LAITY AND CHURCH: II

...Understanding the reality of existing structures, method, practique, technique, instrumentality.., these are all parts of know-how...

...There is no reason to believe that either Baptists or Catholics are exempt from the conclusions of the Gallup Poll in 1976 about the gap between belief and practice among those Americans who are church members...

...When battling with someone of John's skills, it is always an advantage to have two swings to his one...

...Because each Baptist congregation is autonomous, it is cleat that there could be lit.tie lay reflection on issues of common concern or national import if the convention was the instrumentality for expressing the fruit of that reflection...

...Sorry to say I cannot comment on the Hee-Haw wisdom he quotes...

...Pilgrims to Bangkok's "Red Cross place" should definitely stop downstairs...

...This attack, he felt, ignited the greatest agreement among the participants...

...Perhaps the confusion of rooms lay not so much in the maid's attempt to mislead me as in her attempt to dramatize, to recreate the scene of death in a room more like the death room than the real one now is...

...The practical results would seem to be that organizational and ecdesial concerns of career Baptist leaders will tend to overshadow all others and that the effort to minimize the gap between the sacred and the secular will be minimal...

...In the present instance I am forcibly reminded of that classic line from "Hee-Haw": "'Fact' is stranger than truth...

...I don't mind helping it along (my fan was quite real--though mythical too) so long as I do not misrepresent any hard facts...

...Another observer interpreted this thrust as "a major intervention by a foundation into North American social and religious life . . . . . religion is too important to society to be left to official church leaders...

...That serious disoussion and input was ~till missing from the consultation more 'than a decade later, although fthe first general communication to lay leaders had suggested as one possible subject for dialogue, "means of developing awareness of the laity's responsibility in the temporal order...

...Rankin thought that underlying the main theme of the congress---creativity-"another of greater importance . . . the attack on compartmentalization...

...Richard Shaull, professor of ecumenics at Princeton Theological seminary, discussing President Carter as a Baptist leader in the January issue of Sojourner says that the centrality of the people in the decision-making process is a myth inherent in Baptist ecclesiology...

...For protecting me from myself, from the "eastern" mind I was beginning to develop, I am in John Moffitt's debt...

...Said Archbishop Jadot, Apostolic Delegate, to those present at the first consultation sponsored by the committeethat with some leaders of lay organizations (April, 1978)m"Dia, logue leads to exchange...

...Surely the dignity of the laity rests on the special obligation for the renewal of the temporal order, but serious lay reflection on that order is still missing from the dialogue just beginning...

...This is neither good nor bad, but a fact to be considered, when embarking on a dialogue with the laity living in the world, "called there by God" (again Lumen G entium ) . Commonweal: 511...

...Thus, the apparent indifference of the evangelicals to the temporal may not have reflected the mind of the whole chtwoh...

...He cites sociologist Paul Harrison who says .that a large, rapidly growing, and loosely structured denomination demands strong leadership to hold it together and that a large church bureaucracy inevitably develops but with no rational or structural ordering of power...

...McCorthy (eon't) tariat it has oreated, being "to assist all the bishops 'to recognize and promote the dignity as weU as the responsibility of ~he laity in the Church.' " (Lumen Gentium) As with the Baptists the difficulty lies in the structures of leadership...

...Three out of four do not connect religion wi.th their judgments of right and wrong...

...Her explanation of the fan's frayed wire, caused by the door's friction, as was the case with my fan's wire, is harder to explain...

...Of the record 23,000 registrants only 17 percent were lay persons and, as Marjorie Hyer of the Washington Post noted, it is reasonable to assume that some of these were wives of the clergy present...

...Awakening the laity is also the avowed purpose of the bishops of the Catholic Church: the primary objective of the new Bishops' Committee on the Laity, and of the secre(Continued on page 511) Commonweal: 489 reccurse...

...in theory the normal avenue of recourse for the laity is through diocesan structures...

...Perhaps she had just forgotten...

...The difficulty is complicated by the fact that, juridically, the church is governed by dioceses...

...he hoped to make codirector before the conference foundered on controversy...

...But I am relieved to know that he found me in error on just one of my hundred or so details, though that error is a large one and miscolors several other details and interpretations, though too he suspects my tendency to exaggerate on other details_9 (Keystone Kops for Thai police and "whisk" for "expedite" are of course exaggerations...

...This may seem an extraordinary assertion about the Baptists among whom, in theory, power resides in the laity...

...The laity awakened, however, need structures and networks...

...But he also quoted Cardinal Hume who said that it would take fifty years to work out the proposals of Vatican II...

...He seems determined to keep sliding down back bedroom drainpipes forever...

...but then "western" minds have trouble making such distinctions...

...In general, church leaders do not lead the lay life, and therein lies the difficulty...

...It is very likely that Mark Gibbs's comment on the main line churches applies as well to the evangelical---"churches have not yet found the best ways in which lay people can be used in their conferences, conventions and synods . . . though lay people are very often asked .to take part in the government and organization of their churches, really they are pretty helpless faced with the experienced lobbies and the skills of the clergy and church officers...

...JAMES BAKER 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abigai...

...Perhaps she was rationalizing a "western" scientific explanation for my sake...

...I seem to have been in historical error only in identifying Merton's last bedroom as an upper rather than a lower one...

...It was to this bureaucracy that Catholic layman, Secretary Joseph Califano, turned for assistance in planning the ill-fated White House Conference on Families and it was one of its own, Francis Butler, that...

...JOHN MOFFITT Poetry Editor, America magazine Reply Thank you for this chance, to res~ nd to John Moffitt's letter correcting some of my "facts" about Thomas Merton's death...

...It should be noted that there is some statistical evidence that, in the past, graduates of Ca,tholic schools did somewhat better in bridging the gap than did other Christians--but that is another subject...

...exchange to co-responsibility...

...Both Martin Marty of The Christian Century and Robert Rarrkin reporting for the Danforth Foundation News suggested clerical slowness as the reason for Southern Baptist layman Howard Butt's initiative in proposing the Congress of the Laity (Los A~geles, February, 1978) and funding it was the resources of the Butt Foundation...

...As a poor but proud white southerner, I view Hee-Haw in about the same light a proud black person might view Amos 'n' Andy reruns...

...Cynthia Wedel pointed out that in the document on the laity she "missed a serious discussion of the dilemmas of the modern Christian in his daily work _9 . . I wondered, as I read this, how many lay people actually engaged in secular occupations shared in the drafting of the document...

...My only regret is that he did not understand that I was describing only my own experiettce searching for Merton, not giving an authoritative historical account of the death...

...Just as are the Protestant bureaucracies, this one is staffed by church professionals and theirs has been the lay voice actually heard...

...This exchange has been extremely beneficial because now my original thesis stands out in bolder relief: Merton has escaped, is still escaping, and will continue to escape us all, especially us westerners who might think we have him...

...Christianity is more than doctrine . .. it is a way of interpreting reality...

...What her error means is that the Merton myth is still growing--in Asia as well as in the West...

...Quite naturally so--since initiatives in the temporal order have increasingly come from this source in the churchmwitness the "Call to Action...

...Perhaps her "eastern" mind was making a new myth...

...In reality, like the Baptists, however, the bishops have depended on a large church bureaucracy which has been the natural outgrowth of the World War I founding of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the more recent organization of the National Council of Catholic Bishops...

...Nevertheless, it must be significant that the annual Southern convention held this June in Atlanta was almost completely dominated by clergy...

...I readily and gratefully accept his corrections since he was "on the spot" when Merton died and since--as we have been told--"western" memories are superior to my guide's more imaginative, myth-making "eastern" ones...

...The fact is that both denominations --so very unlike in structure--are only beginning to find ways of applying the Gospel to the realities of lay life...

...Upper room" is of course more mythically apt, and by John's account the real death room (due to Thai superstitution) no longer exists as a room...

...LAITY AND CHURCH: U ABIGAIL MeCARTIIY "The laity must take on the renewal o/ the temporal order as their own special obligation . . . . " Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity . . . Vatican H The achievement of an ideal is more often frustrated by the failure to develop what we Americans have so usefully packaged in the indispensable word "know-how," than it is frustrated by bad faith...

...In this country today the two denominations reporting the most growth are, first, the Southern Baptists, and, second, the Roman Catholics...

...That so many of the 800 who attended funded themselves for the four-day conference and stayed closely involved in seminars on evangelism and political leadership, women in the church, international corporate social and ethical responsibility, ecology, a Christian world view, urban needs, race ~elations, etc., certainly justified Howard Butt's statement, "The Congress did call fresh attention to the capacity of the :hutches for changing society through awakening the laity...

...Just after Vatican II, Dr...

...One might think that in both laity hope to come to the fullest Christian mat.urity, to find support in the struggle to live fully Christian lives and, in their work, to begin the renewal of the temporal order...

...A committee, a secretariat, brief and selective consultations are frail instruments for the heavy burden of communicating the needs and concerns of 99.7 percent of the church...