Shared Mission in Prophetic, Kingly & Priestly Service

In the field of Catholic education, there is great necessity and opportunity to deepen the sense of shared mission especially among the lay, religious, and clerical educators.  For their “shared mission” as “builders of communion,” all educators in Catholic schools ought to undergo “shared formation” (Congregation for Catholic Education [2007]).

In shared formation, “the lay faithful themselves can and should help priests and religious in the course of their spiritual and pastoral journey” (Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful 61).  “Communion and mutuality in the Church are never one-way streets” (CICLSAL [2002],“Starting Afresh from Christ,” 31). 

Wise pastors and religious seek and welcome relevant feedback from lay persons as regards the outcomes of pastoral programs, the quality of the preaching and worship activities, and the personal conduct of pastoral agents.

The formation of the laity is a requirement for the work of evangelization by both the younger and older churches:

“The Gospel cannot become deeply rooted in the mentality, life and work of a people without the active presence of lay people.  Thus, from the foundation of a church very special care must be taken to form a mature Christian laity.” (Church’s Missionary Activity 21)

The catechetical and theological formation of the laity strengthens the prophetic ministry of the whole Church and helps the laity to proclaim in word and deed the Gospel in day-to-day life and in particular contexts.  Lay persons as catechists, Catholic school teachers, married theologians, and faith-inspired politicians and public servants have many opportunities to exercise their prophetic ministry.

Church leaders can strengthen the prophetic ministry of the laity in the following ways:

1. Support the theological education of lay people.

2. Include lay (single and married) theologians in seminaries (especially to teach sexual ethics, the sacrament of matrimony, Church history, Scripture).

3. Discover and develop gifted lay preachers in parishes and communities.

In countries of the Two-Thirds World, where many families of the lay faithful experience hunger and deprivation of basic needs from time to time, the prophetic ministry of the poor has to be recognized and developed.  The poor have to be empowered to tell their stories and to retell them from a faith perspective.  As the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines put it in 1991:

“The ‘Church of the Poor’ will also mean that the Church will not only evangelize the poor, but that the poor in the Church will themselves become evangelizers.  Pastors will learn to be with, work with and learn from the poor.  A ‘Church of the Poor’ will not only render preferential service to the poor but will practice preferential reliance on the poor in the work of evangelization.”  (PCP II, 132)

The pervasiveness and persistence of dehumanizing poverty and unnecessary violence in our contemporary world makes it imperative for the whole Church, and for every believer, to exercise better the kingly ministry by paying attention to the wisdom and folly, the fairness and unfairness, of the formulation and implementation of policies of the State and the Church.  

A major branch of the kingly ministry is the ministry of social action whose guiding principles include justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.

Church leaders can strengthen the kingly ministry of the laity in the following ways:

1. Intensify education on the Catholic Social Teachings especially on the rights and responsibilities of lay people in the worlds of politics and economics.

2. Ensure that the Parish Pastoral Council is fully functional in terms of personnel, resources,and responsibilities.

3. Open the membership of policy-making councils and boards (of trustees) of Catholic schools, hospitals and institutions to competent laity.

4. Make the Ministry of Financial Management in parishes and ecclesial communities fully functional, transparent and accountable especially when it comes to budgeting and resource mobilization.

Despite the grief and anguish of many people, especially the poor and the sick, throughout history down to our times, the faithful and merciful presence of the Spirit of Christ animates the priestly ministry of the whole Church of which every member constitutes “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9).  

God’s people offer a sacrifice of praise day and night in liturgies and prayers and in the upliftment of hearts and minds to the Lord in the midst of day-to-day activities and struggles.

In the royal priesthood, there is basic equality in dignity of all the members, whether they happen to be ordained or not.  “The ordination of one should not become the subordination of another” (Peter Neuner).  The ordained priesthood and the common priesthood are meant to enhance their communion and to preserve both their distinction and their equal dignity.

One way Church leaders can strengthen the priesthood of the majority faithful is by inviting and involving them, especially those with musical and artistic talents, in the making of creative worship activities like children’s liturgies.

“When the lay faithful discover and live more and more their vocation and mission in the Church and in the world, the ordained will likewise discover the meaning of their own vocation and mission.Such a discovery on the part of both the clergy and the laity who were called not to compete but to complement each other will result in a deeper realization of the ministry and spirituality of all the baptized.” (PCP II, 417)

The Church is a mystery of communion and shared mission to make the open communion of the Holy Trinity more visible and tangible throughout the earth.  It is timely, first, to deepen understanding of the shared mission of all the disciples, both the majority and the minority faithful; second, to improve their co-responsibility and co-operation; third, to empower the laity especially through theological and professional formation.

The laity are secular because they are called to contribute to the sanctification of the world often in implicit ways especially in multireligious, multicultural, or pluralistic contexts.

Shared Mission

Fifty years since Vatican II (1962-65), it is timely, first, to deepen understanding of the shared mission of all the Lord’s disciples, both the majority (lay) faithful and the minority (religious and clerical) faithful; second, to improve their co-responsibility and co-operation; third, to empower the laity especially through theological and professional formation.

In chapter 2, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church or Lumen Gentium (LG) affirms that there is basically one vocation and one mission for all the disciples, whether lay, consecrated, or ordained. 
 
By virtue of the sacrament of baptism, every disciple has both the right and responsibility to exercise the threefold ministry of prophet (proclaimer), priest (sanctifier) and king (policy-maker) within the Church and wider society.  Thus, the laity “in their own way share the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ and to the best of their ability carry on the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world” (LG 31). 
 
“Each of the faithful [has] the right and duty of exercising charisms in the Church and in the world for the good of humanity and the development of the Church, of exercising them in the freedom of the Holy Spirit who ‘breathes where It wills’ (John 3:8), and at the same time in communion with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ, and with one’s pastors especially” (Apostolate of the Laity 3).
 
“The lay faithful are not second class members [of the Church].  They share with all the baptized an equal Christian dignity.” (Second Plenary Council of the Philippines [PCP II], 405)  It is not their primary mission to be junior partners or participants in the apostolate of the minority faithful, the ordained and the consecrated members.
 
Co-responsibility among the majority and minority faithful are necessary for the work of integral evangelization in which the whole Gospel is offered to whole persons with their religious, cultural, political and economic aspects.  Both the clergy and the religious worldwide cannot offer enough energy and expertise to evangelize all the vast fields of economics, politics, and cultures.
 
The whole Church needs competent and committed laity (and even competent and benevolent non-believers) to engage with the world:

“Nowadays when things change so rapidly and thought patterns differ so widely, the Church needs to step up this exchange [with different cultures] by calling upon the help of people who are living in the world, who are expert in its organizations and its forms of training, and who understand its mentality, in the case of believers and nonbelievers alike” (Church in the Modern World 44).

 
Engagement with the world is what the laity do in their day-to-day lives.  Thus, the laity have a “secular character,” as “they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life” (LG 31). 
 
The laity are secular, not because their activities are outside of or in opposition to the action of the Holy Spirit.  “The secular character of the laity does not make them ‘worldly’ or keep them from the sacred activities of the mission of the Church” (Aurelie Hagstrom).  They are secular because much of their day-to-day practices and affairs are outside of the control or administration of the hierarchy. 
 
More importantly, the laity are secular because they are “immediately and most numerously seen as the presence of the Church in the world” (PCP II, 423), and they are called to “contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven” (LG 31), especially in multireligious, multicultural, or pluralistic contexts.  In such contexts, the explicit proclamation of the faith has to be done wisely and during opportune times so that faith expressions would not be like “pearls (thrown) to pigs” (Matthew 7:6) which might provoke unnecessary scorn or violence.
 
Integral evangelization entails the active participation and co-leadership of lay persons, as their “field of evangelizing activity is the vast and complicated world of politics, economics…the world of culture, the sciences and the arts, international life and the mass media.  It also includes… human love, the family, the education of children and adolescents, professional work and suffering.” (Evangelization in the Modern World 70)

The active participation of the majority faithful becomes more urgent owing to these signs of the times: the ageing of the clergy and their steadily diminishing numbers in the older churches of Europe and North America, the globalization of information and, with increasing access of masses of people to means of interactive communication, increasing discontent with one-way communication, authoritarianism, and elitism globally.