ONCE AGAIN-A NEW START

...More than a quarter of a century ago J. H. Oldham is quoted in these papers as pointing out that that is just what "the best lay people will not do...

...In our dealings with those in power this attitude of humility has been conspicuously lacking...

...In our country many of these took off on their own tacks-often fruitfully -and have long been marching to the music of different drummers...

...4) Awareness of the desperate problems of Third World countries at the same time so many domestic emergencies exist...

...We have, he says, acknowledged the challenge put to lay-people by modern commerce and industry in some ways-we know about the effect of dull, monotonous tasks, of working odd shifts, of the assembly line...

...It has proved difficult to know how we are to be leaven in the meal, the salt that savors, how the good grain must grow with the tares and the cockle until the end-and whether we are, indeed, wheat or cockle...

...We no longer go to the ghetto and say, ". . . we shall found here a day care center for the children of working mothers...

...A new direction...

...This means industry and business, education and politics, law, medicine and all the professions, art and architecture, and even the entertainment world...

...Now he sees four additional strains...

...We offer solidarity with them in their efforts to find selfhood, to reorganize their own communities along lines that they choose...

...We see so clearly what other people should do...

...We have not begun to understand, he concludes, "what kind of fellowship, prayer life, and worship such laity really need or desire...

...Outward-into the world- permeating every nook and cranny of all our social structures with insights from the gospel of Jesus Christ...

...The energy crisis, inflation, worry about unemployment and housing affect the middle-level church families, particularly part-time workers supplementing family income, and "the great grey army of pensioners...

...We ask them what they feel, what they really want...

...The rhetoric has become traditional in the past half century, true, as in the introductory statement of Mark Gibbs, head of the Audenshaw Foundation in Britain: "those who are actually involved (i.e., "in the powerful, complicated, and potentially compromising structures of secular life") are the ones who must be allowed and indeed helped to work out the ethics and the theology of Christian lay responsibilities today...

...we go to tell them so in our lobbies and pressure groups, the business people and the politicians without thought that they also may be lay Christians who should be asked to help find solutions . . . (Gibbs) And Howard Blake director of the conference writes: (Continued on page 510) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...

...Throughout these discussions, however, runs a thread of acknowledgment that a new kind of manipulation of the laity has developed in this day of "strategies" and coalitions...

...They come to mind in a jumble of memories, all those brave starts of the last forty years-Catholic efforts and Protestant, ecumenical, traditional, and daring innovations...

...to ask, "Is there any way we can help you fulfill your responsibility for that part of the world where you are in control...

...Gibbs, for example, writes that it would be "perverse" not to recognize the severe strains under which lay people today labor, both in Europe and North America...

...We either "stroke" them in order to extract their money or we proceed on the basis that we know what these fellows need...

...But the concrete examples come to grips with reality...

...No, we go hat in hand and learn the costly lesson of identification with those to whom we would show love...

...We know about the heavy work loads and the enforced competition in the life of young executives...

...Still we must applaud the effort, hope for its good end, and rejoice that a fresh start has been made...

...Surely he is right...

...1) There is a "numbing feeling of helplessness" because even large companies and senior executives are caught up in giant corporations, unions, international political arrangements, which they can do almost nothing about...

...2) A nagging fear that the people responsible for these giant structures and decisions are "not all that strong or competent" (3) A new anxiety about "practical lines of ethical conduct" under these conditions...

...That seems promising...

...Of the multi-various clerical efforts to come to terms with, and harness the efforts of the laymen and women so seized with zeal...

...We know that is what you need...

...Christophers, the Jocists, the members of Opus Dei, the prayer breakfast movement, the lay retreat movement, die evangel-ische akademieen, the Christian Family Movement, the Grail, the Lutheran Faith in Life Institutes-all the various manifestations of what we used to call the lay apostolate, were they not efforts to permeate our social structures with insights from the Word...

...But I do not know...

...The laity in positions of moderate responsibility have little enough time for family, local leisure and church responsibilities...

...I thought, at first, that only people who had been very bound up in the bureaucracy of the churches could think this direction new...

...The problem for the laity forty years ago was to get any recognition at all of their importance and peculiar responsibility in the church and the world...

...From this distance I hope for good things from the leaders and participants even though I was, at first, somewhat startled by the conference title and announced purpose: The Laity-A New Direction: "Our aim is nothing less than a major change of direction for the laity in the Church...

...And yet, as with any fresh start or rediscovery, there are some promising new points of departure in the preparatory papers...

...Again and again church leaders proved unable to think of lay effort as anything other than providing troops to march in the direction they might choose to point out...

...And not until then was it conceded that the laity might have a "charism" of its own...

...And what of all those endless discussions of the vocation of the laity, and the right of the laity to perceive and direct it...

...They are finding their work situations "a misery" and "a stale tiredness" the norm...

...We set about manipulating whatever forces we find at hand to force some small steps in our desired direction, (i.e., minority representatives on the board, change in investment policies...

...Had it all gone unnoticed...

...In the Catholic Church it was not until Vatican II that there was finally any clear recognition that the laity had a special task in the xenewal of the temporal order...

...Suppose for a moment, that we should apply the lessons learned in the ghetto and go...