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A WORD FROM MICHAEL

In the fall of 1963, just after we were married, my wife, Karen, and I took a ship to Rome to be present at the Second Vatican Council, which was about to open its Second Session (of four). Karen wanted to create a series of prints on the Apocalypse of St. John. My aim was to pay our way by writing articles first and, with luck, to accumulate enough material to write a report on the Second Session such as the layman Lord Acton had published about the First Vatican Council.

For laypersons in the Church, it was rapidly becoming a heady time. Suddenly, we were accorded (even by priests and bishops) uncommon respect and attention. The “new” and the “relevant” ascended in authority. The “traditional” and the “authoritative” seemed in decline.

After I published my book The Open Church, about the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council, I was often invited to speak and to write on “The New Layman” or “Dissent in the Church”—in which I was not so much promoting dissent as pointing out its utility, even necessity, in coming to ever-nearer approximations to the truth of things. I was asked to address “The Role of the Laity.” Oh yes, also, “The People of God”—then the new, preferred way of saying “Church.” The Church is not just the hierarchy; it is the whole people.

The French philosopher Étienne Gilson wittily pointed out that it is not good for the Church to have too many really good popes in a row; such good fortune tended to create a top-down dependency. Now and then, he wrote tongue-in-cheek, a bad pope—a scandal-ridden pope—was a blessing for the Church. For it reminded all that ours is a Church of sinners and that our faith’s dependence is not on the morals of our clergy but on the unshakable fidelity of God to us.

Witnessing the birth of the new role of laypersons in the Church, their new eminence and recognized responsibility in their own vast domain, affected me permanently. I have remained interested in the ups and downs of the past turbulent decades of changes in the life and role of laypersons in the Church.

A decade ago, when Bill Simon challenged me to turn my attention to this theme, it seemed like a providential invitation. After all, a little more than 25 years ago, Bill’s father, William E. Simon Sr., had invited me to participate in one of the most striking lay initiatives of all time. The Catholic bishops of the United States announced a new project for their National Conference: a study of the American economy in connection with the Catholic faith. For those of us passionately interested in engaging the whole Church in a fresh study of economics, especially the new kind of economy pioneered by the United States as nowhere else, this announcement was a godsend. We cheered the idea. If the Catholic bishops had addressed the Catholics of the United States in 1934, they would have had to address them as “poor.” How did it happen that when they published their letter “Economic Justice for All” in 1984, they addressed their fellow Catholics as “affluent”? How did the transformation from “poor” to “affluent” happen so quickly?

In the new lay spirit, we could not help noticing that the field of economics is primarily the responsibility of laypeople, not that of the clergy (although, of course, the economy affects their responsibilities too). The Second Vatican Council had encouraged lay participation, even initiative and leadership, in such worldly matters. So we did our duty. We undertook writing our own lay letter, not to interfere with the draft the bishops were preparing, and hopefully not to contradict it, but to expand and deepen its worldly range. We suggested, for example, more attention to the question of how new wealth is created and more attention to the main cause of poverty in the U.S.: households of many children headed by women without husbands.

Even in that time, we could not help but consider the chutzpah of the thing. No other Catholic laypersons in the world had ever taken it upon themselves to address their own “pastoral letter” (so to speak) to the world. But given the recent developments, one would have thought that this deed would be widely recognized as a beautiful fulfillment of the Council’s express hopes for a new burst of lay responsibility. We did not claim to speak for all laypersons nor all lay points of view. No one could do that in so pluralistic a land as ours. We proposed our letter as something quite new, a lay initiative in a field in which the like had never been seen. It would have been satisfying to see other groups of laypersons, with different economic views, put their heads together and issue their own statements. Instead, there was a certain amount of carping about ours.

Before publishing our letter, we consulted with Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the head of the bishops’ committee on this project, about when he would like us to release our draft. We had sent him a copy as soon as we finished. I suggested that we publish our letter first, so there could be no question of our public dissent (if it turned out that the two drafts were significantly at odds, which we did not really expect but had no way of judging). The archbishop thought on it and then agreed.

Soon after our letter appeared, our lay commission was accused of a “pre-emptive strike” on the bishops’ letter. This, of course, was simply not true. We had been perfectly willing to wait a week or a month. But the very accusation suggested to many that our letter must have been quite effective, and in some ways more arresting than that of the bishops.

In the quarter-century that has elapsed since the dispute over that letter, the push and pull between the laity and the clergy has continued apace. Laypersons were empowered and encouraged by the Second Vatican Council. Even beginning in the 1940s, the record of lay movements around the world—in labor unions, in Christian democratic parties, in Catholic Youth and Catholic Family movements, and in Catholic Action of many sorts, in movements among lay women, such as in Grailville, Ohio—was quite impressive. But after the Council ended in 1965, and especially during the past 10 years, lay activities took off with a woosh!

So why should we be giving this subject more serious consideration today? First, there has never been a period in Church history when so many laypersons have been put on the payroll of Catholic parishes and dioceses and become full-time employees of the Church. There are now more than 30,000 such lay employees, compared with fewer than 60,000 active priests. They are taking over many significant administrative, educational, and pastoral functions, freeing the priests for their own distinctive liturgical and sacramental roles. At the same time, many of the laypeople are learning new ways to pray and to make their own lives more deeply Catholic. Daily presence in and around the church seems almost sacramental, bringing them into the Mystery of God’s Presence in the Eucharist.

Lay Catholics are looking for a new sort of spiritual guidance, a new way of learning how to live the interior life and how to draw upon the spiritual riches developed over 20 centuries of spiritual adventure and exploration. They are inspired by the example of countless saints and in the brilliant writings of many who have been named “Doctors of the Church.” St. Thérèse of Lisieux, for example, may now be the most loved teacher of the new laity.

During the decades following the end of the Vatican Council in 1965, the Catholic Church in the United States lost some 30,000 priests, most often by attrition. The priests aged, and there was no one to take their places. Catholic families have become smaller, couples are more jealous about having grandchildren from the few children they have and are less interested in their children’s pledging a life of celibacy. Moreover, the very rise of prestige in the lay vocation has seemed, erroneously, to have lowered the prestige of the priesthood. And laymen now play so many visible roles in the world, not least in intellectual and professional life, that clergymen—despite their unusually long years of professional study—no longer stand out in these arenas.

This relatively steady drop in the ranks of the nation’s priests has been almost exactly compensated for by the steady increase in the number of laypersons performing the many, many functional tasks around active parishes. The ever-growing numbers and types of ministries—the outreach that is required these days—can now be taken care of by laypeople instead of exhausting the energies of too few priests.

In certain ways, the Church may be more active ministerially than ever. There are Hispanic ministries, interracial ministries, youth ministries, citywide sports leagues, parish finance committeeies, census committeeies, soup kitchens, volunteers for work in poorer parishes, academic tutoring, choir and concert practices, evangelization outreach, gay ministries, volunteers for helping AIDS patients, prayer circles, and sodalities for many purposes and in many different spiritual idioms. Many parishes are even “twinned” with poor parishes in the Third World, with a regular exchange of visitors, volunteers, and photographs to be posted in their mutual church lobbies around the world.

Compared with the lay life I knew when I was a young man in the 1950s and early 1960s, “June is bustin’ out all over!” Today seems in many ways like a New Spring. Yet still there is an awful lot we do not know about what is happening and what is likely to happen next. In this book, we will only be able to point to a select number of new developments, initiatives, and even dilemmas. The full picture will need exploration by many other minds.

With that said, let me undertake to explain the strategy of this book. First, there is not much point in belonging to the Catholic Church, let alone taking up responsibilities for its daily institutional life, if one does not choose to live in moment-bymoment union with Christ. The whole point of becoming a Christian is to become more and more like Christ, to be one with Him in heart and mind all day long and to try to be His hands and feet and heart and head during our time on earth.

What does this mean?

Briefly, when St. Paul was knocked off his horse by a blinding light, he heard an imperious voice questioning him by name. “Saul!” he heard from a voice he did not recognize. “Saul, why do you persecute Me?” Shielding his eyes from the light, Saul did not recognize who was addressing him. How could Saul be persecuting someone he did not even know, had never met?

Then a painful memory came back to him. He did not exactly feel guilty about it—it was in accord with the law—but he had afterward found it distasteful. He remembered holding the garments of the young men who were sweaty in the excitement of locating stones and hurling them with all their might at a blasphemer, a heretic already fallen to the ground: St. Stephen, the first martyr. The young victim was trying to hold up his arm against the hail of stones that sooner or later would bring him death. He was praying.

Could it be that the apparition was speaking of the “persecution” of that renegade? The law commanded the death of such a blasphemer.

Yet the Voice in the Light seemed to be saying, “Saul, Saul, when you do this to one of the least of these, you do it unto Me,” as if a new reality lay outside fleshly sight but was vivid as a palm tree shining in the sun: the Lord God lives in each human being, and they in Him. There is one mystical union bonding all humans in Christ so that if you do violence to a human being, you do it to Christ.

This new vision holds that human beings live in two worlds: the natural world and the spiritual world. In the natural world, they live on the same streets, in the same dusty towns, as their neighbors; nowadays they watch the same television shows and sports, munch on the same snacks as everybody else. But they are also living in a spiritual world that draws them ever more deeply in and illuminates for them a truer and more satisfying way to understand their brief human existence, its inner secret, its purpose, its reason for being.

We begin our study in the natural world. The first part of this book is devoted to life in the lay world: work with the poor, or the disabled, or the young, or our secular colleagues, how we can spend our time and energy and talents to work for and improve our Church. This section will profile nine living pioneers among the new laity in three important areas: education, parish life, and lay ministries. Just as the Church teaches us how to live like Christ by offering us incarnate examples, we thought it best to tell a large part of our story through the lives of these diverse and highly instructive practitioners. I can hardly wait until you meet these great people and learn of their inner voyages and their creative work in the world.

The second part of this book is devoted to life in the spiritual world. How can we learn to live in that inner world in a way that heightens our vision of the ordinary? As with everything else, it is best to be taught the fundamentals and then to learn by doing through practical exercises. We offer here just a tiny taste of a larger life to become skilled in. To become at home in.

Bill and I are indebted to our great assistants, Naomi Schaefer Riley and Elizabeth Shaw, for their help in making this project a reality. In addition, Erin Wales provided invaluable administrative assistance, and Mitchell Boersma provided important background research and help in proofreading. We hope this book gives the keen pleasure in discovery to its readers that it did to its authors.