Integrating the Laity: The Introduction, Excesses, and Recentering of the Laity’s role in the Church

Perhaps the most human emotion we can feel is not solidarity, or joy.  Perhaps, when the rubber meets the road, our most human emotion is incredulity.  The feeling of disbelief or doubt in the face of reality - often times simply because it is proximately real, is a common response in the human mind.  Why is this?  Well, when our lofty philosophical or theological opinings suddenly become stark, physical realities, they hardly ever fit into the Platonic-esque purity of form that we boil them down to in our minds.  They are not cookie cutter, are wrought with real life complications, and, in the end, always somehow related to that ultimate wildcard that is another I’s subjectivity.  As long as the encountered reality can be held as foreign, distant, or other, we humans have no problem with it (think Jesus and His claim that no prophet was ever welcome in His own home, or even the hypothetical belief in Christ which is cast aside when things get real in the Eucharist).  But throw those complications of real-life into it?  We are left thinking to ourselves, “If we were a real [college, family, company, etc.], we wouldn’t have these issues!”  And, as reality would have it, the Church herself is not immune from the human emotion of incredulity when regarding herself and her members.

The Church, as has human nature of all time, has too often in the past searched for those individuals who hold the purest, highest, and most fullest participation in her teaching authority and ministerial mission, all to hold those people and those people only as therefore legitimate representatives of the Church.  In other words, to use the phraseology of George Wiegel, the Church viewed herself and her members in monarchical terms.  “In the monarchical model that shaped the Catholic imagination for centuries before Vatican II,” he writes, “the Pope is king, the bishops are nobles, the clergy and consecrated religious are gentry, and the laity are peasants.  The last have no responsibilities other than obedience and tithes, and when they are not praying, paying, or obeying (as an old saw has it), they are not being the Church in any significant way.  That concept, in John Paul's long-settled view, was a serious impediment to implementing the Council's teaching that the Church is a communio, a communion of believers, who together form the Body of Christ in the world and who all share, by baptism, in Christ's triple mission to evangelize, sanctify, and serve (Witness to Hope, p. 552).”

JPII was passionate about the Church as the whole body of Christ - not merely as different part participating in her to a greater or less extent.  And, he made sure that his teachings reflected that: from synodal documents drafted and ratified by a consensus of the magisterium to his own writings (both personal and pontifical), we see in his work a development of how the Church thinks of herself, and not merely how she interacts with the world. 

Now, at the close of this little essay, I do not have much time to address the dangers such development of thought can bring, legitimate though that development will be.  However, I would be remiss were I not to briefly mention those dangers, and, in closing, identify our own mission to the Church during this time of development.  Put simply, with development of thought comes the potential for excesses as the growing pains and adolescence of that thought runs its course.  In the wake of JPII’s enthusiastic inclusion of the laity in the mission of the Church, some confusion has inevitably arisen as to exactly what the laity’s role in the Church and her hierarchy is.  With the sunset of the sharp divide between clergy and laity comes a blurring of those lines which were once so clearly drawn.  

This, then, is the mission of the present-day Church as regards to furthering and codifying the progression of thought introduced by JPII: that the role of the laity - and the very clear distinction between their role and the clerical roles, especially regarding the Liturgies - must simultaneously become more integrated, and yet more authentically itself.  The laity must come into their own, not in some shallow imitation of the clerical roles of the Church, but enter more fully into their own place as the living body of Christ, bringing the Church into every house, every home, and every career.  To adapt an exhortation from JPII, the laity must become who they are.