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Dr. Phil Johnston, a member of
Saints Simon and Jude Parish in Huntington
Beach. He was for 19 years a member of the
Dominican Order in the Chicago Province. He
holds a PhD is Sacred Theology from the Aquinas
Institute in St. Louis, MO. He left the active
ministry in 1970, married and, with the aid of
his wife Kathleen, raised a family of three
daughters. He retired from the administration
of the California State University in 1993 and
has taught theology and Scripture courses at the
Pastoral Ministry Institute here in Orange since
that time. He currently serves on an advisory
board for the Permanent Deaconate in the Orange
Diocese. His first love, he says, is Sacred
Scripture. His hobby is Ecclesiology and his
chief vice is golf. He also notes that he is
one of the relatively few Catholics in the
Church today who has an official document from
the Vatican identifying him as a member of the
laity. To speak with us this morning is Dr.
Phil Johnston.
The Obligations and Rights of the Laity
by Dr. Phil Johnston
Our common interest and the
reason for our gathering today is our commitment
to Our Lord Jesus Christ, to the Holy Spirit,
and to the Church through which the rich
traditions of our Faith have been nurtured
through the centuries. The teachings of the
Church are important to all of us. For that
very reason, we enter into dialogue within our
Ecclesial Community in order that the full
impact of the Holy Spirit might expand and
deepen our understanding of God’s Holy Word and
enrich the life and mission of the Body of
Christ in our own day. As the Lord manifested
his presence on the mountain in his
Transfiguration, may he do so again in our
presence today. In the words of Peter the
Apostle: “it is good for us to be here.” [Mark
9:3]
My remarks today will revolve
around four words commonly associated with the
Second Vatican Council. They are: [1]
Aggiornamento. [2] Ressourcement, [3]
Collegiality, and [4] Subsidiarity.
The first word,
Aggiornamento, means renewal. It was
used by Pope John XXIII when calling for an
Ecumenical Council in 1958. Following the
second World War of the 20th century,
the Church took a look at herself and her
mission and concluded that her effectiveness in
proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ had
been compromised through the centuries. In
part, this was due to her reaction to the
Protestant Reformation in the 16th
century. The Catholic Church assumed a
defensive position in defining orthodoxy against
the teachings of the reformers. Catholic
teachings challenged by the reformers were
strongly defended while other Church teachings
of equal or even greater importance were not
addressed. In controversy, balance is often an
unintended victim and such was the case in the
decrees of the Council of Trent in 1564. In
addition, there was no longer a single voice of
the Church of Jesus Christ proclaiming the
Gospel. Often the different voices seemed to
demonize one another. After 400 years
relationship among Christian communities
remained fractured and at times even hostile. .
A second factor reducing the
effectiveness of the Church’s mission was its
reaction to a movement in the 18th
and 19th centuries known as the
Enlightenment. Under that heading was to be
found rationalism in the sciences and philosophy
and liberalism in political and social life.
Focus on the autonomy of man [humanism] led
quite naturally to a rejection of authority and
a desire for a greater freedom of thought and
expression. Monarchies in Europe transitioned
into more populist governments in the 18th
and 19th centuries. The Papacy,
which had become accustomed to the monarchical
governing structure of Europe, had relied for
its own political independence on the existence
of the Papal States. It too would experience a
loss of temporal power. The Church’s response
to that threat was to strengthen its spiritual
authority. As the Papal States were taken over
by what became the Republic of Italy, the Church
in the First Vatican Council [1870] defined the
teaching on Papal Infallibility, a protection of
her teaching authority, but a slap at the
proponents of rationalism and liberalism as
well.
Thus, in the middle of the 20th
century the Roman Catholic Church found herself
alienated from ecclesial communities of fellow
Christians and from secular popularist
governments throughout the world. When Pope
John XXIII became Pope in 1958, he challenged
the Church to reexamine its mission and its
place in the world. How might we more
effectively fulfill the mission to proclaim the
Good News to the world of the 21st
century?
Some Church leaders, particularly
those more closely attached to the Vatican,
urged a strong restatement of the Church’s
position as the one true Church. Others,
however, influenced largely by French and German
theologians and with a much broader
representation of bishops from the third world,
urged a return to the earlier teachings of the
Church, those to be found in Sacred Scripture
and the early traditions of Christianity. This
latter position became known through a French
term, Ressourcement—a return to
the sources of Christianity.
In examining Scripture, a number
of images shed light on our understanding of
Church. While the idea of a hierarchical,
institutional church was not abandoned, added to
it were other images such as “People of God”, “Communio”,
and “Body of Christ.” These terms stressed that
the role of the Church was not simply to stand
in judgment or mandate behavior, but rather to
witness God’s presence to the world. And
discipleship and mission were based in the
Sacrament of Baptism. The Holy Spirit is given
not only to the leaders of the Church, but to
all Christians who are called to witness through
their lives.
As the hierarchical image of the
Church was counterbalanced by the Scriptural
images of communion and Body of Christ, the
bishops addressed their own relationship both
with their diocesan communities and with the
Bishop of Rome, the Pope. Declaring that their
Episcopal office is not simply delegated by the
Pope, but belongs to them as successors of the
Apostles, the bishops of the Council spoke of
their relationship with the Bishop of Rome as
one of “collegiality”—that is that
all bishops shared responsibility together with
the Bishop of Rome for the welfare of the whole
Church. However, in the stating of this
important principle, considerable effort was
made in the final draft of the document Lumen
Gentium to ensure that this in no way infringed
upon the autonomy of the Pope [LG #27]. Thus,
even in its effort to propose a collegial
relationship, the hierarchical culture of the
Roman Catholic Church tended to mute the
intended message of collegiality.
In speaking of the Laity,
however, the Dogmatic Constitution on The Church
[Lumen Gentium] made a point of the
laity’s share in the full mission of the Church
by virtue of baptism and urges pastors to seek
the counsel and support of the laity’s
initiatives in the Church’s proclamation of the
Good News to the world. The document points out
that the first priority of the Laity is in
witness to the world through their individual
skills and experience. It also states, however,
that as baptized Christians, the laity has the
responsibility to promote and protect the unity
which belongs to the Body of Christ. A point
worthy of note here is the efforts to extend
freedom to the laity while, in relation to the
bishops, there remained a strong effort to
protect the hierarchical structure and the
absolute autonomy of the Papacy.
This brings me to my final point:
the notion of Subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity means that in an organization or
society, problems should be addressed and
actions taken at the point closest to issue or
event. While such a notion is not foreign to
the Catholic Church, there is and has been a
tendency, especially in our own time, to refer
all important issues in the Church to Rome. It
is Rome who appoints bishops, approves of their
actions, and holds final power to grant
annulments and dispensations and even to
determine vernacular texts for use in our
liturgies. Collegiality was adopted in
principle at the Council. It remains for that
experience to become part of the daily life of
the Church. Communication in the Catholic
Church is, for all practical purposes, largely a
one way conversation. Our bishops and priests
live in this environment and it must surely
affect their ability to communicate outside that
authoritarian structure. In a world of
superiors and inferiors, the latter’s voice is
usually not expected and often not particularly
valued. Accountability goes up; not down.
In the practical world, this
simply means that the laity, at the bottom of
the ecclesial pyramid, is powerless and
voiceless. In the Spirit of Vatican II with its
return to the sources of faith [Ressourcement],
we are reminded that Jesus himself chose to
engage the world from a position of
powerlessness. When faced with opposition of
the leaders of Israel and Rome, he chose to
witness to his divine mission, not with armies
of angels, but “meek and humble of heart.” If
we are his disciples, powerlessness must be seen
as a gift, a charism from the Master. Our
challenge is to learn how to use that
powerlessness to enliven and enhance the mission
of the Church.
A second gift or charism with
which we have been blessed is to live in a
culture where individuals and social groups are
able to negotiate solutions to common problems
through dialogue. We have a great deal of
experience in negotiating with spouses,
children, neighbors, employers, merchants and
even our government. Might it be that, through
the power of the Holy Spirit, the gift of
communal conversation might be reintroduced into
the organizational structure of the Catholic
Church through the laity? We have no position
of power to protect. If we are able to offer a
non-threatening experience of communal
conversation to our pastors and to our bishop,
might that experience not work its way into the
conversations between our bishops and the pope
himself. It would not be the first time that
God has chosen to instruct the wise through the
actions of the little ones [Luke 10:21].
I offer this thought to you
today. I know your great love for the Lord and
your commitment to discipleship, and I truly
appreciate your experiences and frustrations in
the past to initiate dialogue with pastors and
bishops. But I ask you to recall the commitment
of your baptism. In that Sacrament we were
initiated into the body of Christ. As we are
bound to the Lord, so we are bound to one
another in holy fellowship. Each of us is as
responsible for the unity of the Body of Christ
as is our bishop or the pope. Our challenge is
to inaugurate a dialogue with our fellow
Christians who are in positions of
responsibility in a way that will engage them in
a wholly new experience of conversation within
the Church.
The gift that we are called on to
bring to the life of the Church may be as simple
and as profound as our powerlessness and our
experience of negotiation and dialogue. All
that was asked of Mary was that she be a
mother. God works in strange ways. Could he be
calling us to reform the Church in a new way at
this moment in history?
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Sources: Documents of Vatican
II particularly Lumen Gentium and
Gaudium et Spes.
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