The Layman in the Church
I.
The Church, we know, has two divisions, clergy and laity. The laity are lower in rank, if indeed they may be said to have any rank at all, but in numbers they are the vast majority. It is of their function in the Church that I shall treat. Members of the Mystical Body by Baptism, they have for supreme function to take their part, small but real, in offering the Sacrifice of the Mass. Nothing else that any layman does can compare with that for greatness.
Of the Priesthood of the Laity — of what is meant, for example, by meum ac vestrum sacrificium — others will tell, masters of theology and the spiritual life. My task is more prosaic. I shall talk of what the layman is by Confirmation — miles of the Church Militant. The Church on earth is at war, an army therefore. Its officers are the clergy, we are the rank and file, the simple soldiery — what in the British Army would be called privates, in the American Army enlisted men or G.I's. We must consider our part in the warfare.
To begin with we must understand what the warfare is. It is being fought not simply to enlarge the Church, but to bring souls into union with Christ. It is that strangest of wars which is fought for the enemy, not against him. Even the term enemy must not be allowed to mislead.
Every unbeliever is, as every Catholic is, a being with an immortal spirit, made in the image of God, for whom Christ died. However violently hostile to the Church or to Christ he may be, our aim is to convert him, not simply to defeat him, still less to destroy him. We must never forget that the Devil wants his soul in hell as he wants ours, and we must fight the Devil for him. We may be forced to oppose a man to prevent his endangering souls; but always we want to win him, for his own soul's salvation. It is in the power of the Holy Ghost that we must fight, and He is the Love of the Father and the Son; in so far as the Church's soldiers fight in hatred, they are fighting against Him.
The war is fought with many weapons, but the principal one is Truth. For truth means seeing reality as it is. Men who do not know what God is, what man's soul is, what the purpose of life is and what follows death, are simply not living in the real world. And this is the condition of the great mass of the human race. They need to be shown the truths about God, the spiritual order, the world to come, for men cannot live according to a reality which they do not see — nor dare we blame them for failing to live according to a reality which we have never shown them. Above all they must come to see and know Christ Our Lord, in whom all truth is contained and by whom it is announced to men.
Who is to show them these truths?
Here we must dwell for a moment upon a simple fact. We are living in a noisy world, never has it been so filled with clamor. The radio is turned on all the time and so is television; there are cinemas, sporting events, mass circulation magazines and a flood of daily papers; motor cars are rushing about the roads and aeroplanes about the sky. In all this uproar, how is truth to be heard, revealed truth? We have a great Pope, who utters truth profoundly, but the great mass of people never hear what he says, simply cannot hear what he says. So it is with our Bishops, our great preachers and writers — their voice can reach only a small minority, for the rest they are lost in the whirlwind.
There is only one voice that can be heard, apart from the voice of conscience, the voice of a man speaking to his friend — speaking to the man next door, the man he works with, plays with, travels with. That voice, and only that, can secure attention. Therefore it is upon that voice that the winning of the war in our time and place depends. The clergy must teach us of the laity, unless we learn from them there is only loss for us too; but the laity must convey the message one by one, to unbelievers one by one. Meetings have their part, and there should be more of them; but the daily, hourly fighting of the war is only possible if each Catholic is equipped to lead towards the truth the people he personally meets.
For this the layman must be equipped, above all with the truths about God and the soul and the next life and Christ Our Lord. It is not necessary that he should be trained in argument, able to prove the existence of God, for instance, or the spirituality of the soul. What is essential is that he know what the truths themselves mean, and what difference they make; and not only know these things, but be able to utter them.
Without utterance, truth lies mute within us, helping no one but our own self. We first learn the doctrines, then we start all over again to learn to say them; for there is a great gap between the seeing and the saying of spiritual realities. We must above all study the mind to which the doctrines must be offered — what it already contains and what it lacks, how it works, the words it knows.
But the mode of utterance is not the immediate problem: too many laymen do not know these great truths well enough to utter them even badly. They know, or at least they have been taught, the wonderful formulas of the Catechism in which the truths are enshrined, but they do not grasp what the formulas are actually saying; therefore they cannot possibly so present them that another man will be won to see their beauty, still less the difference it would make to his own life if he accepted them.
Consider the grasp of the average layman, not specially instructed, upon the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. He knows that there are three Persons in one God, and that the Persons are called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But that is almost all he does know, certainly that is all he can put into words. Whenever he goes beyond that, he makes the theologian writhe. How often one has heard lay people say "The poor Holy Ghost, we neglect Him, so!". In other words the Holy Ghost is being pitied because we do not give Him sufficient of our attention, so that He must simply put up with the company of the Father and the Son.
This, you say, is frantic nonsense, only to be heard upon the lips of the very uninstructed Catholic. But the uninstructed Catholic is frequently a person of good secular education. One has met Catholic university professors . . . It was a very important Catholic layman indeed who, being asked how could God be in three Persons, answered "God is omnipotent, and can be in as many persons as He pleases". As a member of the Catholic Evidence Guild, which conducts outdoor meetings in Hyde Park and all over England, I am one of those who examine great numbers of lay people who join the Guild in order to be trained for its work. I record a dialogue which I have heard frequently.
The trainee is asked if God died on the Cross. He instantly answers, correctly, "Yes". He is then asked "What happened to the universe while God was dead?" In almost all instances, the answer is that it was not God who died upon the Cross, but the human nature of Christ. This is a form of the Nestorian heresy. It was condemned fifteen hundred years ago at the Council of Ephesus, but even educated Catholics still fall back upon it under pressure. I have said that this is the answer given by almost all. From time to time we get a different answer — "It was only the Second Person who died on the Cross, the other two survived and sustained the universe till His Resurrection". As a notion of the Blessed Trinity that reaches fantasy's limit.
I have chosen three examples from dozens, all illustrating the unhappy fact that Catholic laymen too often give no evidence of any grasp upon the doctrine of the Trinity, and certainly cannot win any other man to accept it. But the Trinity is God; what is not the Trinity is not God. The soldier of the Church is almost incapable of effective fighting unless be can do better.
There is one section of mankind in relation to which our failure to talk intelligently about the Blessed Trinity is especially shameful and especially disastrous — namely the Jews. The Jew is a monotheist to the very marrow of his bones, and the doctrine of the Trinity stands as a lion in his path, precisely because it seems to deny the oneness of God to which through centuries and millenia he has clung. If he asks his Catholic friends about it either they refuse to say anything at all; or else they embark upon an explanation which leaves him convinced that Catholics do in fact believe in three Gods, since they call the Father God, and the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God, while being totally unable to shed any light at all upon how these three can be one God.
I am not suggesting, of course, that every Catholic layman should be able to give a full theological exposition of either this or any other of the Church's dogmas. But he is failing as a soldier if he cannot talk of them intelligently, conveying enough of their meaning and their importance at least to arouse the other man's interest, and possibly make him willing to go to a priest for full instructions.
We are apt, we of the laity, to console ourselves with the assurance that theology is for the clergy, and that we do our duty by setting a good example. But it would be a very unusual soldier whose duty was only to set a good example. It is of enormous value that we should do so, but by itself it is not sufficient. Unbelievers are frequently impressed by the goodness and kindness and unselfishness of some Catholic who has come their way — impressed to the point where they wonder if his excellence may be due to something in his religion. So they ask him to explain his religion to them. If he answers intelligently and winningly then the result is all good, the episode may end with the unbeliever receiving instruction from a priest. But if he talks nonsense, then the unbeliever can but depart, as sure as ever of that one Catholic's goodness, but convinced that his religion has nothing to do with it.
All experience seems to show that we of the laity do not teach very much truth to our acquaintances. What is more remarkable is that in our failure to teach we are not aware of any failure of duty. If in any group that happens to gather anywhere — in one's own town, or on a train or ship or aeroplane — there happens to be a Communist, everyone knows it at once. If there happens to be a Catholic, the chances are that no one ever discovers it at all. The Communist is consumed with a passion to spread the doctrines he holds true; the Catholic has no such passion. It is not that we love the Faith less than the Communist loves his Communism. There is another test of love besides willingness to win converts, namely willingness to die. And Catholics have always shown that willingness in most heroic measure. In those parts of the world where the Faith can be served today by dying, the Church has its martyrs. But in most parts of the world this is not so. What the Church needs from us is not our death but our witness, the witness of our life and our utterance.
Why do we of the laity fail to bear witness by utterance? Almost invariably the layman would like to speak out for the truth — not to win others to accept it, that thought hardly occurs to him, but at least to defend it against attack. Why is he silent? Usually, from a feeling that he does not know it well enough, that if he gets into an argument he will lose it. And this is probably true. But why is he not equipped for this most urgent duty? Because most Catholics see neither what the nature of the war is nor how they could help to win it.
Not to see facts so obvious means that they have not used their eyes. And it has been well said that if we do not use our eyes to see with, we will use them to weep with. The Church, we know, must triumph in the end. But in a given time and place it can be defeated. In our time and place it does not look like winning.
For it takes no great military expert to predict the result of a war in which large numbers of the soldiers do not fight, do not even know that there is a war on. The officers are essential, and obedience to them is essential. But an army in which only the officers fight is likely to have no spectacular success in any war, least of all in this war which the Church is waging for the souls of men. For the great mass of the people we are fighting to win never meet an officer or hear an officer's voice. They meet us. It would be too much to say that they hear our voice.
II.
A layman is not only a soldier, he is a man; and, as in all Wars, the quality of his soldiering will depend upon the quality of his manhood. We have talked of what the Catholic should be doing to help others towards salvation. Let us now talk of what he should be doing in the field of doctrine for his own spiritual well-being, his growth as a member of the Body of Christ. We begin at the most elementary level.
Every man is a union of spirit and matter, of soul and body. So far there is no distinction between the layman and the priest, each has the same human structure, the same human needs. As a material object the body of a priest differs in nothing from the body of a layman. Each needs food, and will perish without it; each needs light and cannot see without it.
All that is so obvious that you may very well feel that I am carrying to an extreme my promise to begin at an elementary level. It seems too elementary to need saying at all. But it leads to something which is equally elementary, yet is not always realized by the laity. They know that as a material object a priest's body and a layman's do not differ. They do not always reflect that as a spiritual object a priest's soul and a layman's do not differ either. Each is a spirit which is the life principle in a body, each has the faculties of intellect and will, each is in contact with the exterior world through the body's senses. It follows that each has the same needs — the same personal needs, of course, not the same official needs. The priest has an office which the layman has not, and powers and duties that go with the office. But in what a soul needs merely because it is a human soul, there is no difference.
Thus, to take the most obvious example, all souls, lay and clerical, need Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, Eucharist, Extreme Unction. To fulfil his special function in the Church, the priest needed Holy Orders; to fulfil that other, lesser, function, on which all the same the continuance of the Church depends, the layman needs Matrimony.
And all souls, simply because they are human souls, need truth, revealed truth. Because the priest has the official duty of teaching truth, he has a greater obligation to learn it and to master its utterance. But as a good for oneself, revealed truth is equally good for all souls, all alike suffer loss by not possessing it, or by possessing less of it than is available.
Truth is not simply a Weapon to be used in warfare for the souls of others. It is food for the mind and light for the mind, our own mind is foodless and lightless without it.
It is food. To the Devil Our Lord quoted Deuteronomy — "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God". The words God utters — commands for our action, truths for our seeing — are more life-giving, more nourishing, even than the bread which nourishes the body. For the intellect exists to know truth, and nothing else can nourish it; and the supreme truths are beyond its own, or any man's, power to discover. They can be known to the intellect, and therefore nourishing to the intellect, only if God reveals them. It is a peculiarity of food that it nourishes only those who eat it: we are not nourished by the food someone else has eaten. Only the truths which the mind itself has digested can nourish it. The theology which the theologians know does not nourish the layman until he, too, learns it. But his soul's personal need of nourishment is as great as theirs.
Thus truth is good. Truth is light too: possessing it, we see reality as it is, we live mentally in the real world. How are we to see reality as it is? The greater part of it cannot be seen by the eyes of the body at all. Our bodily eyes cannot see God, or the spiritual order, or the world to come. And though the mind, using only its natural powers, can see something of these, what it can see is still a small fragment of reality. The greater part can be known only if God reveals it. Those who do not know, the things that can be known only by revelation are living merely in a suburb of reality; it is pathetic that they should think they are living in the whole of it.
Thus the man wholly cut off from revealed truth is living an un-nourished life in the dark. The Catholic can never be in quite such poverty. He has the Blessed Eucharist for his nourishment; and something of the truths of Revelation he cannot help knowing. Yet in so far as he has not grasped the reality which the doctrines are meant to bring him, he is, at best, living an under-nourished life in the half-dark. Between the unbeliever who does not accept the doctrine of the Trinity and the Catholic who accepts it but does not know what it means, the difference is not so great as we might wish. To accept the doctrine as true — and even to be devoted to it — but with no real grasp on what it means, makes it impossible to be nourished by it, impossible to gain light from it.
Religiously he is illiterate. Before the invention of printing, illiteracy was almost universal; even nobles, even kings, could not read; only the clergy could read. In the secular order that condition passed away. But in the religious order it remains — only the clergy can read. There are, of course, laymen who can, but they bear too small a proportion to the whole body to alter the general rule.
Religious illiteracy was bad enough when practically nobody was literate anyway. But what we have now is stranger and more dangerous. To be secularly literate and religiously illiterate produces an unbalance within the man. He finds himself with two eyes which do not focus — a strong eye which sees life as the world sees it, a weak eye which sees life as Faith declares it to be. The temptation is overwhelming to close one eye, the weak eye naturally.
It is not strictly necessary, we say defensively, for the layman to know theology. Only love is essential. But how can one love God and not want to know all one can about Him? Love desires knowledge, and knowledge serves love. Each truth that we learn about God is a new reason for loving Him. After all, the reason for loving God is not that our teachers love Him and communicate their love to us: it is that He is lovable; and we can know that. He is lovable, only by knowing what He is. Love should flow into the emotions, it must not have its root in them. Love is not fully itself and invulnerable unless there is knowledge too.
What applies to love of God applies to all love — of Our Lord and His Mother, for instance. It applies to love of the Mass. The supreme function of the layman, we have noted, is the part he has — small compared with the priest's, but real — in offering the Mass. But how many of us see it as the supreme thing we do? Many of us feel it hardly worth going to Mass on a weekday if for some reason we cannot receive Communion.
Observe the phrase "going to Mass". It is miserably inadequate: it suggests that we do all, that is required of us by being there. But we are not meant simply to sit and stand and kneel devoutly during the offering of Mass. We are meant to offer. And if we have not grasped what the Church has to teach upon the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation and the Redemption, we do not know what is being offered in the Mass, or to whom the offering is made, or why. We do not know what we are doing — an incredible condition for any offerer.
To return to our first question, what sort of a soldier will the uninstructed Catholic make? Stumbling along in the dark not even aware that it is dark, half-fed and not even hungry for more, he is in no state to show others reality. Only a laity living wholly in reality is equipped to show it to others and win them to want to live in it too. That is the Church's warfare.
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