1. I don't think that people way back when necessarily trusted authority. They obeyed authority. There was no other choice. Vassals obeyed lords. Laity obeyed priests. Rebellion resulted in punishment in this world or the next. There would have been differences in personal conviction even if most people were generally obedient.
2. Growing up Lutheran gives me a different perspective on the laity. We were encouraged from the start to trust God, not institutions. The denomination was born from rebellion against established institutions. It still surprises me to see the reverence people have toward priests that seems over and above what I experienced growing up. That priest is someone's little boy whose sister can probably tell stories about him...My faith as a Catholic doesn't depend on a priest or his authority, but on the authority of the Church in Scripture and Tradition. That's infallible; a priest is not.
3. My role as a lay person is to use my gifts and life circumstances to bring about the Kingdom of God. Mostly this has been raising a family, the witness of our marriage, teaching, and volunteering as a retiree. These have all been my own decisions, made with prayer and discernment, but completely outside of any influence of clergy. I would have done these things whether our priest was good and holy or was a jerk.
4. I've never heard a priest speak about the laity discerning and using spiritual gifts for use in the parish. There are calls for volunteers sometimes, but nothing about the role of the laity as laity. This message of using my gifts was received from other parishioners in programs initiated and run by parish lay people and confirmed by my own experience.
I mean to chat with you today about this but it slipped my mind... and there was other chaos, too.
1. This is a really interesting point. There's something in, I think, Rerum Novarum about how it's newly understood how education and culture can benefit everyone (as opposed to just the elite classes), and that struck me. I'm not a historian but it does seem that the trajectory is moving toward flattening hierarchies and class divisions. I think there is a lot of good in this, but it also (obviously) has some pitfalls as well. It's worth remembering that people in the past (especially the distant past) were living in a different culture with different unspoken assumptions.
2. This is also a really good point. I went through a time in my life (which you may remember) when I shared some of this undue reverence for priests. Since writing my original post here, I read further in Congar's work and he describes the Reformation as being, at least in one aspect, a rebellion of laity against clergy. Lumen Gentium points out that lay people shouldn't assume priests are experts in everything, yet popularly we're often encouraged to do so.
I was in a conversation recently where someone suggested that if a couple isn't sure if they have a "good enough" reason to try to avoid pregnancy, they should talk to a priest about it. My husband and I both pushed back; our experience has been that (for the most part) even good and well-meaning priests don't have helpful advice or perspectives on marriage-related things. I live marriage; many of my friends live marriage; we talk about things. Priests are unmarried and, where they interact with married people, they don't do so as peers. My experience has been they can explain the theology of marriage fairly well but don't normally have a good sense of the practical situations it would need to be applied to.
3. This has largely been my experience as well (though with different specifics). I've heard complaints sometimes of the "clericalization of the laity" -- specifically, that there are so many teams and ministries and trainings that we forget that it's our baptism, not a certification from a program, that enables us to evangelize. These programs can be helpful but we should be careful not to let them create different castes of Christians.
1. I don't think that people way back when necessarily trusted authority. They obeyed authority. There was no other choice. Vassals obeyed lords. Laity obeyed priests. Rebellion resulted in punishment in this world or the next. There would have been differences in personal conviction even if most people were generally obedient.
2. Growing up Lutheran gives me a different perspective on the laity. We were encouraged from the start to trust God, not institutions. The denomination was born from rebellion against established institutions. It still surprises me to see the reverence people have toward priests that seems over and above what I experienced growing up. That priest is someone's little boy whose sister can probably tell stories about him...My faith as a Catholic doesn't depend on a priest or his authority, but on the authority of the Church in Scripture and Tradition. That's infallible; a priest is not.
3. My role as a lay person is to use my gifts and life circumstances to bring about the Kingdom of God. Mostly this has been raising a family, the witness of our marriage, teaching, and volunteering as a retiree. These have all been my own decisions, made with prayer and discernment, but completely outside of any influence of clergy. I would have done these things whether our priest was good and holy or was a jerk.
4. I've never heard a priest speak about the laity discerning and using spiritual gifts for use in the parish. There are calls for volunteers sometimes, but nothing about the role of the laity as laity. This message of using my gifts was received from other parishioners in programs initiated and run by parish lay people and confirmed by my own experience.
I mean to chat with you today about this but it slipped my mind... and there was other chaos, too.
1. This is a really interesting point. There's something in, I think, Rerum Novarum about how it's newly understood how education and culture can benefit everyone (as opposed to just the elite classes), and that struck me. I'm not a historian but it does seem that the trajectory is moving toward flattening hierarchies and class divisions. I think there is a lot of good in this, but it also (obviously) has some pitfalls as well. It's worth remembering that people in the past (especially the distant past) were living in a different culture with different unspoken assumptions.
2. This is also a really good point. I went through a time in my life (which you may remember) when I shared some of this undue reverence for priests. Since writing my original post here, I read further in Congar's work and he describes the Reformation as being, at least in one aspect, a rebellion of laity against clergy. Lumen Gentium points out that lay people shouldn't assume priests are experts in everything, yet popularly we're often encouraged to do so.
I was in a conversation recently where someone suggested that if a couple isn't sure if they have a "good enough" reason to try to avoid pregnancy, they should talk to a priest about it. My husband and I both pushed back; our experience has been that (for the most part) even good and well-meaning priests don't have helpful advice or perspectives on marriage-related things. I live marriage; many of my friends live marriage; we talk about things. Priests are unmarried and, where they interact with married people, they don't do so as peers. My experience has been they can explain the theology of marriage fairly well but don't normally have a good sense of the practical situations it would need to be applied to.
3. This has largely been my experience as well (though with different specifics). I've heard complaints sometimes of the "clericalization of the laity" -- specifically, that there are so many teams and ministries and trainings that we forget that it's our baptism, not a certification from a program, that enables us to evangelize. These programs can be helpful but we should be careful not to let them create different castes of Christians.
4. This has been my experience as well.
This is really interesting and I've been thinking about it lot.