[60]
in which the laity “seek the Kingdom of God.”[61]
As such, secularity is “not only an anthropological and sociological reality,
but in a specific way, a theological and ecclesiological reality as well.”[62]
It is not merely a “dimension” of the layman; it is considered his “characteristic.”[63]
Secularity characterizes the laity because the world is intrinsic to
their exercising the priesthood of mediation. It is what uniquely and
specifically characterizes them as being other Christs and
constituting the Body of Christ, the Church. They become Christ, and therefore
Church, in the profound sense of a mystical identity, precisely by living an
ordinary life in the world: they study, they work, they form relationships as
friends, professionals, members of society, cultures, and so forth. The world
is a specific vocation for laypeople as the place of their self-gift. It is the
place in which they “are charged with carrying out an apostolic mission.”[64]
John Paul observes:
Their
specific competence in various human activities is, in the first place, a
God-given instrument to ‘enable the proclamation of Christ to reach people,
mold communities, and have a deep and incisive influence in bringing Gospel
values to bear in society and culture.’
They are thereby spurred on to place their own skills effectively at the
service of the ‘new frontiers,’ which are seen as challenges to the Church’s
saving presence in the world. The priests for their part have a primary and
irreplaceable role: to help souls, one by one, through the sacraments,
preaching and spiritual direction, to open themselves to the gift of grace. A
spirituality of communion will best strengthen the role of each ecclesial
element.[65]
Summary and Conclusion
Are
laymen ever ministers? It seems not. The layman is a priest without being a
minister. The priest is a minister because of the Sacrament of Orders that
empowers him to act in persona Christi in a specific way.
The priesthood of the ministerial priest is in one sense functionally
higher than that of the laity, because the laity cannot exercise their
priesthood without the service (ministry) of the minister. Mary engenders
Peter, but Mary cannot function without Peter. The priesthood of laity is substantially
superior to the ministerial priesthood, because it is the presence in the
layman of the very anthropology of Christ himself as relation to the Father,
and, therefore, of holiness and divinization. The ministerial priesthood is
substantially lower because it may be possessed and exercised without achieving
the divinization of the self-gift. This is why John Paul II describes the
Church of Peter as in service to the Church of Mary. Both ministerial priest
and laity are radically equal, but irreducibly different as “opposite” forms of
relational identity. The paradigm suggested is the equality but dissimilarity
of Bridegroom to Bride inter-relating within a spirituality of communion.
Together, layman and priest converge, not in the univocity of “ministries,” but
organically with different orientations in the re-evangelization of a truly
secular world that, by walking the way of Christ Jesus in act, becomes ever
more secular. Once again, the model is the one priesthood of Christ, shared in
two distinct but circumincessive ways.
Because
the Church has been progressively clericalized since the conversion of
Constantine,[66] the
time is now ripe, and the blueprint clear, for the great work of universal
holiness within society and for the creation of a truly human culture that is
genuinely secular and autonomous precisely because it is formed from the heart
of the Church. Since the conscience of the believer is the same conscience of
the citizen, the dignity of being another Christ is ultimately one with the
dignity of the human person. This is not a “dumbing down” of a radically
supernatural Christianity to a cheap humanism. It is an awakening to the
presence of transcendent triune divinity, calling man to his supernatural
destiny from within the immanent [67]and
the ordinary. The task before us does not consist in “imposing on non-believers
a vision based on faith, but of interpreting and defending the values rooted in
the very nature of the human person. In this way charity will necessarily
become service to culture, politics, the economy and the family, so that the
fundamental principles upon which depend the destiny of human beings and the
future of civilization will be everywhere respected.”[68]
The proprium of the layman is to be at work in the heart of the secular
world where both the Church and society grow at the rhythm of his
transformation into Christ. “We cannot increase the communion and unity of the
Church”—or we might add, society— “by clericalizing the lay faithful or by
laicizing priests.”[69][70]
[1] Bishop
Matthew Clark, “The Relationship of the Bishop and Lay Ecclesial Minister,” Origins
(April 5, 2001, vol. 30, no. 42): 677.
[2]
Promulgated on August 15, 1972 and ordered into force on January 1, 1973.
[3] Paul VI, Motu Proprio Ministeria Quaedam (15
August 1972). English translation: Documents on the Liturgy 1963-1979
(Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1982) 908-911.
[5] Christifideles
Laici 23.
[6] “The
Diversity of Charisms” (April 22, 1994), in The Pope Speaks (April
1994), 308-312.
[7] Instruction
on Certain Questions 1
[8] Cf. the
post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis 11.
[8] “The
Diversity of Charisms,” 311.
[10] “On
the other hand, it must always be remembered that the Church ‘by its specific
nature is a reality diverse from the simple human society,’ and therefore ‘it
is necessary to affirm that the mentality and current practice in cultural and
sociopolitical trends of our times cannot be transferred automatically to the
Church” (“The Diversity of Charisms,” 309-310).
[11] Origins,
November 27, 1997 (vol. 27, no. 24): 399-411 (including the Note).
[12]
Ibid., Note 1 (409).
[13]
Ibid., Note 2 (409).
[14]
Ibid., Note 3 (409).
[15]
Ibid., Note 2 (409).
[16]
Ibid., Note 2 (409).
[17]
Ibid., Note 7 (409).
[18] Pastores
dabo vobis 18.
[21] “The
Diversity of Charisms,” 311.
[23]
George Weigel, Witness to Hope (Harper Collins, 1999), 577: “The Curia
and the hierarchy, expressions of the Petrine Church, existed because of
the Marian Church of disciples. The Marian Church receding and making possible
the Petrine Church—this was not the way
many curial officials, not to mention millions of Catholic laity and clergy,
were accustomed to thinking about Catholicism. But it was how John Paul
proposed that they should.”
[24]
“Address to the Cardinal and Prelates of the Roman Curia” (December 22, 1987)
in L’Osservatore Romano, December 23, 1987.
[25]
“‘Authority means power.’ In the Church too this concept of authority has been
and still is widespread. If we start from the principle that all authority
comes from God (cf. Rom 13:1; Jn 19:11), it is easy to form a mental picture of
how authority and power descend from God through the different ranks of the
hierarchy and finally reach the people. This could be depicted graphically in
the form of a ‘structure-pyramid’ or a ‘power-pyramid:’ God is at the
top of the pyramid. Under him, we are presented with the visible authorities
(the ‘power-structure’) of the Church: the hierarchy, the clergy; and under
them—in the lowest place, as the ultimate subjects— the Christian laity…. For those who conceive the Church in terms of
the pyramid just drawn, advancement of the laity can appear as a
straightforward matter, a goal whose pursuit takes an obvious direction. It
simply means raising the laity ‘upwards’ into the structural level of the
hierarchy, promoting them into the ranks or at least into the functions of the
clergy” (Cormac Burke, Authority and Freedom in the Church [Scepter,
1988], 109-110).
[27] Pedro
Rodriguez, “The Place of Opus Dei in the Church,” in Opus Dei in the Church
(Scepter, 1994), 29.
[28] “The
organic convergence of priests and laity is one of the privileged areas which
will give life and pastoral solidity to that ‘new energy’ whereby we all feel
invigorated after the Great Jubilee” (Address during an audience for
participants at a seminar on Novo millennio ineunte” March 17, 2001).
[29] It is
important to grasp that the most profound meaning of evangelization is not only
imparting concepts, but also sharing and helping share in the experience of the
Person of Jesus Christ, and thus fostering knowledge of him by that experience.
Of course, to know him, is already to possess eternal life (cf. Jn 17:3): “To
evangelize means to reveal this path—to teach the art of complete living. At
the beginning of his public life Jesus says: ‘I have come to evangelize the
poor’ (Lk 4:18). This means, ‘ I have come to respond to the fundamental
question of your existence. I am here to show you the path of life, the path to
happiness, I am, in fact, that path” (Joseph Ratzinger, “The Way to True
Happiness,” Inside the Vatican [August-September 2000]: 20).
[29]
“Similarly, by not making a clear
distinction, including in pastoral practice, between the baptismal and
hierarchical priesthood, one also runs the risk of underrating the theological proprium
of the laity and of forgetting the specific ontological bond which unites the
priesthood to Christ the High Priest and Good Shepherd” (Pastores dabo vobis
11).
[30] “It
is also a feature of our culture to have the honesty, the frankness, the
ability to tell things as they are and in this case to say that truth demands
that we admit that we are here confronted by a revealed mystery that is not on
the same level as our categories and that the way we use reason must preserve
its nature as mystery, and not replace it with our church structures” Note.
5.
[32]
Without the experience of the self as being, there is no context for the
experience of reality outside the self by the senses, and hence purely
empirical knowledge ends up as mere facts without “meaning.” There is no
reference to an experience of being; hence the turn to skepticism and nihilism.
“The turn towards practical knowledge was accomplished precisely by no longer
contemplating being in itself but only how it functioned with regard to our own
work. This means that in the separation of the question of truth from being and
in its shifting to the fact and the faciendum the very concept of truth
was itself fundamentally altered. The notion of the truth of being in itself
has been replaced by that of the utility of things for us… understanding means
seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground.
I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that
we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and
truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning” (Joseph
Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity [San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1990], 45-46.
[33] Dei
Verbum 5 reads: “‘The obedience of faith’ (Rom 16:26; cf. Rom 1:5; 2 Cor
10:5-6) must be given to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits
his entire self to God, making ‘the full submission of his intellect and will
to God who reveals.” Karol Wojtyla comments: “Faith, as these words show, is
not merely the response of the mind to an abstract truth. Even the statement,
true though it is, that this response is dependent on the will does not tell us
everything about the nature of faith. ‘ The obedience of faith’ is not bound to
any particular human faculty but relates to man’s whole personal structure and
spiritual dynamism. Man’s proper response to God’s self-revelation consists in
self-abandonment to God. This is the true dimension of faith, in which man does
not simply accept a particular set of propositions, but accepts his own
vocation and the sense of his existence” (Karol Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal [Knopf, 1979]), 20.
[35] Joseph
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986),
92-93.
[37] Pastores
dabo vobis 22.
[39]
George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 577.
[40]
“Thus, to say that ordination, the orientation of the priest to the faithful,
is essentially diakonia or service is equivalent to saying that the
‘ontology’ of Church structure indicates the substantial priority of the
‘Christian condition’ (the common priesthood). ‘With you I am a Christian; for
you I am the bishop,’ said Augustine of Hippo. With respect to the common
priesthood, the ‘priestly ministry’ element has a relative character,
theologically subordinate: ‘Christ instituted the hierarchical priesthood for
the benefit of the common priesthood’ (Karol Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal)”
(Pedro Rodriguez, “The Place of Opus Dei in the Church,” in Opus Dei
in the Church [Scepter, 1994], 29).
[41] “The
organic convergence of priests and laity is one of the privileged areas which
will give life and pastoral solidity to that ‘new energy,’ (Novo millennio
ineunte 15) whereby we all feel invigorated after the Great Jubilee. In
this context I wish to draw attention to the importance of that ‘spirituality
of communion’ emphasized in the Apostolic Letter (NMI 42-43)” (John Paul II,
“Address,” [March 17, 2001], 1).
[43] Joseph
Ratzinger, “The Spiritual Basis and
Ecclesial Identity of Theology,” in The Nature and Mission of
Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 54.
[44]
To be sure, as John Paul II has insisted, there is an intra-ecclesial
mission of the laity: “a good number of lay people in America legitimately
aspire to contribute their talents and charisms ‘to the building of the
ecclesial community.…’” (Ecclesia in America 44). But precisely in this context, the pope makes
reference to Christifideles Laici 23, which warns of confusing lay and
ordained priesthoods “by a too-indiscriminate use of the word ‘ministry,’ the confusion and the equating of the common
priesthood and the ministerial priesthood … the arbitrary interpretation of the
concept of ‘supply’ [supplere], the tendency towards a ‘clericalization’ of the lay faithful and the risk of creating,
in reality, an ecclesial structure of parallel service to that founded on the
sacrament of Orders” (Christifideles Laici 23, par. 6).
[45] The
Instruction: An Explanatory Note 5.
[46] To
consider, as Russell Shaw does, that “there is a problem if ‘deputation’ is understood as a necessary condition for
the very existence of a call to lay ministry, since this seems difficult to
reconcile with the idea that lay ministries arise immediately from baptism and
confirmation” is to miss the depth of the irreducibly different ontological
configurations introduced by the sacraments of Baptism and Orders.
[47]
Burke, Authority and Freedom in the Church, 121.
[48] “In
fact the Council, in describing the lay faithful’ s situation in the secular
world, points to it above all, as the place in which they receive their call
from God: ‘There they are called by God.’ This ‘place’ is treated and presented
in dynamic terms: the lay faithful ‘ live in the world, that is, in every one
of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary
circumstances of family and social life, from which the very fabric of their
existence is woven.’ They are persons
who live an ordinary life in the world: they study, they work, they form
relationships as friends, professionals, members of society, cultures, etc.
However, the Council considers their condition not simply an external and
environmental framework, but as a
reality destined to find in Jesus Christ the fullness of its meaning…. The
‘world’ thus becomes the place and the means for the lay faithful to fulfill
their Christian vocation because the world itself is destined to glorify
God the Father in Christ” (Christifideles laici, 15).
[49]Cardinal
Jean-Marie Lustiger told an international Congress of Catholic Laity that in
the years preceding the Second Vatican Council, there was a lively debate among
Western theologians, who were heirs to an ancient historical situation. This
situation… was characterized by “the confrontation between the spiritual power,
represented by the Church, especially the popes, and the temporal power,
represented by princes and emperors.” This situation gave origin to the
doctrine of the “two swords,” two powers, each of whom tried to prevail over
the other. When this political-ecclesial balance disappeared, these notions
were transferred “to the internal balance of the church, with a division of
competence between the laity on one hand, and priests on the other. Some said
the laity should manage the temporal, and the priests have authority and manage
religious realities. The laity should handle politics; and priests, worship and
the apostolate. Vatican II no longer took as a starting point the exercise of power
in the interior of the Christian sphere, but rather the vocation and mission of
the Church in the world, and the way in which her different members participate
in her. Since then, it is the concrete and historical reality of the sacraments
of baptism and holy orders, which permits the analysis of ecclesial society,
and not political and sociological concepts” (Zenit.org, Nov. 28, 2000).
[50]LG 31;
GS 32, 36, 41, 48; Apostolicam actuositatem 5.
[51]Christifideles
Laici 15.
[52]Paul
VI, “A Presence and an Action which will Transform the World From Within,”
February 2, 1972; AAS 64 (1972), 208.
[53]
“Passionately Loving the World,” the title of a homily preached on the campus
of the University of Navarre, October 8, 1967 by Blessed Josemaria Escriva de
Balaguer; it forms the last section of Conversations (Scepter, 1974),
113-123 in which the author professes: “I am a secular priest, a priest of
Jesus Christ, who is passionately in love with the world.”
[54]“In
reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of
man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to
come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the
mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings
to light his most high calling” (Gaudium et Spes 22).
[55]“For
our sakes he made him to be sin who knew nothing of sin, so that in him we
might become the justice of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
[56] “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).
[57] “Man’s genuine
moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of
the moral law, of God’s command… Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy,
or participated theonomy, since man’s free obedience to God’ s law
effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s
wisdom and providence” (Veritatis Splendor 41).
[58] Christifideles
Laici says as much quoting Paul VI: “the Church ‘has an authentic secular dimension, inherent to her inner
nature and mission, which is deeply rooted in the mystery of the Word
Incarnate, and which is realized in different forms through her members.’”
[60] “The
Diversity of Charisms,” 310.
[62] Christifideles
Laici 15.
[63] The
distinction between secularity as “dimension” and secularity as
“characteristic” bears on the distinction of layman and priest. Secularity of
“dimension” is a note of the entire Church inasmuch as Christ himself can be
considered the paradigm of secularity. As Christ is Head, the Church is Body,
both being one and same thing. Secularity as “characteristic,” however, refers
to the laity’s engagement in the world of work as “the place, the environment,
the means, or if you prefer, the tools and language of our response to the
caring love of God” (L’Osservatore Romano (no. 17, April 26, 1995), 3).
The point is: “what makes us holy is not work, but the action of
grace within us.” That grace moves us to make work a self-gift. In that
sense, work and the secular world are intrinsic to holiness, and therefore the
“characteristic” of, the layman.
[64] John
Paul II, Address during an audience for participants at a seminar on Novo
millennio ineunte organized by the Opus Dei Prelature, March 17, 2001, #2.
[66]
“Professor Stefan Swiezawski, the distinguished Polish historian of
philosophy who was instrumental in
bringing young Father Karol Wojtyla to the faculty of the Catholic University
of Lublin, once said that the post-Conciliar Church was ‘living in a new
epoch.’ ‘ Vatican II was not just one Council; it marked the end of the
Constantinian epoch, thank God. Now the Church has no army, no state. It is a
quite different situation.’ Working out
the implications of this post-Constantinian ecclesiology with an eye toward the
third millennium of Christian history has been one of the principal leitmotifs
of the pontificate of John Paul II” (George Weigel, “John Paul II and the
Priority of Culture,” First Things (February 1998): 24).
[68] Novo
Millennio Ineunte 51.
[69] “The
Diversity of Charisms,” 310.
