Editorials

...We need real consultation, honest discussion, serious theology, and recog-nition that care and concern for the church exist at the bottom as well as the top...

...When Congar wrote, in the fifties the question of the laity seemed almost an exotic interest, even to many lay people...

...There exists a strange embrace between this literature of purposeful transgression and what it transgresses...

...three million have been displaced from southern Sudan...

...Many questions from the faithful, few and evasive answers from the Pontifical Council on the Laity, underscore the church's want of a substantive theology of the laity...

...Lay ministry-work in the world and/or work in the church...

...This famine, in the midst of good rains and a promised full harvest, continues because food itself has become a weapon of war between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM...

...How, when, and in what ways will Islam come to lessons like these...

...Passionate rebellion not only requires an object but needs an alternative...

...In many parts of the world the consultations were in themselves animating events...

...Chesterton put it, writing in 1905, "Blasphemy depends upon belief...

...Islam is a great religion of 900 million adherents, claiming scores of nations...

...Christianity did not easily give up its own self-endowed mission to pass judgment on infidels, or the burning and hanging that went with it...

...With this document in hand, we still have no adequate theological framework for understanding the work of lay people in either church or world...

...This development is a considerable boon to writers, of course...

...We now know there must be better ways of searching it out than the synodal process...

...The 1987 synod, with its prior worldwide consultation of lay people, was convoked to review the state of the laity since Vatican II...

...Rushdie are wont, we know, to play with fire, but we do not respond by burning them alive...

...Thus, it is a faith these authors profess, and one not without paradoxes...

...Rushdie has sided notjust with literature but with a certain kind of modem Western literature, a literature of imaginative rebellion...

...Now, we have the just-released Christifideles laid...

...Then, there was the truncated and censored summary of the synod discussion groups...

...Thirty years after Congar and twenty-three years after Vatican II's Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, we now have Christifideles laid, the post-synod report from the 1987 synod, "The Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and the World," under the byline of John Paul II...

...Therefore, not simply the words coming directly from him, but also those transmitted by the various departments of the Holy See [emphasis added] call for a loving and receptive hearing by the lay faithful.'' (In Scripture and tradition there is solid grounding for the lead-ership role of the bishops, and for the priesthood of the faithful...

...But whatever inner tensions it may reveal, this literary faith is one which the West has been living with since at least the Enlightenment...

...Early in the next century the church will flourish or wither depending not only on how vigorously laity have come to understand and take up their responsibilities as Christians, but on how prudently Vati-can officials understand and exercise theirs...

...In parishes as well as in regional and national gatherings, lay people got the chance to exchange ideas with one another and with clergy and bishops...

...Certainly there are others: national and international task forces of bishops, theologians, and lay people systematically looking at and reflecting on the theological lacunae apparent in the "ministry" issue...

...Rushdie has done...

...We are not sure what a fully developed theology of the laity would look like...

...Many Muslim leaders have distanced themselves from the ayatollah's issuance of a license to murder in God's name...

...Women in non-ordained ministries, including altar girls...

...There should be no boasting about this process, too slow, too reluc-tant, too smeared with blood, including the blood of Muslims...

...Not being invited themselves, what did the laity ask to bishops to discuss in Rome...

...A hunger for community and spiritual develop-ment...

...It is impossible to say...

...Like most caricatures, they are based on a germ of truth...

...refer-ences to previously unknown commissions that will settle the question of lectors and acolytes and that will designate authen-tic Catholic lay movements...

...If we are now working in the dark, it's because someone keeps dimming the lights...

...The laity have come to play an unanticipated and growing role in the work of the church itself-with more to come because of the increasing shortage of priests and sisters...

...The U.S...

...Cheap shots are made about the Enlightenment, about secularism, about the modern world's supposed incapacity for belief or its insensitivity to the sacred...

...He helps us see again that running the risk-and it is a risk-of free inquiry and free artistic expression is every bit worth it...

...The War of Words must be waged with words...

...One alternative model is our own bishops' patient, critical, and alert listening on econpmics, on war and peace, on women, and on the laity...

...END THE FAMINE END THE WAR There is famine in Sudan, as bad as Ethiopia's four years ago...

...Rushdie or both...

...Human sexuality from the perspective of married cou-ples...

...The authors have made sure that almost no one-lay or clerical-will read these 40,000 words...

...Is our belief eroded when we counter with criticism or even ignore the artistic transgressions against our faith, sometimes seriously and thoughtfully meant,'sometimes merely exploitative or adolescent...

...The ayatollah reminds us what that old-time religion really could be...

...in addition the committee organized seven national meetings between lay leaders and the bishop-delegates to the synod...

...Modestly subtitled "A Study for a Theology of the Laity," his volume was the first comprehen...

...Loving and receptive hearing" is a one-way process where the Vatican is concerned...

...When one of the world's most important religious leaders .declares that even if Mr...

...The ethic it has engendered is, no doubt imperfect and is imperfectly observed, but it has conferred benefits: Writers like Mr...

...In any other church but our own, that would reflect badly on the laity themselves, who share in the responsibility for theological reflection...

...But is our creed diminished because we reserve the term blasphemy for such things as a resurgence of the ' 'teaching of contempt''-the long history of Christian anti-Semitism...

...More fully linking faith and life...

...LECTURING (SIGH...

...Improving collaboration with clergy...

...The role of the bishop as the leader of the local church is emphasized, but crucially hedged: "The church is a primary teacher, in which the pope takes the 'primary' role in the formation of the lay faithful...

...First, there was an unfortunate pre-synodal "Working Paper," which sup-posedly drew upon the bishops' consultations (we don't really know that since the Vatican put the lid on the bishops' confer-ence reports), and was meant to guide their discussions at the synod...

...where is the theological warrant for endowing curial officials with the mantle of Petrine authority...

...And what does it all add up to...

...But in the case of the Roman Catholic church the blame for failure lies squarely with those who insist on complete control, so much so that the honest efforts of the bishops initially to consult the laity, the willingness of the laity to speak up, and even the work of the synod itself have been lost, first in bureaucratic maneuvering that limited input and output, and now, more than a year later, in a sea of torpid prose...

...forums of lay people reporting on their experiences as Christians in church and world and reflecting on the theological and spiritual consequences...

...Some have emphasized that mercy, compassion, tolerance, justice, and patience are basic to Islam, but it is not clear from what they have said whether, in their view, the ayatollah's actions derive from a tenable alternative interpretation or constitute an offense against Islam at least as grave as anything Mr...

...If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think of blasphemous thoughts about Thor.'' Rushdie's own honest recognition that he has enlisted in a religious war helps explain why some of the testimonials offered by other writers in response to the ayatollah's anathema had such a strongly religious, dare one say dogmatic, tone...

...One million people have died since 1983...

...As G.K...

...As for Mr...

...THE LAITY It is more than thirty years since Yves Congar wrote Lay People in the Church...

...Oxfam, America has asked for prayers for the Sudanese people on Sunday, March 12, and for letters to George Bush urging U.S...

...Thirty years later, with the issues barely advanced beyond Congar's treatment, the laity, though critical to the future of the church, remain peripheral to its theological self-understanding and to its decision making...

...Rushdie, although his insistence that he meant no disrespect by his novel seems more than a bit disingenuous, he has certainly been candid about his overall enterprise...

...Mainly we need to be clear about our own weaknesses and strengths...

...support for nascent peace efforts...

...We must find a way to understand it and live with it, as it is now, and not as Christians or the West would prefer to redefine it...

...Its bare-bones references to the issues raised by the bishops are found scattered throughout in allu-sions to the struggles between bishops and unnamed lay move-ments for setting and maintaining diocesan priorities...

...And that is the heart of the matter: Until we develop and learn to live by an ecclesiology congruent with Vatican II and until the Vatican is able to set aside the overweening defensiveness of its own authority- only a portion of which is authentically Petrine-the laity along with the rest of the church will be in die intolerable position of having their own concerns and queries shunted aside while being given answers to questions they did not ask...

...It is not for us to decide whether Islam, its Prophet, and its Holy Book have also been blasphemed, by either the ayatollah or Mr...

...Rushdie hints about Moham-med...

...Bishops' Committee on the Laity estimates that in this country some 200,000 Catholics participated in the consultations...

...Well, when the ordinary layperson "in the world" encounters this sort of thing from business or government, she has a term for bureaucratic claptrap...

...Both government and the guerrillas have blocked food supplies...

...and a welcome declaration that parishes are the basic locus of church life...

...This turn of events and the resulting preoccupation with "lay ministry" have drawn attention and resources away from sufficiently imagin-ing the work of the laity in secular affairs...

...In the March 2 New York Review of Books, he wrote that, left by his loss of faith with a "God-shaped hole," he has filled it with literature: "So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths....As my fictional character 'Salman' says of my fictional prophet 'Mahound,' 'It's his Word against mine.'" In this War of the Words, Mr...

...But it is equally important to believers...

...But we need to be frank about its weaknesses just as we need to gain from its strengths...

...sive effort to understand and define theologically what he described as a new Pentecost: "If the church, secure on her foundations, boldly throws herself open to lay activity, she will experience such a springtime as we cannot imagine...

...If heart can be taken from these efforts of the local churches, it should be, for none can be taken from Rome...

...As successor of Saint Peter, he has the ministry of 'confirming his brothers in the faith...

...Or have we instead learned that believers are more in need of self-examination than God is of defense...

...Is it possible that Congar's work will prove the high point in the effort to devise a serious theology of the laity...

...It gave them up under the pressure of self-destructive religious wars, spreading skepticism, and its own internal critics...

...Even more than relief efforts, the Sudanese people need international support for peace negotiations...

...But there should be no hesitation in asserting its central and , permanent value now that the process has occurred...

...when the document is not inching in one direction or the other on internal church questions, it throws in long quotes from other documents (the luminescent phrases of Lumen gentium shine forth in this numbing context...

...Rushdie turned himself into "the most pious man of all time," true belief demands that all Muslims still "send him to hell," that leader is saying something about God as awful as anything Mr...