Knights of Columbus

"Be not afraid! Open, indeed, open wide the doors to Christ! Open to his saving power the confines of states, and systems political and economic, as well as the vast fields of culture, civilization and development."

These opening words of John Paul II's pontificate — "Be not afraid!" — followed by his plea to open society to Christ, display the pope's overriding concern for man's situation exactly as he lives in the world. But the words also represent a kind of key to John Paul's pontificate and its encounter with man in his everyday life. This proclamation therefore seems particularly central to his understanding of the character and task of the Church's laity.

What is the source of the pope's "overriding concern" with the human person, situated as he is "in the world"? And of what, more specifically, is this human person "afraid"? In answering the first of these questions, it should be noted that even before he became pope, Karol Wojtyla had shown particular interest in man's everyday condition. In his writings, he touched upon married and family life, man's working life, his problems, joys and sufferings, his struggles with faith and the dangers that threaten him.

Wojtyla was concerned with the implicit "danger" and "fear" entailed in these human relations and in their historical circumstances. This early focus on man's everyday circumstances continued when he became Father Wojtyla. He was well known for his work with young people and couples, newly married or contemplating marriage. As a bishop, his writings on sexuality earned him renown. Of special note is his contribution to the drafting of the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Consti-tution on the Church in the Modern World).

As the opening words of his inaugural homily indicate, John Paul's focus on the human person in everyday life has also carried over into his pontificate. One sign of this is his continued and deepened reflections on marriage and the family. Similarly, he has emphasized social ethics and the Church's role in bringing to society a truly Christian sense of liberty and political relations. It is in these contexts that the pope responds to the question concerning the source of modern man's fear. He is afraid of "alienation," of becoming a mere political or economic or sexual "object." He is, at times, afraid of the Church and of placing himself under the guidance of its teaching. He is afraid of truly giving himself away and the possibility of his own fruitfulness, of being "perfect" as the heavenly Father is perfect. He is, in fact, afraid of the encounter with God.

But who and what are the laity in John Paul's teaching? What is their task in the Church and in the world, and what are they to do about this modern fear and confusion? In answering these questions, we have to understand the fundamental importance for the pope of what Vatican II had called the "universal call to holiness" or the "perfection of love" (Lumen Gentium, 39-42). Certainly, the Church has always held that all are called to holiness, to be "perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt 5:48). What was new in Vatican II's "universal call to holiness" was its emphasis on the teaching's centrality for the Church's very self-understanding. The call to perfection was seen by Vatican II to be rooted, not only in the "religious state of life" (that is to say, the state of those taking the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and living in a religious order), but in Christian life as such. Therefore holiness was to be sought in all Christian states of life, including the lay state and its normal fulfillment in the sacrament of matrimony and the Christian family.

John Paul's most important teaching on the role of the laity is Christifideles Laici, his 1988 apostolic exhortation on "The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People." Christifideles Laici gave a positive sense of who and what the laity in fact are. They are not just those who are not ordained priests or members of religious orders. They are members of the Church in the fullest sense.

In Christifideles Laici, the pope emphasizes two characteristics of the laity that may at first glance seem to be in tension. First, he highlights that, by virtue of baptism and the other sacraments of initiation, the lay members of the Church are above all else precisely that — members of the Church. "Only from inside the Church's mystery of communion," the pope tells us, "is the ‘identity' of the lay faithful made known and their fundamental dignity revealed" (8). He also stresses that, along with priests and religious, the laity make up the whole Church, the body and bride of Christ. So the first characteristic of the laity is that it is part of (indeed, the largest part of) the people of God, which is Christ's "Body and Spouse" (14).

The laity, like priests and religious, are called to live a holy existence. Their very lives should be an answer to the call given by and in Christ, namely the call to leave everything behind and "follow me." In the first chapter of Veritatis Splendor, his 1993 encyclical on moral theology, for example, the pope uses the Gospel story of the rich young man (Matt 19:16-30; Mark 10:17-31; Luke 18:18-30) — a story that had often been associated exclusively with the call to the religious life or to the ordained priesthood — to describe the central point of Christian morality itself, that is to say the fundamental moral task of all Christians without exception. All Christians, including the laity, must be characterized as those who are called to leave — and indeed are those who by definition have already left — "everything behind to follow Christ," each according to his particular conditions and state of life.

At the same time — and this is where the "tension" would seem to arise — John Paul emphasizes the secular character of the laity. What defines the laity is their living "in the world" or, as it is sometimes put, in the "secular order." The laity have jobs and raise families. They are part of secular activities and organizations. The laity participate fully in the political, economic, legal and social orders. They live in, form and transmit culture. Thus, if all Christians are called to leave everything behind by the very nature of what it means to be a Christian, this reality has to be squared with the actual lives of the laity.

Of course, the lay faithful require "things," such as homes and automobiles and various types of personal possessions, to fulfill their "vocations" to marriage and family life and to pursue their work in the world toward building the kingdom of God. But all of this is "left behind" in the sense that it is all directed (or should be directed) to the realization of the lay state; each of the "things" required by the lay person must be exclusively ordered within the vocation itself.

When the pope speaks of the "secular character" of the lay state, he does not, of course, mean "secularist," or "secular" in the negative sense. In this latter "bad" sense of "secular," God is alien to this world. The result is that the encounter between God and man (and finally between man and man) necessarily appears as a threat to human liberty, producing the type of fear and confusion experienced in modern culture. Rather, the Holy Father means "secular" in the positive sense of the "world" considered precisely as the place in which the drama of human history, the human recognition of God as both origin and end, unfolds.

This seeming "tension" means that the laity serve a unique function in the Church. Without losing their character as most fundamentally members of the Church, the laity are called to realize their Christian vocation in and through their specifically secular character and activities. Having been "taken up into" — belonging to — Christ, the layman constitutes, in his very person, a concrete realization of the relationship between God's gracious gift of himself (in and through the mediation of the Church) and the world.

Christ himself straddles all of the states of life: He is both priest and layman (he spends 30 years in family life and as a common carpenter!); he is both virgin and spouse. He takes into himself all of the states of life and incorporates each as a vital organ of his body, the whole Church. As such, Christ takes the layman and all of his activity into himself through the sacraments and gives the layman back to the world as an image of himself and of the Trinity he reveals.

The pope explains this theological reality through the image of the layman's participation in Christ's threefold mission as "prophet, king, and priest." According to this teaching, the layman shares in Christ's mission as "prophet," since he "bears witness" (primarily by simply living it) to the Gospel; as "king," insofar as he is called to reorder and ready the structures of the world for the coming of the kingdom; and as "priest," since he is called, Christ-like, to lay down his life as a sacrifice for others.

This interior reality of the lay life is particularly well reflected in the vocation to Christian marriage and family (Familiaris Consortio, 11). The Church teaches that marriage must always be open to God's freely given fruitfulness — children. The Church has often reaffirmed the sacred character of marriage and family. They are not simply secular realities of this world, and indeed John Paul tells us that they will find their fulfillment — as will all that is redeemed — in God's kingdom. At the same time, the family is characterized by both Vatican II and Pope John Paul as the "fundamental unit of society." The family and the layman are called to "be the Church" (Christifideles Laici, 9) in the very structures of the world, of society and culture, thereby transforming them into an authentic "communion of persons" from within.

It goes without saying that the human person loves only with great difficulty. And the basic elements of life in the world pose difficulties and potential dangers to the beginnings of this love, dangers that could be the source of "fear." Authentic married love, which the pope constantly reaffirms is grounded in self-gift, could be a source of this "fear." By implication, then, so could our very relationship with God and all others.

The laity's role then, in a way that is similar to the other Christian states of life, is to show a way beyond fear. And this is to be accomplished most fundamentally by "living the Church" in the midst of the world, by "doing the truth" (John 3:21; 1 John 1:6).

By being what they most fundamentally are, lay persons bring faith, hope and love and the spirit of the Beatitudes to the very workaday settings that in themselves seem to pose so many dangers. In short, the layman accomplishes his vocation by living an authentic secular life, a life that in its very worldliness sees God, not as a threat to human liberty and dignity, but as "all in all," and therefore as the very source of this liberty and dignity.

"Be not afraid!"

David S. Crawford is assistant dean and assistant professor of moral theology and family law at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.