POSITIVE ROLE OF LAYMEN STRESSED

Catholic Herald reporter
THE layman is not merely the Church obedient, the Church passive, not even the active helper of clergy. He is first and foremost a member of the people of God through baptism.
This view—by the Rev. S. Fagan. S.M. of Dublin--was
the theme of a conference on -The Priest and the Lay Apostolate", held in Beaumont
College, Windsor, during the Easter weekend.
More than 150 priests, 50 of them from the religious orders, attended the conference, which was organised by the Catholic Missionary Society.
Fr. Fagan said that the layman is characterised by his more direct and immediate involvement in a temporal vocation. It is his complex lot to live in two worlds at the same time. But these two worlds interpenetrate to such an extent that his Christian fulfilment of the temporal vocation has value only to the extent that it is the expression of his life of grace.
Mgr. Derek Warlock, parish priest of SS Mary and Michael, Commercial Road, Stepney, East I.ondon, said certain theorists, because of an erroneous belief that the emancipation of the layman is a reluctant process, had been led to replace "clericalisation" of the Church with a new brand of anti-clericalism..
They minimised the role of the priest in the apostolate, forgetting that it is usually the priest who in large part must form the layman for his apostolic role and sustain him in it.
Means to achievement:
At the other end of the scale, there was the danger arising front the abuse of "over-organisation" priests of Catholic societies. They should be seen as a means to the achievement of the Church's mission, not as an end. Above all, they are a means of formation, equipping the member for his apostolate in the home, the parish, in public life, nationally and internationally.
An organisation might well he most successful when it lost its trained members to an apostolate outside its own rank's.
Professor J. M. Cameron of Leeds University, said if we combined the Petrinc idea of the royal priesthood of the people of God and the Pauline teaching on the diversity of gifts and roles within the body, with our developed theology on the offices of Pope, bishops and priests, had the result to be that conception of the role of the layman which is current and predominant among most Latin Rite Catholics today?
Or did the present situation represents a distortion of the apostolic tradition, because of historical circumstances no longer valid?