An Abstract by Lydia Reynolds (Bethlehem Community) of the Keynote Address of J. Francis Cardinal Stafford, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, at the Plater College Summer School, Oxford, England, August 27, 2001. It is reproduced here with permission from the Cardinal. The full text will appear in the third issue of Second Spring.

"I will address the identity and mission of the laity under seven headings in the light of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and of Pope John Paul II."

The term "laity" indicates this. A non-specific term, it is defined by not being clergy (who have a ministry) or religious (in a state in life). There’s no sacrament particular to being lay. "The word ‘laity’ remains elusive. The poverty of its content is humbling."

This poverty allows the laity a freedom of spirit. Like St. Francis of Assisi, the laity are free to hand on to others "the gentle mockery of possessions," as G.K. Chesterton put it, in imitation of Christ.

Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, speaks of the Christian "using and enjoying creatures in poverty and freedom of spirit...All are yours, but you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s’." This is a new form of Christian spirituality: not a fleeing of the world, but a responsibility in and for the world as the way of holiness.

An essential element which characterizes the laity—as it does the whole Church—is that its ultimate destiny is not in this world, but in the heavenly city. The Church on earth is on pilgrimage towards her union with the heavenly Church. She orients herself around the central event of history, Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection and Exaltation. When the laity make their eucharistic acclamation, they affirm this truth as their purpose and direction: "When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory."

The Eucharist celebrated each Sunday is a reminder to all God’s people of their pilgrim character. The Pope has stated this in Dies Domini. The Eucharist is a sign of Jesus’ final coming. But the Church is a sign that the Kingdom is present on earth: already here, yet not fully the City of God. "Within the church, the Kingdom matures progressively in history" and it will be fully manifest at the end of history.

The Church is herself, then, a sacrament of the City of God which is to come. She has a visible form and history. Just as she is simultaneously "already" the Kingdom and "not yet" the Kingdom, the world is simultaneously God’s "very good" creature and yet the untiring enemy of the disciples of Christ. "More than priests and religious, the laity in the world sustain the tensions of the Church and the mystery, the sacrament of the already and the not yet."

Because of our ultimate destiny, the actions of the laity in their daily affairs must be informed by a sense of detachment: an awareness that life’s purposes will be completed only in the heavenly city. In other words, by "an eschatological reserve." The theological virtue of hope is connected with this: lay people proclaim Christ by word and by their lives when they inform their secular judgments and actions with a hope in the glory that is to come.

A case in point: in the Pope’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, he urged a recovery of "the basic elements of a vision of the relationship between civil law and moral law." We may not in any way support unjust laws, such as laws permitting abortion or euthanasia. Democracies (to which Christians have contributed much) must be judged like all other systems against the reason for our hope in Christ and in the church. Popular consensus is no excuse for tyrannical decisions, as the Pope termed them, against unborn life.

Laymen and laywomen who give costly witness springing from their union with Christ and the Cross demonstrate that "the Catholic Church is the sacrament of universal salvation." Martyrdom is the most dramatic form of this witness to the power of the Kingdom of God. It is notable that two thirds of all the Christians martyrs in the last 2000 years died in the 20th century.

"Christian martyrs affirm that man’s final happiness can only be found in contempla- tion of the face of God." It is against this end that all economic, political and social actions must be judged.

Confessors also give powerful witness to the final coming of Christ. Two Catholic lay confessors of the 19th century who exemplified this were Blessed Frederick Ozanam of France and Orestes Brownson of the United States.

Every person is called to holiness. Every person has been given a divine mission in society and history. The Beatitudes are the norms of our moral life, proclaiming hope in the future. The Sermon on the Mount is the laity’s road to holiness. Those who receive the promise of salvation in hope are those who have, in their freedom, become poor in their inmost attitude. In the words of von Balthasar, they "live in mourning over the present and in hunger and thirst for what ought to be, while doing what they can in their powerlessness." The lives of the laity are measured against the Son of God, who dispossessed himself, in love, upon the Cross.

The lay faithful live in the world, in every secular profession and occupation, in all the ordinary circumstances of family and social life. Because this world itself is destined to glorify God the Father in Jesus Christ, the world can indeed become the place and means for the lay faithful to fulfill their Christian vocation. But how are the laity to do this? For them there is no equivalent to the Rule of St. Benedict. This fact "reveals again the essential poverty of spirit emblematic of the lay identity and mission." Each lay person makes his way in unique circumstances.

The layman has two centers to his life: the Church and the world. The laity realize in themselves the presence of the Church in the world and the presence of the world in the Church. Any layperson feels the tensions between the two, the imperfections from each side. He experiences, in both centers, the "already" and the "not yet" of the Kingdom. He feels painfully the demands of the Church’s Gospel within the complex civil, social, economic realities of everyday life.

 IV. The Laity’s Anointing at Baptism: Is it for Power or for Service?

In Baptism each Christian is anointed to share in Christ’s three-fold mission as prophet, priest, and king. The Second Vatican Council set this mission in the context of service, the diakonia. The servant is distinct from the slave; the servant renders service with responsible dignity. "For Jesus, the images of friend and servant go hand in hand." A friend of Jesus is one who wills to lay down his life for his friends. Christian husbands and wives especially exemplify this community of friends.

Among the ordained, service takes a public form. Among the laity, it is carried out in everyday life within the Church and the world. The Holy Spirit dispenses a whole variety of charisms, which make it evident that we are dependent upon one another in the total economy of the Mystical Body. This is far removed from the logic of power. The essence of the lay diakonia is to be of service to others, not to be gaining privilege. Each individual Christian may well receive a unique charism or mission, bestowed by the Holy Spirit at confirmation. This endowment marks the beginning of his responsible life in the ecclesial community.

In the remaining three sections we look in more detail at the prophetic, royal, and priestly mission of Christ’s faithful.

Every layperson is a prophet. He must proclaim the truth of Christ. And he is able to do so, for he shares in the whole Church’s sense of the faith. Laity have the right to teach and to teach actively, "by reason of an interiorized faith received at baptism and matured through the Sacrament of Confirmation, prayer, liturgy and daily life in the family and marketplace." This does not mean that laity have a "magisterium" of their own, or teaching authority parallel to that of Bishops or the Pope.

The prophetic mission of the lay faithful takes place amidst the pressing anxieties of our contemporary world. One can summarize the most urgent modern themes under these headings: bioethics; war and peace amidst cultures in conflict; global economy and massive impoverishment; human freedom in a pluralistic world; ecology. "Prophets are needed in this ambience."

How should Christian prophets confront these issues? They must "insist in season and out of season that happiness is found in the free pursuit of the true and good." People, as George Bernanos pointed out, are endowed naturally with a generous willingness to do great things for God and for others. "The laity submit that virtue to the ways of grace. The Sermon on the Mount and the Church’s Magisterium are their polestar."

Lay prophets, like all prophets "proceed as one proceeds in a fog"—discerning things only just a little ahead. Amidst all the cross-currents, contradictions, sharing of emotions and fragile intersections of relationship, the lay faithful reach out in the spirit of open dialogue to speak within the situations that confront them in the world.

Mary of Nazareth is the model for the layperson’s share in Christ’s royal office. Like Mary our Queen, laypersons are called to rule by bringing the order of love into their various communities. Every community is in danger of falling back into chaos. Love, the order of justice and charity, is what overcomes this. And love, according to Thomas a Kempis, is "the royal road of the holy Cross." Royalty implies power; the source of the disciples’ power is charity. Every form of competition, arrogance, and privilege is excluded. Listening, dialogue, obedience, and humble service take their place. There can be no contesting of the apostolic authority of the hierarchy. Jesus is the model, who said, "I am among you as one who serves."

Lay Christians are not laboring to "reconquer" society, to push their way into public places. Rather, they are to be "custodians of Christian wisdom." St. Paul describes this wisdom: "We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

The most urgent task of laypeople is to encounter everyone with love. Maybe the public square is not ripe for fully implementing the Sermon on the Mount. Nevertheless it is the laity’s royal mission to show that the baptised, for their part, live by this holy teaching.

The model of lay kingship is Jesus’ self-emptying. At the center of history, Life died on the Cross. Exalted now by the Father, Jesus communicates his power to his disciples "so that they too may be constituted in a royal freedom, and through self-denial and a holy life may overcome the reign of sin within themselves and...through humility and patience lead their sisters and brothers to the King to serve whom is to reign." (Lumen Gentium, 4, 36).

Through their baptism, the laity are a priestly people. In Romans 12,1 Paul exhorts us to present our bodies—he does not say "spirits"—as a living sacrifice. Paul uses the language of Old Testament worship. To "present our bodies": this is spiritual worship. This also defines the nuptial vocation, the state of life of most lay people. The true offering of oneself occurs in whatever place one may be. So Gabriel came to Mary in an ordinary place of daily life, far from Jerusalem, the religious center.

The priesthood of the laity is not at all a poor echo of the priesthood of the ordained. The two priesthoods exist in complementarity.

Our postmodern society has shattered the old points of reference. "Through a fog the laity contemplate the face of the crucified Christ." Meanwhile everyday life is dizzying and chaotic. The laity will be put to the test, and must not flee. "The lay faithful will end up in front of the altar of the Cross in their historical lifetime." To be baptised into Christ is to be baptised into his death.

"In Ending, I will make three prophecies about the laity in the new millennium 1) history shall be central to their experience of faith; 2) they shall understand that because they belong entirely to history where God has placed them, they belong entirely to God....; and 3) in employing their personal freedom within history, they shall shine like stars in the night when making known the glory of God manifest in their response to Easter."