By Fr. Song Eugene
The Laity obliged to provide the Church’s needs
Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the situation of the laity in the Church was never a happy one. Clerical dominance notoriously marked the Church as only those in cassock, the collar and religious habits could make their voices heard.
There was a huge bridge separating the clergy- ordained ministers, from the laity-those not in Holy Orders, due to the ecclesiology of the Councils of Trent, 1545-1563 and Vatican I, 1869-1870, which described the Church as a perfect society of unequals. This led not only to an emphatic distinction between clergy and laity, but it also placed great emphasis on ecclesiastical authority and the obedience required of the laity.
However, the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965, in its “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”, Lumen Gentium, the “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity” Apostolicam Actuositatem, and the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”, Gaudium et Spes, made a radical shift from a “hierarchiology” to the theology of the Church as the People of God with equal dignity of all the Baptised from the Pope to the newly baptised infant. Nonetheless, the “functional inequality” between the clergy and the laity remained sacrosanct.
During and after the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s lay members have been called repeatedly to assume their rightful place among the People of God and to carry out the apostolic mission that is theirs according to their state of life.
Their primary mission is to heed the call to holiness of life received from God at the time of baptism. To attain perfection, Pope John Paul II in his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles Laici contends that “---the laity should follow and imitate Christ in embracing the Beatitudes, in listening and meditating on the Word of God, in conscious and active participation in the liturgical and sacramental life of the church, in personal prayer in family or community, in the hunger and thirst for justice, in the practice of the commandments of love in all circumstances of life and service to their brethren especially the poor” (no 16).
Moreover, the lay faithful have as mission the noble obligation to respond to the needs of evangelisation and to bring all men throughout the world to hear and accept the divine message of salvation by bearing personal witness to Christ by the use of words and their example of life. This is because “people today put more trust in witness than preachers, in experience than in teaching, in life and action than in theories. The witness of a Christian life is the first and irreplaceable form of mission (RM, n. 42).
The witness of the laity should start in their families since the family is the basic cell of human society and then extend to their places of work, politics, offices, and in all other secular spheres. They can also witness within Lay Associations like the Catholic Women Association, CWA, Catholic Men Association, CMA, the Young Christian Workers, YCW, Young Christian Students, YCS, and Small Christian Communities, SCCs, which have taken a new vitality in the African Church. Pope Benedict XVI contends that the development of these Associations is helpful in shaping our Christian conscience and supporting one another in the struggle for justice, peace and reconciliation. The Pope said Small Christian Communities, for example, and the new communities are fundamental structures for fanning the flame of our Baptism (Africae Manus n. 131).
SCCs have successfully taken root in many dioceses across Cameroon which illustrates the lay faithful’s desire for a greater commitment to the discipleship of Jesus. The SCCs are operational in all the parishes of Bamenda Archdiocese and they enhance deeper spiritual enrichment and promote the image of the Church-as-family through specific apostolic works like visiting and assisting the sick,prisoners, widows and orphans, encouraging laxed Christians and inviting priests to bring communion to the sick.
Furthermore, they have the mission to support the Church through generous and freewill donations. They are to support church projects, seminaries and houses of formation and the sick or retired priests and should remember their local parishes when writing their WILL. Canon 222 &1 states that: “Christ’s faithful have the obligation to provide for the needs of the church, so that the church has available to it those things which are necessary for divine worship, for apostolic and charitable work and for the worthy support of its ministers.”
In addition, individuals, groups and ex-students’ associations can opt to support Catholic Education by furnishing school libraries with books and computers and award prizes to outstanding students like the Lucy Ayafor Prizes of Excellence awarded to meritorious students of St. Bede’s College Ashing Kom.
At the political level, the lay faithful are to participate in the political life of the nation as the only means through which they can bring Christian principles to bear upon the temporal order. It is the pastoral duty of Bishops to form the consciences of the people for a sincere political commitment. This explains why before the October 9 Presidential election, the Bishops of Cameroon wrote a Pastoral Letter calling on “--- all Cameroonians, especially those who are of voting age, to take part in the electoral process, to use the ballot box to demonstrate their civic maturity, to reject strongly all acts of violence, unnecessary provocations, various forms of fraud that distort results, and anything that can lead to destabilisation and disorder.”
The Bishops also have the duty to set out the moral principles related to social order especially with the recent emergence of ambiguities or questionable positions on certain principles of natural moral law. They have to clarify the moral stands of the Church so that Christians do not vote for laws and lawmakers who contradict fundamental moral teachings.
This is significant in the Cameroonian context where there is an ongoing tussle for the recognition of abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriages in the name of human rights and freedoms. Cameroon ratified the Maputo Protocol in July 2009 whose article 14 promotes homosexuality and abortion to the consternation of our Father Bishops who condemned the act in June 2009 after their 34th Plenary Assembly in Yaoundé and called on Christians to disregard the protocol and protect human life from conception to its natural end.
For the lay faithful to carry out their mission effectively they need to acquire competence in church doctrine so as to always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks them to give reasons for the hope they have (1P 3:15). The Church therefore needs suitable centres and schools of biblical and pastoral formation such as the Maryvale Institute of Bamenda Archdiocese to prepare the laity with proper catechesis.
However, the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965, in its “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”, Lumen Gentium, the “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity” Apostolicam Actuositatem, and the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”, Gaudium et Spes, made a radical shift from a “hierarchiology” to the theology of the Church as the People of God with equal dignity of all the Baptised from the Pope to the newly baptised infant. Nonetheless, the “functional inequality” between the clergy and the laity remained sacrosanct.
During and after the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s lay members have been called repeatedly to assume their rightful place among the People of God and to carry out the apostolic mission that is theirs according to their state of life.
Their primary mission is to heed the call to holiness of life received from God at the time of baptism. To attain perfection, Pope John Paul II in his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles Laici contends that “---the laity should follow and imitate Christ in embracing the Beatitudes, in listening and meditating on the Word of God, in conscious and active participation in the liturgical and sacramental life of the church, in personal prayer in family or community, in the hunger and thirst for justice, in the practice of the commandments of love in all circumstances of life and service to their brethren especially the poor” (no 16).
Moreover, the lay faithful have as mission the noble obligation to respond to the needs of evangelisation and to bring all men throughout the world to hear and accept the divine message of salvation by bearing personal witness to Christ by the use of words and their example of life. This is because “people today put more trust in witness than preachers, in experience than in teaching, in life and action than in theories. The witness of a Christian life is the first and irreplaceable form of mission (RM, n. 42).
The witness of the laity should start in their families since the family is the basic cell of human society and then extend to their places of work, politics, offices, and in all other secular spheres. They can also witness within Lay Associations like the Catholic Women Association, CWA, Catholic Men Association, CMA, the Young Christian Workers, YCW, Young Christian Students, YCS, and Small Christian Communities, SCCs, which have taken a new vitality in the African Church. Pope Benedict XVI contends that the development of these Associations is helpful in shaping our Christian conscience and supporting one another in the struggle for justice, peace and reconciliation. The Pope said Small Christian Communities, for example, and the new communities are fundamental structures for fanning the flame of our Baptism (Africae Manus n. 131).
SCCs have successfully taken root in many dioceses across Cameroon which illustrates the lay faithful’s desire for a greater commitment to the discipleship of Jesus. The SCCs are operational in all the parishes of Bamenda Archdiocese and they enhance deeper spiritual enrichment and promote the image of the Church-as-family through specific apostolic works like visiting and assisting the sick,prisoners, widows and orphans, encouraging laxed Christians and inviting priests to bring communion to the sick.
Furthermore, they have the mission to support the Church through generous and freewill donations. They are to support church projects, seminaries and houses of formation and the sick or retired priests and should remember their local parishes when writing their WILL. Canon 222 &1 states that: “Christ’s faithful have the obligation to provide for the needs of the church, so that the church has available to it those things which are necessary for divine worship, for apostolic and charitable work and for the worthy support of its ministers.”
In addition, individuals, groups and ex-students’ associations can opt to support Catholic Education by furnishing school libraries with books and computers and award prizes to outstanding students like the Lucy Ayafor Prizes of Excellence awarded to meritorious students of St. Bede’s College Ashing Kom.
At the political level, the lay faithful are to participate in the political life of the nation as the only means through which they can bring Christian principles to bear upon the temporal order. It is the pastoral duty of Bishops to form the consciences of the people for a sincere political commitment. This explains why before the October 9 Presidential election, the Bishops of Cameroon wrote a Pastoral Letter calling on “--- all Cameroonians, especially those who are of voting age, to take part in the electoral process, to use the ballot box to demonstrate their civic maturity, to reject strongly all acts of violence, unnecessary provocations, various forms of fraud that distort results, and anything that can lead to destabilisation and disorder.”
The Bishops also have the duty to set out the moral principles related to social order especially with the recent emergence of ambiguities or questionable positions on certain principles of natural moral law. They have to clarify the moral stands of the Church so that Christians do not vote for laws and lawmakers who contradict fundamental moral teachings.
This is significant in the Cameroonian context where there is an ongoing tussle for the recognition of abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriages in the name of human rights and freedoms. Cameroon ratified the Maputo Protocol in July 2009 whose article 14 promotes homosexuality and abortion to the consternation of our Father Bishops who condemned the act in June 2009 after their 34th Plenary Assembly in Yaoundé and called on Christians to disregard the protocol and protect human life from conception to its natural end.
For the lay faithful to carry out their mission effectively they need to acquire competence in church doctrine so as to always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks them to give reasons for the hope they have (1P 3:15). The Church therefore needs suitable centres and schools of biblical and pastoral formation such as the Maryvale Institute of Bamenda Archdiocese to prepare the laity with proper catechesis.
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