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LAITY Laos means
people. The laity are “prototype” members of the People of God; each
one has been divinely chosen with a specific calling and mission. The
proper place of the laity is in the world. They are asked there to
sanctify themselves through their ordinary work and life so that their
presence, friendship, and example can lead others around them to God. The first
task for the lay Christian is to sanctify his or her ordinary secular life
and work. This involves work humanly well done (with effort, study,
thoroughness, generosity, sacrifice), and work done out of love for God
(with purified intention, trying to overcome vanity, meanness,
self-centered ambition). Along with
the search for personal holiness, each layperson has the ecclesial right
and duty to exercise the Christian apostolate. Each one ought to feel the
call and urge to bring Christ to those around him or her (Canon 210). A
Christian “who does not work at the growth of the body (of Christ) to
the extent of his possibilities must be considered useless both to the
Church and to himself” (Vatican Council II, Decree on the Apostolate of
the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, 2). The
apostolate specific to laypeople, which all of them can do, is in their
own secular walks of life: job, family, social, or public activities.
Certain aspects of Church life (various parish activities, for instance)
call for lay participation; but this type of ecclesial-structural
apostolate can ordinarily engage or involve few laypersons, and for fewer
still can it offer full-time outlets. The special apostolic vocation of
laypeople lies in their work, and in their social and family activities.
“By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the
kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them
according to God’s will. They live in the world, that is, they are
engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the
ordinary circumstances of social and family life that, as it were,
constitute their very existence. There they are called by God that, being
led by the spirit of the Gospel, they may contribute to the sanctification
of the world, as from within like leaven, by fulfilling their own
particular duties” (Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church, Lumen Gentium, 31). Laypersons
are not lesser members of the Church than the clergy. The essential
ecclesial rights and responsibilities of the Christian flow from Baptism,
and these are possessed by laity and clergy in equal measure. Laypeople
therefore are not a “long arm” of the clergy, to carry out a Christian
infiltration of the world. They are in the world, and they have their own
specific mission there, “the special duty to imbue and perfect the order
of temporal affairs with the spirit of the Gospel” (Canon 225; cf. Lumen
Gentium, 31; CCC 898, 909).
See:
Apostolate; Baptism; Church, Nature, Origin, and Structure of; Communio;
States in Life; Vocation. Suggested
Readings: CCC 897-913. Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church, Lumen Gentium, Ch. IV; Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity,
Apostolicam Actuositatem. John Paul II, The Lay Members of Christ’s
Faithful People, Christifideles Laici. Cormac Burke Russell Shaw.
Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997,
Our Sunday Visitor.
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