BLOG 9/27/15. THE ROLE OF THE LAITY, VIS-A-VIS CLERGY DOMINATION
It has been fascinating to watch the reports of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, to see the obvious affection of so many for this unique figure. The populace obviously needs some hope and some good news, and the pope’s warmth and obvious touch with ordinary humans has been a gift in the midst of so much that is distressing in the news. But there’s an issue that lurks here that I want to speak to, and to hopefully speak to it constructively. I want to untangle the whole issue of the ministry of the laity in the church.
In one of Francis’ addresses in Philadelphia he stressed the urgency of the role of the laity in the church . . . but he did it in the context of all of those vested priests, and bishops, and seminarians. Therein lies something of a contradiction. Where in the New Testament documents is there any authorization for a sacralized class of persons who would control the church? Where? Where are there set apart persons, who alone could preside at the eucharist, or alone could baptize, or alone could hear confessions, or be the dominant figures in the church? Before Pope Francis, in Philadelphia today, would be hundreds of thousands of laity who would listen to him as though he was someone far more in touch with the divine than they. And that troubles me.
When he speaks of the necessity of the ministry of the laity in the church, what does he have in mind? Is he thinking of the role of the nuns (whom he commended) who serve but cannot be ordained to the priesthood? These would be, in my definition: church-ified laity, i.e., those who provided their skills keeping the inner workings of the church institutions going. . . . Or was he thinking in terms of the ministry of all the laity in their 24/7 incarnations in the midst of the human society/polis, what with all of its intracables and cultural challenges?
This is not a Roman Catholic problem alone. This is a point of confusion for a good part of the church. There is a clergy-seminary sub-culture that sees itself as the church’s elites, . . . something of a dominant segment of the church. French sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul nailed this contradiction more than a half-century ago. He called the sacralization of a special class of people in the church to be one of the major ‘subversions’ of Christianity (the other being the sacralization of buildings as church sanctuaries—but that’s for another day). This exalting of a special clergy class surfaces frequently when those ostensible disciples of Jesus Christ will lament: “O, I’m just a layman.”
This issue surfaces periodically, but somehow the clergy domination relegates it again to relative obscurity. But ‘laity’ are the actual people of God, and by Peter’s own definition they are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and more (I Peter 2:9). Every believer in Jesus Christ is a priest, and has access to the God’s holy of holies through the sacrifice of Christ. No one is an ‘ordinary layman’ or someone inferior to some clergy-class of dominant ecclesiastical figures. So while I can appreciate the events and messages of Pope Francis’ visit, I have trouble with all of the vestments and accouterments of ostensible ecclesiastical authority visible in his public appearances. Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II, those decades ago, to allow “a fresh wind to blow through the church.” One of the contributions of that Vatican Council was the establishment of an office of the laity to be led by Sister Rosemary Goldie. For a season it looked hopeful, but then it disappeared in the Vatican bureaucracy. The World Council of Churches, likewise, periodically surfaces a priority on the ministry of the laity, but clergy domination seems to smother it. Every believer, no matter how humble, is one of God’s priests through Jesus, and God’s special person in his or her daily life, communicating the life and teachings of Jesus in flesh and blood. I’ll come back to this again. All God’s children are sacralized, and all are to be servants to one another, and to the world. We all are the very Body of Christ, the church, ordained at baptism.
