245. Ninth Tuesday of Ordinary Time
Meditations no. 237 (unofficial computer-aided translation)
Mission of lay people in the Church.
The Second Vatican Council teaches that the laity are assembled in the People of God, and established under one head in the single body of Christ. They have the vocation, whoever they are, to contribute, as living members, to the growth of the Church and its continual sanctification, with all the strength they have received from the kindness of the Creator and from the Redeemerâs grace.
The duty of the laity, which springs from their own vocation, is to seek the kingdom of God in the transaction of worldly business and the godly arrangement they give it. Their life is lived in the world. It is lived in each and all of the worldâs occupations and employments and in the ordinary situations of the life of the family and society. This is the context of their existence. This is where they have their call from God to make their contribution to the sanctification of the world from the inside, as a leaven, by tackling their own job with the spirit of the Gospel as their guide.
Since God our Lord founded his Work in 1928, we have been living in this spirit, which the Second Vatican Council ratified: the sanctification of all temporal structures; holiness in the world and through worldly things. The apostolate that God wants of us is not normally carried out in ecclesial or religious spheres, our Father has written, but in the very heart of civil society. Our task is to be present, with our knowledge of God, and by means of human knowledge and our professional work, in all human activities, wherever there is a soul to be saved, with our arms always open to everyone and to every upright human reality.
In this way, each equipped with your own professional formation, all the culture you can acquire, and the outlook characteristic of your background and personal situation, you will bring the doctrine of Jesus Christ to all those you find along the path of your life, with the gift of tongues, in a way that they can understand.
Many souls will receive light from God in this way, and will ask in amazement, just like the multitude on the day of Pentecost, ex omni natione quae sub caelo est, from every nation under the sun: et quomodo nos audivimus unusquisque linguam nostram, in qua nati sumus? How can we each have heard them speaking our own language?
St Paul tells us of the range of gifts within the Church: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. We too have received a gift from God, the express call to contribute to the work of building up the Church by making use of our professional activity in the middle of the world.
The action of Christians in the heart of civil society.
The Gospel of todayâs Mass shows us how the Pharisees and Herodians try to set a trap for our Lord over the question of payment of the tribute; and we see him responding with a single sentence that goes far beyond the legal point at issue. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesarâs, and to God the things that are Godâs.
As Christians we are citizens both of the Church and of civil society, with all the rights and duties that every citizen has. We live and work in the world, and we have to make a stand against the mentality that tries to laicize everything. Unfortunately this laicizing tendency, described by our Father many years ago as a âblack stainâ, is advancing further and further, especially in the Latin countries, and in a more hypocritical way in others. This is the bad sort of anti-clericalism, which tries to relegate God and the Church to the depths of peopleâs consciences. Though really, it isnât that; to put it differently, and more clearly, this anticlericalism wants to shut God and the Church up within the limits of peopleâs private life, so that the fact of holding Christian faith and morals has no effect on public life at all.
In our personal apostolate we have to remember that all just and noble human affairs have a divine meaning, because they come from God and are ordered towards God. If we bear this in mind we will avoid making the sort of split that is so frequent in the lives of many Catholics. It comes from misunderstanding the distinction our Lord made between the things that are Godâs and the things that are Caesarâs. Christ separated the fields of jurisdiction of the two authorities of Church and State, to forestall the harmful effects of âCaesarismâ and âclericalismâ. He established the healthy kind of anticlericalism which consists of real, deep love for the priesthood; what a sorry sight it is when the high calling of the priest is cheapened and debased by getting mixed up in mean, worldly projects. He fixed the autonomy of Godâs Church and the legitimate autonomy enjoyed by civil society in regulating and structuring its affairs.
But the distinction established by Christ does not in any way mean that religion should be relegated to the sacristy, or that the ordering of human affairs is to be done outside the ambit of all divine or Christian law. Because that would be to deny the faith of Christ, which demands obedience from the whole person, body and soul, as an individual and as a member of society.
Christâs message lights up the whole of a personâs life, from its beginning to its end, and not merely the narrow reach of some personal acts of subjective piety. Laicism means a denial of the sort of faith that expresses itself in deeds, the faith that knows that the worldâs autonomy is only relative, and that the ultimate meaning of everything in the world is the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
How the members of the Work serve the Church.
Your Christian vocation requires you to be in God and, at the same time, to be concerned with the things of the earth, using them objectively, just as they are: to give them back to Him.
Everything has to be ordered towards God, as a requirement of its very existence. We have given ourselves to Godâs service so that he may reign in souls, and we serve the Church in the heart of civil society, by giving life to all human work. This is the specific mission of the lay faithful. In the last centuries the active religious have tried to come closer to the world while still being outside it, by specializing their apostolates so as to infuse a Christian spirit into certain human callings: education, social work, and so on. This is a praiseworthy work, but it is often not so much a case of expressing the true religious vocation, as of supplying for the deficiency of Catholic citizens. Perhaps because their own Christian formation had been neglected, Catholics did not feel it as their own responsibility to Christianize temporal institutions.
So this task was not specific to the religious vocation, but the religious did it in order to fill a gap; and in choosing their specialization, they found themselves limited, because there are many fields of human work which are perfectly clean and upright in themselves but simply incompatible with the religious state. The principal common mission of the religious is to offer the witness of their consecrated life to the world from which they have withdrawn in a holy way. In addition to that, the laicism of recent times, in many countries, including Catholic ones, has meant that the religious have been thrown out of schools and charitable institutions, or at least that they have had their activity restricted to the strictly religious sphere.
With the apostolate of the Work, lay people donât act simply to fill a gap, but take full and responsible possession of the specific field God has shown them as the place for their mission in the Church, and carry out an apostolate whose specializations canât be mapped out beforehand, because they are one with the possibilities of human work and social development Devoid of rigidity, this apostolate is open to all the structural changes that may take place in time, in the nature of society.
And our Father goes on to write, Therefore, my children, we can say that there weighs upon us the concern and responsibility for all the holy Church, sollicitudo totius Sanctae Ecclesiae Dei, and not of this or that sector of it. By divine vocation, our service to the whole Church has a professional character; it is the service rendered by citizens who take the Christian witness of example and doctrine to the furthest corners of civil society.
This apostolic action in the heart of society will be more effective if we have recourse to our Blessed Lady. In the middle of the rejoicing at the feast in Cana, only Mary notices that they are short of wine. A soul will notice even the smallest details of service if like her, it is alive with a passion for helping its neighbour, for God.