Woodstock Report | The Laity in the Life of the Church

Woodstock fellow Dolores Leckey has published a new book on the laity and Christian education as part of the “Rediscovering Vatican II” series from Paulist Press. Following is an excerpt of that work, The Laity and Christian Education: Apostolicam Actuositatem, Gravissimum Educationis, which is available from paulistpress.com.

By Dolores R. Leckey

Vatican II has become a place-marker in the ecclesiastical and ideological geography of contemporary Catholicism. Yet forty years later, few who refer to the council and its teachings, whether with approval or criticism, demonstrate a solid grasp of those teachings. Even fewer are aware of the important debates that have taken place in the past four decades regarding the council’s authentic reception and implementation of its documents.

The Laity and Christian Education tells the story of how the role of the laity – as being essential in the life of the church – moved to “center stage” during the council, and how lay people were among those who made it happen.

The years following the council saw new material emerge about the efforts in the United States to implement this landmark document on the laity and its companion on Christian education. Through author interviews, archival research, and firsthand witnesses, the reader will see the rich reservoir of teaching regarding the laity – especially the role of women – that developed in the postconciliar years.

Ours is a time of crisis in the church, and that crisis is faced in the book. But crisis, by its definition, offers the possibility of health and new life.

From Part I: The Documents

The Second Vatican Council is often referred to as “The Council of the Laity.” The nomenclature may be wry hyperbole, but it also contains a nugget of truth. The calling of the council by Pope John XXIII, an elderly pope expected to be simply a caretaker after the tumultuous reign of Pope Pius XII, was one of the great church surprises of the twentieth century. The fact that the council approved a decree on the laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem (and that lay concerns were central to many of the discussions surrounding the writing and the approving of the other documents) was also surprising.

The layperson also has a role in the worshiping community, bringing the things of the world, “the work of our hands,” to the celebration of the Eucharist.

The dictum of Pope Pius X that “the one duty of the laity is to allow themselves to be led and, like a docile flock, to follow their pastors” had set the tone for the laity’s role in the church for generations. But for decades prior to the 1960s, the ground had been cultivated to allow for a different view of the laity’s role to emerge. The currents of creative theological reflection and the unfolding of historical understanding and cultural change were being felt within the walls of the institutional church. Catholic Christian self-understanding was getting deeper and more inclusive, and European theologians and apostolic lay movements were central players in all this.

In the Forefront

French Dominicans and Jesuits were particularly influential as they worked to shape a new theology. It was a theology that was heavily dependent on biblical research while at the same time exploring the values present in the modern world. The new theologians utilized culture as a context for reflection about God and the things of God. They did not abandon Thomism (the philosophical underpinning of Catholic theology, based on the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, which has perdured for centuries), but rather understood it in the light of historical and cultural realities. The contemporary theologian Paul Lakeland states that no one influenced the Second Vatican Council more than these theologians, and chief among them was Yves-Marie Congar, OP.…

A major thesis of Congar is that the laity love and serve God by their life in the world. But that is not all. The layperson also has a role in the worshiping community, bringing the things of the world, “the work of our hands,” to the celebration of the Eucharist. Perhaps most important in terms of council documents and postconciliar life is Congar’s probing of the power of baptism as the primary sacrament of evangelization and mission. It is this insight that has guided the life of the laity, theologically and pastorally, in the forty years since the close of the council. Once initiated into the Catholic community of faith, all are called to a life of mission – not exactly the same mission, but to lives of service and witness according to individual gifts and the needs of the community. Congar’s was a strong and creative voice in the years prior to the council, full of conviction that the laity were indispensable to the mission of the church. His insight that the laity truly participate in the priesthood of Christ can be found throughout the documents of the council.