The Lowly Catholic Layman

Compared with his Protestant neighbor, the U.S. Roman Catholic layman has traditionally been something of an ecclesiastical G.I. An active Protestant can take an active part in running his church by joining a board of trustees, and an intensely concerned one might reasonably aspire to succeed Industrialist J. Irwin Miller as president of the 40-million-member National Council of Churches. But among Catholics, the layman is low man in the ranks, subject to the spiritual orders of priests, monsignori, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and the Pope.

Slowly but surely, the long-passive Catholic laity are beginning to rebel. As both the quality and quantity of Catholic education have improved, sons and grandsons of Catholic immigrants have begun to question the old, priest-run order. Widely read in papal encyclicals, knowledgeable about the Catholic liturgical movement, many modern laymen are openly unhappy in parishes where the spiritual life is conducted along lines that were new a century ago.*Talking about the "emerging layman" is now a favorite parlor game of Catholic intellectuals. Some clergymen--notably Monsignor John Tracy Ellis of Catholic University and Bishop George W. Ahr of Trenton-have publicly worried that a new anticlericalism is on the rise among Catholics.

Exhortation v. Inertia. Last week, concluding a series of nine articles on the role of the laity in the church, the lay-edited Catholic weekly Commonweal published a notable analysis of current relations between U.S. laymen and their priests, by Harvard-educated Daniel Callahan, 32, an associate editor of the magazine and co-editor of a scholarly collection of Protestant-Catholic ecumenical studies, Christianity Divided.

"The Church," writes Callahan, "is in the midst of a revolution with which it does not have the means, juridical or theological, to cope." Popes and contemporary theologians alike have exhorted the layman to become more active in the service of the Church; the new breed of well-educated, spiritually alert layman is eager to do so. Yet, thanks to centuries of lay inertia and clerical imperialism, the "Church's organizational and institutional life has been the sole responsibility of the clergy; from the teaching office of the Church down to the most remote parish everything of importance has been in the hands of the clergy." Callahan points out that Pope John XXIII, in his preparations for the Second Vatican Council, appointed a preparatory commission to discuss the role of the layman--but it did not occur to Rome to name representatives of the laity to the commission, and no Catholic layman will participate in the deliberations of the council.

Task for Vatican Council? The reactions to unfulfilled promises, says Callahan, are already plentifully visible: "The unwillingness of many recent Catholic college graduates to join parish or church organizations; the flight from Catholic higher education of many young Catholic scholars; the transference of the zeal of many apostolic Catholics from Church to secular organizations; the desire of innumerable Catholics to detach themselves from any cultural attachment to the Church, to lose themselves in a sheltering, pluralistic society." Callahan thinks that the frustration of lay hopes could lead to anticlericalism, but sees a more immediate danger in the dissipation of the contemporary layman's eagerness to serve. "The whole lay apostolate," Callahan warns, "could simply wither away to a feeble, insignificant movement, of little consequence to the ongoing life of the Church."

Ultimately, lay hopes for the future rest on the Vatican Council, which has a rare opportunity to promulgate reforms that would give the layman a more vital role in his church. What the laity want, Callahan concludes, is for the clergy to do some soul-searching and, in the context of the Council, to think seriously about how the layman could be used in the service of God. "To even face the problems and needs, much less to find solutions to them, will require much boldness. But it is a boldness not impossible for the Church."

*"Sermons are usually built around the catechism," complained Physicist Charles Herzfeld, writing about "Our Wasted Intellectuals" in the July 6 issue of Commonweal. "This is simply not good enough. Parish activities, where the featured speaker is a football coach, are not good enough, nor are bazaars, nor novenas." Parish life, he says, often gives "a great and deep sense of being outcast, and of being abandoned by the Church."

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