Renewing the Vigour of the Catholic Laity

Fr. Philip North of the Walsingham Shrine has an excellent article in New Directions on what is needed in the Catholic movement in the Church of England. He is absolutely spot on in this piece and I for one am happy to see it here. It has been the laity through and through who have helped us along in maintaining the Catholic tradition in the Church of England and we should also begin our renewal by saying thank you to them. If it weren't for them we who are priests would have nothing. So, we owe them the time and effort it will take to help renew them in the vigour of their own faith in the Catholic tradition of our church.

Below, I take some quotations so that the reader will be motivated to read this article in its entirety and then act upon it. I do hope our priests are reading this too. Thank you to Fr. Philip!

Catechesis. Complacency is the great enemy of evangelization. When Christians take their relationship with God for granted and forget the power of the gifts that are theirs, the ardour to evangelize goes. Good catechesis will counter complacency by recalling Christians to the heart of their faith. We have increasingly become a church in which the only instruction most laity receive is the Sunday homily.

Encounter with the Bible has often been limited to the opportunity once every week or so to listen to three badly-read passages. Meanwhile Junior Church has too often been making sunflowers from paper plates and confirmation classes have been thin and/or ill-thought through.

We are convinced that the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century was a powerful moving of the Holy Spirit, seen in the renewal of laity and clergy alike. The worship and the preaching of many of our churches was fervent and emotional. The aim of the Anglo-Catholic Congresses was 'to bring men and women to acknowledge Jesus as Saviour and King'. It is on record that Fr Wainwright at St Peter s London Docks in the 1920s thought that the time of conversion for the men in his Confirmation Group came when they prayed together freely and in their own words. Anglo-Catholics believe in the Holy Spirit. We teach that the Spirit is truly given in Confirmation and Ordination, and that the same Spirit transforms bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at the Eucharist.

Ardour in prayer and a new confidence in telling of the Good News of Jesus Christ in our lives will come to Anglo-Catholics as we open ourselves and our parishes to the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit. There will be tongues and tears in prayer for some, and profound and expectant silence for others. But there will be no fear or division over this, for Anglo-Catholics will have discovered a new love of God and each other.

For many it is demonstrated at the big celebrations such as the National Pilgrimage to Walsingham or Stand up for Jesus when for hours we watch as hordes of clergy parade forward to kiss the altar while laypeople look on in admiration. Many would argue that this represents a profoundly dis-eased model of the Church in which it appears that the role of the baptized is to watch and be impressed. All too often this attitude is replicated in parishes where the people of God are left stunted and unused, their gifts unacknowledged.

Often, even when there have been attempts to develop lay ministry, lay people have been turned into pseudo-clergy, taking on some of the tasks that cannot be achieved by a reduced number of priests. Proper lay ministry means forming a community of the baptized who have an ardour and an understanding of their faith which enables them to live it out and proclaim it. To achieve this, priests need to accept that their key role in the future is to draw gifts out of others, to call people to lay ministries in the church and to resource lay people to live out their faith boldly. Lay people need to see that their responsibilities do not end when they walk through the church door and that their vocation as the baptized involves more than 'helping Father'.

The renewal of the laity lies right at the very heart of effective evangelization and if the working party had been asked to make one single recommendation, this would have been it.