TEN YEARS LATER
Curran, Charles E.
LAITY AND CHURCH: I Abigail McCarthy "Mercy" exclaimed Imogene Coca when she heard that she was to be considered for an Emmy—and a young press agent asked her what that meant. Columnist Earl...
...Life for the vast majority of mankind was an unending struggle to meet basic needs...
...A measure of protection and a civil or religious leadership which fostered the maintenance of family and simple community life was all that could be expected...
...But it is equally necessary...
...But it was necessary...
...It was called a consultation of national lay organizations and was convened by the Bishops' Committee on the Laity, the first major initiative on the part of the committee since establishing its secretariat last fall...
...Through most of these centuries few people were educated...
...everyone had his place, knew it, and accepted it...
...Both conferences illustrated the difficulties inherent in the current dialogue...
...Because the means of historical communication have been missing, the laity, both Protestant and Catholic, have little sense of the past, even of the immediate past...
...Almost midway through 1978 I realize that I have spent an amazing amount of time this year reflecting on, and discussing, that topic...
...Under these conditions it was inevitable that in all Churches the clergy, with assigned responsibility for the institutional life of the Church and its work, accepted the task of leadership and decision making...
...In part this was because of my participation in two conferences...
...If church is to remain church, that is, if it is to remain institution, sacrament and community on the one hand, and if it is to attain to fullness (Continued on page 447) 7 July 1978: 424...
...The problem is communication and providing the instruments for communication between members of the laity, between and among lay organizations, between the laity of one church and the laity of another, between laity and clergy, laity and governors of the institution —in the case of the Catholic Church, the bishops...
...It was the first time that leading evangelicals had met with leaders from the laity of the Catholic and mainline Protestant traditions...
...The second conference, although much smaller and much less ambitious in scope, was in its way just as unprecedented as the Congress of the Laity...
...Mercy me'," he explained, "probably was shortened from 'Have mercy on me.'" To those who are survivors of the age when most communication was via the printed word, and linear (connecting past, present and future), there is something amusing in the need for explanation...
...Cynthia Wedel's comment on the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Vatican II...
...Wedel was writing twelve years ago...
...The bishops were to hear the concerns of the lay organizations...
...Her comments appear in Walter Abbott's The Documents of Vatican 11 (1966): During the long centuries of Christian history, following the first apostolic period when functions of various members of the Body of Christ were fairly fluid, a strikingly similar pattern appears in all manifestations of the Church...
...Columnist and philosopher Michael Novak characterized it the most important religious meeting since Vatican II...
...It was intended to be a listening conference...
...Wedel, now one of the five presidents of the World Council of Churches, was one of the Protestant observers at the Council...
...The pattern of Church life was paternalism...
...The first of these was the Congress of the Laity held in Los Angeles in February...
...One of the best explanations for the belated emergence of the laity as truly church as is hierarchy is to be found in Dr...
...Most churches, as a result, were, she said, taking a new look at the role and responsibility of their laity...
...The organizations were to hear from the bishops directly about the current concerns of the hierarchy—rather than through letters or pastorals...
...In fact, one of the curious aspects of the meeting was that all the principal speakers, including myself, were from the mainline churches...
...Columnist Earl Wilson explained solemnly in the New York Post that "mercy" was once almost an expletive...
...Participation in the rule of Church or State was beyond the abilities or the imagination of most men—and totally beyond the wildest dreams of women...
...To those of us whose salad days were spent in exploring the varied possibilities of the lay apostolate and the role of the laity in changing the world, much of the current discussion of the laity has the same flavor as Earl Wilson's explanation, the overkill of the obvious...
...In the past year the discussion of the laity has taken on new intensity...
...In the age of television the speech patterns of one generation do not carry into the next...
...She goes on to note that in the past century and a half the conditions which required paternalism have completely changed...
...Newsweek called it "unprecedented"—a gathering of Christian lay persons—800 leaders from business, labor, government, education and the arts, gathered together by the Butt Foundation of Texas, and urged to exchange their views on how dedicated Christians could transform secular society...
...political and social life was clearly hierarchical...
Vol. 105 • July 1978 • No. 13
