Every baptised person has an integral role

Unfortunately, many of us, lay persons, when commenting about the Church tend to address her as an institution outside ourselves. We do not realise that every baptised person has an important and specific role to play as a living and integral member of the Church.

Because we distinguish between those who are actively involved in the running of the Church and those who are on the receiving end, the division bertween clergy and laity seems to imply that lay persons have an inferior or insignificant role to perform.

Some of us think that the only role we have, as lay persons, is in Church services or getting involved in committees run by the parish.

Though such participation is to be encouraged these shouldn’t be the only functions that we have to undertake to show that we are committed Christians.

Pope Francis, when he was still a Cardinal, in a 2011 interview with an Argentinian Catholic news agency spoke about the disease of clericalism. Clericalism means focusing fundamentally on the things of the clergy and, more specifically, Church functions, rather than bringing the Gospel to the world. In the interview the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stated: “The lay person is a lay person and has to live as a lay person with the power of baptism, which enables him to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself, to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from the pulpit but from his everyday life”.

Even Blessed Pope John Paul II, in the document Christi Fidelis Laici (1988) warns us to “beware of the temptation of being so strongly interested in the Church services and tasks that some fail to become actively engaged in their responsibilities in the professional, social, cultural and political world”, In other words, it is through our profession that we have to proclaim the Good News by word and example.

In the same document it is emphasised that “the lay faithful’s position in the Church... comes to be fundamentally different by the newness in Christian life and distinguished by their secular character”.

This secular trademark is properly and particularly our field of work. Through our example and correct behaviour in our place of work and entertainment we will be acting as leaven thus hastening the kingdom of God in this world.