The Liberation of the Laity by Paul Lakeland
Ruddy, Christopher
STILL WAITING The Liberation of the Laity In Search of an Accountable Church Paul Lakeland Continuum. $28.95.120 pp. Christopher Ruddy On 1963, Daniel Callahan published his first book, The...
...No book can treat every topic, and Lakeland has previously written a volume titled Freedom in Christ...
...The first is historical, tracing the development of the theology of the laity from the nineteenth century to the present...
...These strengths, though, are undercut by serious lacunae...
...Robert Wilken's recent The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale) would be a useful corrective here...
...In addition, Lakeland's insistence on the church's "worldly" mission leads him to deprecate needlessly the cen-trality of worship...
...We need a deeper understanding of Christian community-one centered on the celebration of Christ in word, sacrament, and service...
...In writing that worship is "not the task" or "even the most important task" of the church, Lakeland contradicts Vatican II's statement that the liturgy is the "summit toward which the activity of the church is directed...
...Calling for greater lay leadership in the world and in the church, he concluded by warning: The layman will be of no help in [the church's] mission if he is not bold and daring, if he is not able to go into society armed with a free, informed, and mature faith, if he has not been taught within the church how to speak with vigor, courage, and candor...
...boldness does not come easily to those socialized into reflexive deference and silence...
...In The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church, Paul Lakeland, a theologian at Fairfield University and the author of several books on post-modernity and political and liberation theologies, argues that the ongoing failure to more fully enfranchise the laity is rooted in an ecclesial identity crisis...
...Lakeland's "Promethean" understanding of humanity and its freedom is similarly devoid of Christological content...
...While upholding the necessity of ordained ministry, Lakeland wishes to recover the laity's authentic vocation and thereby overcome the division between church and world...
...Thus, when focusing on problems in the church, Lakeland correctly mentions such matters as ministry, ordination, and sexuality (he is curiously silent, though, on the dehuma-nization entailed in abortion...
...The second is constructive, offering proposals for the future and tackling such topics as secularity, mission, accountability, and leadership...
...These mid-twentieth-century French "new theologians"- Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Jean Danielou, most prominently-returned to the ancient sources of Christian tradition in a desire to renew the life of the church in an increasingly post-Christian environment...
...Lakeland's proposals for reform thus have a certain hardness and impersonality to them...
...Finally, Vatican II's key image of the People of God must be fully realized through structural reform...
...The greatest theologians of the early church, he writes, saw theology as a road to happiness and holiness...
...Christopher Ruddy On 1963, Daniel Callahan published his first book, The Mind of the Catholic Layman...
...Possessed of much heat, but less warmth, his book lacks the spiritual intimacy and insight characteristic of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez...
...His career as a prominent bioethicist still before him, the then-associate editor of Commonweal traced the history of the American Catholic laity and prophetically anticipated much of Vatican II's theology of the laity...
...And, at a time when it has become fashionable to oppose structural and spiritual reforms, Lakeland justly argues that holiness remains primary, but not sufficient...
...Often treated as children or as sheep by the clergy, the laity must name their oppression and move from being objects of the church's mission to its primary subjects...
...Lakeland anticipates a Vatican III dealing with, among other issues, the role of women and of the laity as a whole, ministry, religious pluralism, and the struggle against poverty in a globalized world...
...These thinkers were steeped in the words of Scripture and the gestures of liturgy-all moving toward the vision of Christ in his beauty and truth...
...Three points compose the heart of his argument...
...Moreover, if heavy-handed in his claim that "any mention of the Spirit is alarming to the keepers of the institution," Lakeland rightly deplores the "pneu-matology of nostalgia" that limits the Holy Spirit's role to the defense of past truths rather than the genesis of new insights...
...His book is divided into two sections...
...But a lay-centered church is no better than a clergy-centered one...
...The long-standing, nonbiblical separation between "clergy" and "laity" has harmed both groups and compromised the church's mission in the world...
...First, the laity must be liberated from their oppression: "Infan-tilization...
...The pope should likewise be elected by a more geographically representative body chosen by the bishops themselves, rather than by the "anachronis[tic]" and hand-picked College of Cardinals...
...The entire church must be liberated, but Lakeland's vision, I judge, cannot sustain communities of resistance and renewal...
...Parish and diocesan councils, for example, should be endowed with a deliberative, and not merely consultative, voice...
...He describes ordained ministers as a kind of support staff who are to take a "back seat" to the laity "in the vanguard of the church's mission...
...The Eucharist is not simply something that the church does, however, but what the church is...
...church" cannot therefore be privileged over against "world...
...Lakeland's devaluation of the liturgy corresponds as well to a devaluation of the ordained ministry...
...Relegated to the "world," a place decidedly secondary to the "church," they are excluded from any effective ecclesial voice or leadership...
...They recognized that the Christian life was an "affair of things"-bread, wine, water, oil-and Christian theology a loving quest after a person-Jesus Christ- rather than an idea...
...Lakeland develops here an incarnational theology which affirms that the secular is the sacred, not merely a natural prelude to a divine end...
...Wilken sees the Christian life as grounded in a set of practices, in an apprenticeship to history (Israel and Christ), ritual (liturgy), and text (the Bible...
...Forty years later, Callahan's vision of a Catholic laity integrated into society and increasingly central to the life and work of the church remains elusive...
...Structures without Spirit are enslaving, but Spirit without structures is ephemeral...
...Lakeland's historical survey is quite helpful, especially in its account of la nouvelle theologie...
...their blend of apostolic vision and theological erudition is sorely needed today...
...Second, this liberation sets the laity (and clergy) free for the church's primary mission: the humanization of the world, especially through resistance to the "antihuman," "evil genius" of global capitalism...
...his God sometimes appears deistic, his anthropology Pelagian...
...it is also the source from which all its power flows...
...Self-definition...
...Although telling a distinctive story-God's love for the world, revealed in Christ-about humanization, the church does not have a distinctive mission...
...Conscientization...
...In this context, his understanding of worship as an event where believers renew themselves for their worldly mission is somewhat functionalistic...
...Nonetheless, Christ is scarcely mentioned in the second, constructive half of this book...
...Yet there is little on the more fundamental failure of the entire church to worship Jesus as Lord and to imitate his humility, forgiveness, poverty, and nonviolence...
...both function only in a kind of impotent tug-of-war, where one's gain is the other's loss...
...This project requires a bold yet faithful recasting of the church's identity and mission...
...Christopher Ruddy is an assistant professor of theology at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota...
...These are the Egypt, Sinai, and promised land of lay liberation...
...Correct in arguing that worship divorced from life is empty and hypocritical, he fails to emphasize that life without worship is fruitless and grim...
...The laity, in particular, ironically find their dignity praised effusively in official teaching and their activity sharply circumscribed in practice...
...Above all, he hopes for a genuinely democratic church guided not primarily by the ballot box, but by the principles of consultation, consent, and accountability...
...The laity's liberation is still some way off...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 15
