Cardinal affirms Catholic lay mission to serve
Apr 22, 2006
Laypeople are called to serve the church's mission, both by ministry within the church and by apostolate to the world, U.S. Cardinal Avery Dulles said in a lecture March 29.
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com, 4/5/2006) While some Catholics would like to restrict the use of "ministry" to what the ordained do, Scripture, tradition and official church documents make the use of the term much broader, the Jesuit theologian said.
It is also a mistake to view lay ministry within the church – a necessary support for strong lay apostolate toward the world – as somehow undermining lay apostolate, he said.
Cardinal Dulles, the Laurence J. McGinley professor of religion and society at Jesuit-run Fordham University, spoke about "The Mission of the Laity" in his spring McGinley lecture at the university.
"In some past centuries it might almost have seemed that the laity had no mission" because church documents used the words "mission" and "ministry" in ways that applied to the church itself and to its clergy but not to the laity, he said.
That changed early in the 20th century when popes "began to involve the laity in the ministry of the church," he said. He cited the establishment of Catholic Action by Pope Pius X and its strong encouragement by Pope Pius XI.
By mid-century, he said, Pope Pius XII went further, describing the laity as "on the front lines of the church's life" and encouraging not only Catholic Action but other works of lay apostolate that "could be left more or less to the free initiative of laypersons, while of course being conducted within the limits allowed by competent ecclesiastical authorities."
Between the first and second world wars, he said, there was "a prodigious growth of lay activity on the part of Catholics." Examples he cited included the growth of diocesan and national councils of men and women, the Catholic Worker Movement, the establishment of lay Catholic magazines like Commonweal and Integrity and, shortly after World War II, the founding of the Christian Family Movement.
He noted that in the 1960s the Second Vatican Council declared that by virtue of baptism laypeople share in their own way in Christ's threefold office of priest, prophet and king.
In the council's teaching, "prior to any mandate from the hierarchy, they already participate in the saving mission of the church through their baptism and confirmation," he said. "Through these sacraments the Lord himself commissions them to the apostolate. Far from being merely passive recipients of the ministrations of the hierarchy, all the lay faithful have a positive role to play; they are called to make their own contribution to the growth and sanctification of the church."
While the council generally used "apostolate" for the laity and applied "ministry" to them only a few times, those instances "are significant in view of later developments," Cardinal Dulles said.
He said the council "speaks of servers, lectors, commentators and choir members as performing a true ministry."
The council also applies the term "ministry" to religious instruction by laypeople, to missionary activity whether clerical or lay, to teaching catechism, to practicing charity in social or relief work and, in one document, "rather loosely to indicate any kind of service, including work on behalf of peace, justice and the defense of human life, which are normally the tasks of laypersons," Cardinal Dulles said.
He said "ministry" is used particularly for service to build up the church from within while "apostolate" connotes activities directed outward to the world, but since the council there has been a growing tendency in official church documents to use "ministry" for lay activities that would have been called "apostolate" by the council.
Noting the explosion of lay ministries since the council -- including now more than 30,000 lay ministers who work at least 20 hours a week in U.S. parishes, mostly in paid positions -- Cardinal Dulles addressed two controversies over lay ministry.
He said one is the desire by some to restrict "ministry" and "minister" to the ordained, or at least "to the exercise of an established office in the church."
"But neither of these positions seems to be warranted by official Catholic teaching; still less by Scripture and tradition," he said.
He said the other controversy involves questioning by some whether there has been too much emphasis on the rapidly expanding lay ministries in the church, "obscuring the secular mission of the laity" and devaluing their responsibility to transform political, economic and social institutions.
"It would be a mistake, I believe, to make a sharp dichotomy between ministry in the church and apostolate in the world, as if it were necessary to choose between them," Cardinal Dulles said. He said those in lay ministry have an important role in forming "a Catholic people sufficiently united to Christ in prayer and sufficiently firm and well instructed in their faith to carry out the kinds of apostolate that Vatican II envisaged."
Cardinal affirms Catholic lay mission to serve