Editorials
COMMOHWEAL Reinventing the laity ' atican II did not invent the laity, nor issue a Magna Carta on the laity' s behalf. But the council's capacious sense of the church itself did provide a kind of...
...There are many others...
...Of course, no one needs special permission to live a Christian life...
...When the pope and the curia increasingly speak and behave as if "we (and we alone) are the church," and the bishops acquiesce in the playing of the Roman card, more and more people will concede their claim—"O.K., it is their church"—and give up...
...But there is another response—plugging away on doing one's best at what one is doing...
...Yet Christians, by definition, need a community...
...So are Feminists for Life, the Association for the Rights of Catholics, and, in another way, Commonweal...
...Though the two words continue to embellish conference brochures, their actual practice is in peril...
...As a result, collaboration among bishops, clergy, religious, and the laity, which necessarily rests on a fraternal and collegial relationship with Rome and among the bishops themselves, is gradually being reduced to a matter of top-down choice...
...But where the hierarchy fails in its observance of collegiality and prefers a system of top-down governance to collaboration with the community of believers, the work of the church is diminished and perhaps can go on only in such a small-scale and halfhearted way...
...Nor should anyone wait for an invitation...
...But since there are no procedures (such as mandatory consultation) to protect collaboration when preferences change, nor established forums, such as required pastoral councils of laity or women religious, to express it, the spirit of "working together" is becoming an option rather than a way of living the Christian life...
...No one needs a mandate to reflect on the Gospels, as Mary Good's review of a history of the Young Christian Workers reminds us...
...It is no small benefit when a bishop or pastor prefers a collaborative style...
...Such modest hopes sound a somber note...
...Collegiality and collaboration, in tandem, seemed a new way of doing business in the church...
...The Vatican's end runs around national episcopal conferences and its current episcopal appointments are, in effect, strangling the spirit of collegiality...
...Discouragement and disengagement constitute one response...
...that comes with baptism...
...If the decline of collegiality and collaboration di11 September 1992: 3 minishes the number of ways in which Catholics can participate in the community of believers, that still should not keep lay people from doing what they can...
...But the council's capacious sense of the church itself did provide a kind of "parva carta...
...The National Center for the Laity, whose fifteenth anniversary offers the occasion for this special supplement, is one example of this lay initiative...
...A corollary of this collegiality was collaboration—the "working together" of bishops, clergy, religious, laity...
...As Ed Marciniak puts it: "The cemeteries of this world are appropriate resting places for countless Christians who spent their lives waiting for cues that never came and summonses that were never delivered...
...For example, Katharine Byrne: "I know that this [parish] could survive in its essential purpose even if its members met in a store front...
...11-39), the subject of this issue's special supplement...
...May their numbers increase...
...This larger understanding, expressed in Gaudium et spes and Lumen gentium, was exhibited in a new spirit of collegiality between bishops and the pope and among the bishops themselves...
...That seems to be the preference of those who responded to a query from Commonweal about the laity, the church, and the future (see pp...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 15
