WHAT IS A LAYMAN ?

ANYONE at all familiar
with the mass of recent writing on the laity will agree, 1 think, that it leaves the earnest reader in a confused state of mind. What is a layman? There doesn't seem to be any precise answer to the question.
One can get furthest by a negative approach. He is not an ordained minister. That much at least is clear—perhaps the only clear line in a blurred picture.
He is not a religious. But already here the demarcation line fades . . . Many religious do not differ from lay people in the essential actions of their Christian life.
But religious withdraw from the world and take vows, it may be urged. Well. members of several secular institutes take vows and yet fiercely claim that they remain lay.
And what constitutes withdrawal from the world? Ordinary Christians, neither religious nor clerics, have lived in community before now, creating a special environment for their own spiritual profit or to carry out some Christian work. Did they cease to be lay?
OR, WE MIGHT ADOPT a different approach. A layman, let us say, is a person who remains in the human situation given him, independently of his Christian faith and life, by the interplay of natural and social factors.
He must christianise that situation but does not embrace a new state of life arising out of his Christian profession. But that would mean that people, such as some catechists and Catholic Action leaders, who devoted all their time to the work of the Church would put themselves outside the lay state (and Fr. Karl Rahner has argued that in fact they do).
And again, where would we draw the line? On which side would we place those who followed their profession or trade in the ordinary way but for the good of the Church decided to move to a mission territory to do so?
Or those who gave a great part of their time to apostolic work, seriously modifying their state of life while not entirely renouncing it?
Fr. Karl Rahner, by the way, wanted to group fulltime Church workers with the clergy. Which shows us how difficult it is, theologically, to distinguish minor clerics from the laity.
IF WE TACKLE the matter positively — and lay people understandably object to a merely negative treatment—the difficulties increase. Everything that is said positively about the laity seems to apply to all Christians without distinction.
The attempt to make the consecratio mundi, the christianising of the temporal order, the distinctive lay task runs great dangers. It may result in underestimating the role of the laity in the whole mission of the Church.
To use modem jargon, the Church has a charismatic as well as a hierarchical dimension. All lay people are under the action of the Spirit for the common task of the Church, and some are called upon to play a decisive part in the Church's life at particular times.
LAY PEOPLE, too, may fulfil a surprising variety of ecclesiastical functions. There have been lay spiritual directors in the past. Nothing prevents lay people from becoming fully fledged theologians and being thus fully engaged in the doctrinal life of the Church.
They can also be canon lawyers, and it was suggested at the Council that many of the jobs in the Curia could well be done by laymen. The laity are by no means restricted to the temporal order.
Nor are priests excluded from this either. Even under the present discipline priests can be scientists or philosophers. Paul followed a trade, and the married priests of Greece live much the same kind of life as their unorda ined neighbours.
While the distinction between the ordained and unordained is essential and unchanging, the present difference between the clergy and laity, which embodies and extends it, includes many changeable historical and sociological elements.
The difference could be transformed if conditions warranted this. The theologian must not make absolute what is relative. Admittedly, then, lay people carry the main burden of the consecratio mundi, but that does not adequately define their role.
MY CONCLUSION is that the discussion about the laity has got into a tangle by an over-emphasis on the distinction between the clergy (or religious) and the laity. It has fallen into an inverted clericalism, unconsciously assuming the dichotomy of the past but now looking at it from the layman's side. The remedy is to put what belongs to all Christians simply as Christians firmly in the first place.
We should be much less concerned with marking out an exclusively lay status and task. One could go through most of the books on the laity and substitute "Christian" for "lay" without loss of meaning. The aim of the lay movement should be to give the laity their full status as Christians and members of the Church rather than precisely to define a lay sphere.
When we have recaptured the sense of community and the conviction of the share of all in the mission and life of the Church, then we can go on to consider the diversity of functions within the one body. The variety and inevitable overlapping of these will not then disturb us.
Charles Davis