Laity, influence, populism, and centuries of history

Please forgive me for this title.

Hey everyone, I’m hoping to get back to posting something weekly, but I’m still working through a backlog after the conference, and I’m behind on everything. I have about half an hour now, so let’s see what I can throw together…

I was reading Laity, Church and World by Yves Congar. I don’t know a ton about him (and yes, I obviously should, given my topic; I’m in the early stages of my research!) but he’s a Dominican theologian who gave three addresses published in this book in 1960. His influence on the thinking of Vatican II is obvious, and I’m glad this thread is so easily recognizable.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I wanted to pull on one thread in his second address. He talks about the importance of the personal conviction of the laity. In brief, no one is listening to authority these days; people who hold positions of authority are not swaying or influencing as much as was true in the past. What’s influential now is personal conviction; people who have accepted the Church’s claims inwardly and are personally convinced of them. He refers to another observer of the times, who “had the merit of seeing clearly” the following (p. 45):

That what had formerly been done for religion by the great ones of the earth was now devolving on the people as a whole, that it was public opinion that ‘got things done’; and that for the future it was these new rulers who had to be turned to. Today, Catholic activity directed towards keeping or making social life Christian is no longer the responsibility of a few important people; it is a ramifying activity whose organizations are spread all over the world.

This was published in 1960, and it seems that this train has gotten even further down the tracks in the last several decades: familiar to us today are democracy, populism, mistrust of institutions and authority. This mistrust of authority is not entirely unfounded; in my own case (and I’m probably not unusual in this regard), it comes from the fact that those in authority have often done a terrible job of using their authority well. This obviously isn’t true of everyone in authority, but it is true that the behavior of some (many? most? few but prominent? I don’t keep data) Church leaders has been deeply scandalous and, at times, horrifying. Why, then, would we be inclined to trust?

In sum, the world in general is moving from a trust in authority and institutions to a trust in personal conviction. This tracks with my observations of the world. Congar suggests that this is a big reason why the laity is “coming of age” (a phrase he says he would have disliked “had not Pipe Pius XII himself used it” p. 21) in the late 20th / 21st centuries.

Okay, but what about the laity during the many other centuries of the Church’s history, when people did trust in institutions and authority? What then? Any theology of the laity must necessarily include them as well.

I’m reminded of another article I read a few weeks ago — I don’t have time to dig it up now — which caused me to think carefully about the word “secular.” Does “secular” refer to those spaces where religion is elbowed out, like the public university’s hospital that provides medical procedures that Catholics find immoral? Does it refer to those spaces that are not explicitly religious, i.e. anything that isn’t the sacristy and the sanctuary and the pilgrimage? There are spaces in between — vacuuming the carpet in a Catholic home, or the work in a carpenter’s workshop in historical Christendom. If the laity’s particular space is on the “frontier” or “front lines” of the boundary between the Church and the world, we ought to have clear definitions of “Church” and “world.”

This is all a bit rambly. I think this is the piece I want to unpack: A lot of the modern conversation about the laity is about the secular sphere, being on the front lines of evangelization, ordering the temporal world to the plan of God (i.e. by using political or cultural influence to, for example, make our society more conducive to love and family life). But there’s a difference between the question What are the laity, ecclesiologically? and What ought today’s lay people do? The second question ought to be informed by the answer to the first, and the first ought not be limited to WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies.

I’m interested in your thoughts, especially if you’re of an older generation that has seen more of the shift from trust-in-institutions to mistrust-of-institutions. How has your experience of being a lay person changed over the years? Have you noticed a difference in the “messaging” you received from the Church* (homilies, etc.) about your role? For those of you who don’t have this perspective of decades, what do you understand your role as a lay person to be? What messaging do you see as most prominent? Where do you receive this messaging from (homilies, parish programs, podcasts, online priests, online laity, etc.)?

*Congar would be upset at me for using the word Church this way, and I agree with him. But I’m out of time.