The layman in the Church

We come now to the relation between the layman and the Church of which he is a member. As a Catholic, I of course am going to be talking mainly about membership in the Catholic Church (or for those of you who resent this name, the Roman Catholic Church); so let me say what I think first about the many Christian Churches.

The People of God, as it is now called, or the Mystical Body of Christ, as it used to be called, following Paul's way of expressing things, consists, in its fullness, of every person who lives with the life of the Holy Spirit in addition to his natural life. Anyone who shares this life is in fact Jesus, who is the human expression of the life of God in the world.

This, it seems to me, includes vast (I hope) numbers of people who do not belong to that sociological entity I called the Catholic Church, and probably excludes some (and I hope not many) who are actually enrolled in it, and who have been baptized and so on. Anyone who gets baptized, for instance, for purely social reasons such as to avoid persecution, and who has no belief in Jesus as God, is externally a Catholic, but has not, I would think, what it takes to be a Christian.

It is quite possible that Buddhists and Jews and other sincere non-Christians in fact belong to the People of God. We could not say that they are Christians (and in fact they aren't, because they don't believe that Jesus is God); but we cannot exclude the fact that God has used their sincere disbelief in Christianity and belief in whatever their religion teaches to bestow his life on them. This, by the way, is teaching that has always been held by the Catholic Church, if not by everyone in it.

Why then is there such a thing as the sociological entity called the Catholic Church? I think that it must exist, for two reasons: First, because it is nonsense to say that we are all "united" but there is no visible sign of this union at all: that we are united purely internally, and this internal union, which makes us all one Person, in fact, finds no visible expression whatsoever. That is absurd. If the indwelling of the Holy Spirit unites us, this will spill over into an interactive cooperation among the people so united.

Thus, though Luther perhaps was on target in stressing that being Christian did not come by belonging to a certain organization, but was the Holy Spirit in us; still, to say that this means that therefore there is no visible union of those so united is to me a contradiction. It is like the faith-works controversy. Works will not make a sinner innocent again; only God's gift can do that; but God's gift will spill over into works done in the Spirit, as its effect, not its cause.

Secondly, the truth is the truth; and while some people, because of their temperaments or training, cannot accept some of the truth, it does not follow that that which they cannot accept is "false for them" and only "true for those who believe it."

The Christian Creed is not one of values, but one of facts. We do not "believe in" brotherhood, love, justice, and so on; we believe that there is only one God, that Jesus was born from a virgin mother, that he in fact suffered crucifixion and died, and in fact returned to life, and so on. We assert that these are facts, not legends--or, as Paul said, "our faith is a waste of time."

The point here is the belief does not create the facts; the facts are facts irrespective of whether anyone believes them or not. Jesus was in fact crucified and died, even if some Muslims think he wasn't. He in fact came back to life, even if practically all non-Christians (and even some Christians) think he didn't.

But what did actually happen? Is the piece of bread the words "This is my body" are said over actually Jesus' body, or is this not a fact, but a pious way of looking at things? What is the truth--the fact--here? Obviously, many Christians believe one side, and many others the opposite.

We are pretty far away from the events themselves. There are no longer any of the five hundred who saw him still alive for us to question. If Jesus is serious about "the facts" being what saves us, then it would seem that there would have to be something by which what the facts are could be preserved.

Protestants, of course, immediately say that there is: the New Testament. But which books are really the New Testament? There are Gospels like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Childhood of Jesus, and other books like the Books of Esdras and so on which have equal antiquity as manuscripts with what we are familiar with, but which have never been accepted as authentic. Who is to say, in other words, which Books are the Bible? All recount fantastic events, so to distinguish the "true" ones from the "legendary" ones on the basis of internal evidence is impossible; you wind up rejecting them all, as so many Biblical scholars have done, and save only that core which you think is "reasonable to believe."

No, I think the Church--the sociological entity, now--must exist mainly to let us know what are the facts.

Now in one sense, what the facts actually are doesn't make a great deal of difference toward a person's salvation. We will all be saved, as I said much earlier, by our mistakes; none of our ideas of what the facts are exactly squares with what they are; and God uses our ignorance and perversity and pig-headedness to save us.

Some might, in the real world, be damned if they belonged to the Catholic Church, because the Church makes them hold as facts things they simply cannot bring themselves to believe are facts. So God in his wisdom has created Churches that they can belong to, where they can hold to part of the truth and reach their salvation that way. In this sense, what does it matter?

Still, the truth is the truth; the facts are the facts; what happened did happen. And it is by our belief that it happened that we accept the life of God, and are released from our sins and will share God's happiness. So it does matter that the truth be there to be known by those who can know it, to the extent that they can know it. If for some reason we can't believe some aspect of the facts, God uses this for our benefit; but it does not detract from the value that the facts should be there and that we should be in a position of knowing them if we can.

That is, I would think that a person who knew or believed (as I do) that the Catholic Church held as facts the total of the facts that are there to be believed (even if no one in the Church understands all about these facts--but that is another story), and deliberately refused to belong to it because he didn't like some particular tenet, or didn't like the people in it (thinking that Bishops lived luxurious lives, for instance), then that person would be putting his salvation in danger.

The Church does not exist, in other words, to provide us with models of holiness, though there undoubtedly should be many such models in it; it exists, first, so that the unified life of the Mystical Body should have a visible expression, and secondly, so that the facts will be available to be known as facts and not legends. If all the Bishops in the world were lechers, including the Pope, this would still not be an argument against the Church or the truth of Christianity.

Now what does all this mean for the layman? What it means is that he recognizes that his belonging to the Body of the Prince comes from the Prince's gift to him; and this is what is essential.

But he belongs to the sociological entity called the Church (and if he knows what he is doing, I think to the Catholic Church), because he cannot accept that he will be united with the other cells of that same body in a purely spiritual way with no visible sign of it; his belonging to the Body would not separate him from the other cells, but make him seek them out.

He also knows that what he thinks he believes may be the result of inspiration by the Holy Spirit or by his own fevered intellect, or even by the evil spirit; and he wants some way he can check to see which way the Holy Spirit is leading him. The Holy Spirit will not contradict himself; so if he believes as true something the Church teaches is false, then he knows it is his belief that doesn't square with the facts.

That is, he is, as I said, not like the Religious, who finds the will of God in what the superior commands. The layman finds the will of God in what seems to him to be the correct and reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, looking on the world (as he thinks) from Jesus' divine-human point of view. The Church functions for him as a kind of veto: when he wants to do something that the Bishop forbids, then God did not want him to do it. When he says something that the Bishop silences, then God did not want it said by him in this way at this time. He is not unwilling to submit to this constraint, because he knows that it is not God's will that the good be done at all costs, but that we submit as He submitted--that we fail as he failed--and in that failure that our resurrected selves succeed.

He is the receiver from the Church as an organization: the student that the hierarchy and priests are teaching, and who is being taught directly by the Holy Spirit also. The function of the Church as a society--i.e. the hierarchy--is to see to it that the laymen (the students) have the facts available to them, and that they can worship as a visible unity, not simply individually. The Church as a community includes the laity; as a society (i.e. as that part of the community which can issue orders and threaten punishments), it is the hierarchy.

The layman, thus, is free. The "orders" the Church gives are information, telling him what the facts are to be believed, and what the Holy Spirit does or doesn't want done; what the Church "orders" him to do is simply a way he "forms his conscience" (that is, find out the facts about what is right and wrong). And if, for instance, like--we can presume--Luther, he cannot believe that these facts are facts or these orders come from the Holy Spirit, then he is "anathema," which means, "not a member of the visible community," (that is, he is ex-communicated)--which does not mean he is damned, but simply that what he is teaching is objectively not the truth, or what he is doing is objectively not what the Holy Spirit is prompting--that he is either perverse or objectively mistaken. The excommunication does nothing, really, to him, but simply provides information to others that what he is saying is not to be believed as the facts.

So in that sense, the Church's commands to the layman are not commands, and the layman has the full freedom of the Christian, unlike either the clergy or the Religious, for whom the will of God consists in taking orders. For the clergy and the Religious, the orders of superiors are orders from God, not simply information.

I spoke of the Religious; the priest is taking orders on what to teach and how to do it, on how to help the people to worship as a unit from his Bishop; and the Bishop is taking the orders from the Deposit of Faith: that is, from the College of Bishops, whose spokesman is the Pope. The Bishop is not taking orders from the Pope, but from the Prince Himself, as commanded to his Representatives ("Apostoloi") from the beginning through the living tradition. These are real orders; this is why he is the Prince's Representative in our time.

I said much much earlier that the Bishop has no mind of his own; he is a pure channel by which the authentic facts about Jesus and his teaching get transmitted to the people of today. He has no control over what is to be taught, and very little over how it is to be taught. If ever there was an "instrument," it is the Bishop--and by delegation, the priest who is his instrument.

The Theologian's job is to ponder the meaning of the facts and the teaching of Jesus; to show how it is true, in spite of apparent evidence (from science, for instance) to the contrary; and to show how it is "relevant" to our age, so different from the age of Jesus. This is the Theologian's task, and is something that I, a layman, am trying to do in these pages. The Bishop's task, and the priest's, is to see to it that the facts are preserved, and that the "meaning and relevance" doesn't mask what the facts are or take their place.

In this connection, I think for a priest to teach something that (as a Theologian, say) he finds at variance with the common teaching of the Church is for that priest to do a tremendous disservice to what the Church as a society is all about; to my mind, he is directly contradicting his teaching function as a priest--and is teaching what he thinks is "true," rather than transmitting what the Church teaches as the facts. How can the layman use what the clergy teaches as a check on his own belief if all he is checking it against is what the priest happens to be thinking? The "teaching" of the Church is not then what the facts actually are, but simply what "the learned" happen to think based on the evidence they have at the moment; and if the particular Theologian is as learned as Isaac Newton was in physics, his knowledge is of the same order as Newton's--able to be overthrown in fundamental respects by someone who unearths some new evidence. If the teaching of the Church is of this order, then the whole enterprise is a waste of time, because no one now is going to get back there and find out whether Jesus actually did walk on water and all the rest of it.

So when a thinker who is a member of the clergy "finds out" something that seems to contradict what the Church is saying, let him discuss it with other members of the clergy and check things out, so that the Church can speak with one voice--or let him shut up.

I realize that I have in a sense excluded myself from this; because as a layman, I don't belong to that part of the Christian community whose function is preservation of the facts; and so my meanderings into what the "meaning and relevance" of being a layman is are mine and are recognized as mine, not as what the Church teaches.

I am not totally free, however. If there is anything in these pages that is contrary to the teaching of the Church, I would hope that what is contrary would be suppressed by the hierarchy. Of course, I hope that only that part that is contrary to Church teaching would be suppressed, and the rest, if it is not positively false, would be allowed to be stated. But if none of this can be published, then so be it; I would then hope that, if it is true, and the Holy Spirit does not want it known now, then it would be preserved somewhere so that when the opportune time comes when people would not misunderstand it, it can then see the light, and people can be helped by it.

My task, as I see it, is to get the words down on paper, so that they are available to those (if any) who can benefit from them. The words seem to me to be odd enough so that if I don't say them, they won't be said; and I do think that they are true and worth saying. But once I have done this, my essential service to mankind has been accomplished; and if nothing ever comes of it--well, I did what I could, and it is better that the effort come to nothing than that falsehood masquerade as the truth.

One word on the worship of the People of God. The essential task of God's People, the Body of the Prince, is to perform the sacrifice two thousand years ago which redeems us here and now. I have less patience than I should with those who don't go to Mass because they "get nothing out of it." Jesus got nothing out of the crucifixion, and the Mass is the crucifixion, in which we, the laity participate. Our participation is made possible by the clergyman--the priest--but it is we, Jesus living in the world today, who perform the "People's Work" (leitourgia--liturgy), and are the many of the sacrifice of one man two thousand years ago--now.

I have said this before. What I want to stress at the moment is that the participation here is the participation in the crucifixion, not the participation in the ceremony. There is nothing wrong with participating in the ceremony; but being passive at the ceremony can be active participation in the crucifixion, which is what it is all about.

That is, one who is aware that he is a cell in the body of the man who is now two thousand years ago being crucified for the redemption of the world from sin and who is simply "following" the Mass with this in mind, and not, perhaps, even saying the responses with the rest--is he participating less than the person who is up there in the choir loft, singing on key and in perfect time, shaking hands with the proper smile and "communing" (in the ordinary sense) with all the other members of the human race?

The Mass is not a solidarity session of human togetherness; if that happens, it is because of what the Mass is, but it is not what the Mass is; the crucifixion unites us; but it is the crucifixion that is what the Mass is, not "unity."

And what the raison d'etre of the Mass as a ceremony is is to make the people aware of what they are doing: to make them participate in the crucifixion. What leads to this is beneficial in the Mass; what distracts from it is to be eschewed, no matter how much "togetherness and fellow-feeling" it may foster. If we leave the Church building with the impression that we like belonging to that club, the Mass we attended has missed the point. We are supposed to have been redeeming the present age by presenting it with the crucifixion in us.

Again, there are volumes to be written on each of the topics in this too-long, too-short chapter. But I fall back on the prefatory nature of what this book is supposed to be, and hide my inadequacy there.

There remains now only for me to say something about how I think the layman could be trained to get something of an adequate idea of what living a real Christian life could be in practice. That is the next and final chapter.