Lay Apostolate Is Distinct and Noble in Its Own Right
For more than 30 years in the United States as priestly numbers have dwindled throughout the industrialized countries, lay Catholics have dutifully prayed at countless Masses for an increase in priestly vocations. But too many of those same Catholics have gone home and done too little to co-operate with grace in helping their own sons hear God's call. We who are parents have prayed the right words, but our actions have too often sent a very different message to our own children. We have not taught by our own lives the urgent and fundamental need we have for the ministerial priesthood. We want priests, certainly; but we seem unwilling to make the sacrificial witness within our own families to ensure that sufficient good men consider the priestly life.
Obviously, other serious factors have contributed to our current vocations shortage. But this is precisely where my wife and I, as lay persons, would begin our response to the recent interdicasterial Instruction on the "collaborative ministry" of priests and the nonordained. Simply put, Catholics are unlikely to see an upsurge in priestly numbers until we recover a proper understanding of the Eucharist, and the priest's indispensable and irreplaceable role in it. Moreover, we will not have a renewed lay apostolate unless the unique identity of the ordained priesthood is reaffirmed.
Every married couple understands the essential "ecology" of their sacrament: husband and wife are different but complementary; mutually supportive and also mutually dependent. Neither can accomplish the married vocation alone. Neither can adequately substitute for the other. They complete each other in the Lord and, in doing so, create a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts. In like manner, the Church is a similar ecology (or, more properly, communio) where life flows out of the interdependent love and action of ordained and lay, married and celibate. Each state has its own God-given gifts and tasks, its own unique dignity and its own unique necessity to the life of the Church.
Confusing these roles does not enrich a lay person's opportunities for service. On the contrary, it impoverishes the language of faith by reducing the vocabulary of "real" or "authentic" apostolic action to the kind carried out by the clergy. Thus, three decades after Vatican II and despite the best efforts of the Church to guide her children otherwise, we now face the anomaly of a new kind of clericalism. And it is promoted not by the clergy but by lay people, especially in various developed nations who are inadequately formed in their own vocation to evangelize outward, toward the world. Most ironic of all, when lay persons inappropriately take on the forms and tasks of priesthood, they defeat their own prayers for more priestly vocations by clouding, in the minds of the young, the urgency of our need for priests, the fundamental role priests play in the life of the Church and the nature of the Eucharist.
One important value of the Instruction on collaborative ministry lies in reminding all Catholics that the vocation of the lay person is not "what's left over" after the identity of the priest is defined. As the Church has repeatedly taught, and increasingly so since Vatican II, the lay apostolate is distinct and noble in its own right. Not only is the Church open to appropriate lay leadership within her institutions as never before; but far more importantly, as the Instruction notes, a whole world of culture, science, education and economic and political life desperately needs to hear the message of Jesus Christ. In societies rapidly losing their souls to violence and materialism, the lay person, as leaven within the world, is uniquely suited to this special task of the new evangelization.
The Instruction's other great value is to bring a simple, readable, understandable clarity to both the theology and practical issues of collaborative ministry. We need the Eucharist for sustenance as a believing and worshiping community. Without priests, we have no Eucharist. The priest shortage problem is therefore a real and pressing problem, but we will not solve it by lay persons becoming more like priests. Rather, God will solve it when those of us who are lay persons become more like the lay apostles Christ calls us to be. For in evangelizing the world, we will be opening the ears of our own sons to hear God's voice.
This item 339 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
