To gain the attention of an audience you have to awaken it, and to awaken it you have to make noise. I am going to place this exposition under an unexpected patronage, that of Bourdaloue, priest, religious and Jesuit, a preacher of whom his contemporaries said, «Save yourself if you can; shout like a deaf man.» I will try to shout like a deaf man and, consequently, I will make a lot of noise saying some of these truths that are easy to say, but not always easy to hear.

In spite of this, and as I begin to speak, a scruple comes over me: am I really a layman? Do I have the right to speak to the laity in the name of the laity? It was said of me, with humor, that I was «the layman of the Church of France», the only acceptable layman they could find. This unique situation intimidates me a little. Fortunately, I have been dethroned, unexpectedly, by my old friend Jean Guitton, the only layman admitted to the Vatican Council (1), and who thus becomes the «layman of the Universal Church», not a Father of the Council, since this title does not suit his status, but rather, if I may so express myself, a grandfather of the Council.

Am I an authentic layperson? A recent controversy has just told us that to be an authentic layperson one must have children. Whoever does not have children is not a layman. Since I have a spirit of contradiction, I immediately thought of the Eastern clergy, who are united by marriage bonds and generally create large families. I then asked myself if the Eastern priests would not be more lay than I am, canonically and theologically lay, but celibate. I would not dare to draw an affirmative conclusion, for such a conclusion seems to me to be «repugnant», as theologians say.

It matters little, after all: it seems to me that I must be truly secular when

I wanted to become one after a mature and deliberate choice, after having hesitated for about ten years between the holy state of the laity and other «even holier» states.

LOOKING FOR THE LAITY...

I am going to make some analyses aimed at showing the different deviations and deformations of the lay state and how, even without our knowing it, in spite of our explicit wills, we are not always as lay as we believe and as the Church would wish. Let us admit that this is a small phenomenology of the laity as it appears to my eyes or, if you prefer, a typology, describing a certain number of human types that we have all encountered.

Understand me well, I do not pretend to describe and judge from the outside with a critical detachment that would indicate I don't know what superiority. I do not see any gulf, not even a moat between myself and the subjects of my observation. I find these different types of lay people, with all the deformations that I will highlight, in myself. As different and sometimes as opposed as they may appear, I feel them in me, bubbling, agitated, quarrelling and tormenting each other, perhaps because deep down the layman does not exist in a chemically pure state, nor does the priest or the religious, because all of us, as we are, are inclined to step out of our role and to exceed our vocation.

I will classify these types of lay people into three broad categories.

First category, the hybrids; that is, the clericalized laity.

Second category, the secularized laity, the «squared» laity.

Third category, the intermediate elements. I have classified the latter as such, perhaps because I did not know where to put them. Any classification is illogical.

1. THE CLERICALIZED LAITY

I would caution your priest...

In the first category, that of hybrids, I distinguish a first type, which I will call the frustrated priest or the lay sexton. You know, or you will learn if you did not know, that, according to certain evolutionary theories, the dog is a wolf that has not yet reached the adult state. The good-natured Goshawk is a big, bad, frustrated wolf. If I were to apply this theory to the laity as I see it before my eyes, I would experience the feeling that certain lay people have remained at a degree of evolution that should bring them to the finished state of the priesthood or religious life. They can, moreover, claim an illustrious and regal patronage, that of Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, whom his colleague Frederick the Great called «the sacristan King» and who had a mania for regulating worship down to its smallest details. Sometimes, moreover, they come from a mysterious organization, which I dare not call the Organization of Former Seminarians. In this case, the frustrated vocation is an evidence.

The lay sacristan seems to me to be characterized, first of all, by some manias related to worship and liturgy. He is obsessed with the censer and the candlestick. Nowhere is he more at ease than in the vicinity of the altar, like the young Eliacin. He sings nothing with so much pleasure as the chanting. There would be much to say, on the other hand, about the canticles of his choice, old or new, but this is another story.

He likes ecclesiastical meetings, where he is at home, on familiar ground, and shows a propensity for repeating stories borrowed from the inexhaustible treasure of the folklore of the presbyteries. He feels the prurience to preach, to his lay brothers certainly, but also, when he can, to priests, and his conversation, even usually, is preachy. There is in him something of Gros Jean, who does not mind admonishing his priest, and if he could, he would preach retreats for ecclesiastics.

One can guess, in his unconscious, the search for compensation - perhaps compensation for a frustrated vocation - and a secret desire to manage, in its smallest details, the presbytery, the parish and the Church. This type of layman is the priest in the precise and almost technical sense of the word. I dare not quote the expression dedicated to them by the farmers in my land, because it is so energetic that it would burn the ears and the paper.

I will be told that this species is on the way to extinction; I believe it and I will not regret it.

However, it has not entirely disappeared and will perhaps never die, for there is in many men's lives a certain age when the long-contained sacristan reappears: the age of retirement, when one thinks of having a good death, when one easily has the gift of tears and time before him to mingle in what does not matter to him.

A bad dye of theology

Another hybrid, the lay theologian. Attention to the order of the words: I do not say the theologian.

I do not see any reasonable reason why the Church should not have lay theologians, since, apart from custom, I do not see any reasonable reason why the Church should not have lay theologians. If I had the contrary conviction, I would not have done four years of theology, although at the present time I do not have the right, in view of my occupations, to the title of theologian, but simply to the title, not very glorious for our contemporaries, of moralist. I am not speaking, then, of the lay theologian, who can exist and serve, but of the lay theologian - which is not the same thing - the layman lightly rubbed with theology by ecclesiastical contacts, as the peasants of the Midi rub a crust of bread with garlic, or as my Burgundian ancestors rubbed themselves with rancid butter on feast days.

This deformation is particularly found among a certain number of militant leaders who have passed through the various branches of the Catholic movements and who have been trained there, if I may use this verb, by priests, who have communicated to them some of their intellectual manias and inoculated them with theologizing fever, sometimes even the theologizing fever of the Catholic Church. Rabies tehologica.

The lay theologian gladly uses theological terminology without always understanding well the words it implies, and applies a properly theological problematic to his daily problems as a committed lay person. However, this problematic rarely starts from the concrete and the facts, as would be appropriate to a lay search, but falls from the top of Revelation, from the Word of God itself, as the theologian understands it, applying it to reality as he sees it and, sometimes, pasting it on this reality. This method has a danger, even for the theologian, since there is a distance between the word of God as God knows it and as the theologian understands it, as between reality as it is and as he thinks he sees it. All the more reason why this method can lead him to error or, simply, to verbosity, to logomachy, to what our contemporaries irreverently call the «blah blah blah and chatter», the «fluke» theologians or, as Péguey would say, the «new theologians». The method then gives very curious results for the lover of teratology, but exasperating for the professional theologian as well as for the layman.

The lay altar boy

Third category, always adulterated and mixed: the lay altar server. I speak with all due respect for the altar boys, for whom I have a double regard inasmuch as they are among those children whose angels see the Face of the Father and who occupy a place in the choir near the Holy of Holies. Only, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything,

an age to be an altar boy and an age to be an adult.

What I reproach certain lay people for is, precisely, lagging behind in the time of the altar boy.

The matter does not date from today. Msr. D'Hulst said, I believe, regarding Catholic colleagues:

«We ask them for men, and they send us altar boys!». The dispatch of altar boys has not entirely ceased in the airmail era.

The altar server is the lay person of good will, capable of action, but incapable of directing himself, always in search of an authoritarian spiritual director, priest or religious, because he cannot come to a decision on his own.

The examples of this deformation are curious and sometimes monstrous. Between the two wars, on the occasion of a famous financial scandal, one of the accused, a good Catholic but a deplorable administrator, explained to the judges that his conscience was clear because he had always acted in agreement with his spiritual director. This saintly counselor unfortunately lacked competence in financial matters. I am also thinking of the specialists in poetic murder who felt the need to have their legitimately anxious consciences soothed by authentic or presumed theologians, or of those military chiefs who, faced with the terrible problem of torture, resolved to torture after theological consultation, even though their first impulse, which was to reject torture as a means of information, was a good one and was, moreover, Christian. All these men, if they had been less altar boys, would have been not only more adult, but also more Christian. If I were to apply to this kind of layman the categories of depth psychology, I would say that they have not completely liquidated their Oedipus complex and that they look to the priest - the «father» as they call him - as a reassuring substitute for the paternal image.

The dreaded «mother of the Church»

I will now refer to the female hybrids: there is the mother of the Church, nice, imposing and fearsome, an active lady patron, even a self-sacrificing activist, but who knows how to make her self-sacrifice pay at the best price, which is authority.

The ecclesiastical folklore, more clear-sighted perhaps as for feminine defects than as for masculine defects, is not silent in this respect. To him we owe a famous story, that of the «Holy Spirit of the ladder».

A priest, urgently summoned by his bishop, meets, on the stairs of the bishopric, a lady from his parish with whom he does not get along very well. She comes down when he goes up.

When he arrived at the bishop, he told him: «My dear son, the Holy Spirit has inspired me to move you to another parish». The priest's reply, «Naturally; I just found you on the stairs.»

Certainly, one species of lady patronesses is on the way to disappear: the well-preserved lady, with a severe suit and white lace around her neck. Today's patronesses do not age more or faster than other women, or at least they do not refuse to recognize their aging, and the singer Jacques Brel marches to war against an almost defunct species when he denounces this type of patronesses.

But under more subtle and less visible forms, the terrible mother of the Church, manly and imperious, still exists and perhaps will always exist, if Dr. Marañón's analysis of the manly phase in the evolution of women is to be believed.

The less fearsome, but just as tyrannical, «daughter of the Church.» 

At the opposite extreme is what I call the daughter of the Church and, to be more accurate, should often be called the old maid (old daughter) of the Church.

God forbid that I should speak ill of spinsters in general. They render too many services to humanity and to the Church for one to indulge in jokes about them that are always a little cruel. And all of them, although filially of the Church, are not daughters of the Church in the sense in which I use this word.

The daughter of the Church is what the people of the south of France call the beata. Primitively, the beata was a somewhat hybrid woman, half religious, half lay, ancestor of the governess, the social worker and the nurse, at the service of a people. The category of the beatae had been imagined for the Velay and the Vivarais by that man of genius who was Saint Francis Regis.

But in peasant language, the term beata, formerly applied to this particular category as something estimable, has come to designate the daughter of the Church, whom ecclesiastical folklore calls the «catachresis,» an expression whose origin I have always wondered about with anguish.

Sweet and sometimes even sugary, gentle, helpful, often useful and in any case harmless, the daughters of the Church do not resemble the mothers of the Church, but, as much as the patronesses, they make their services to the Church pay dearly for the time they waste for priests on whom they want to depend closely and constantly.

The altar boy, in masculine; the daughter of the Church, in feminine, is the same type of humanity, which has not finished its evolution, which has not reached the adult state, nor the clear action of its role and status. The normal place for many daughters of the Church would have been a convent. But often they have not been able to support the thought of the rule nor the authority of a superior. Outside the convent, however, they have conventual traits.

Nostalgia for the cloister

This observation allows me a transition to present a last variety of the clericalized laity: what was called, what is still sometimes called, «the religious in the world» or more often, «the religious in the world» since the species abounds more in feminine than in masculine. This type comes to us from the Counter-Reformation, as a sort of by-product of the «Introduction to the Devout Life». St. Francis de Sales, author of this famous and still very current work, did not foresee, I believe, when he wrote to Philothea, the consequences that future generations would draw from his spiritual teaching.

The attempts at religious life in the world, as they have been presented since the Counter-Reformation, owe much more, in fact, to St. Francis de Sales than to St. Francis of Assisi, founder, however, of the first Third Order.

The early Franciscan tertiaries were not exactly quiet. They had a noisy and sometimes agitated, but authentic and uncompromising holiness. In a certain way, St. Francis of Assisi found among them a kind of compensation and consolation when, under the leadership of Brother Elias, the first Order did not develop according to his wishes.

The forms of religious life in the world, as elaborated from the 16th century onwards, are only remotely reminiscent of this Franciscan springtime, disordered, vital and fruitful. They have led to the existence of mixed types of Christians, canonically lay, who try to behave in the world as if they were religious, with the frequency of spiritual exercises and the regularity of life that characterize and should characterize religious life.

Do not misinterpret my thinking. I am not saying that there is no need for asceticism in the lay life; the problem is to know if it can be the same as that of the religious. I am not saying that it is not necessary to introduce a certain regularity in the lay life, on pain of going aimlessly; the problem is to know if it can be religious regularity. In my opinion, taking into account the difference in conditions, the identification of ascetics and rules is impossible, so that, normally, attempts at religious life in the world either end in failure, leaving an impression of spiritual defeat, or are only possible for certain categories of people, whose schedule is naturally regulated or can be easily regulated; for example, singles, especially women, without excess of professional or apostolic responsibilities, or the elderly, who have complete freedom to distribute their time. It is not surprising, then, that among the people who want to lead a religious life in the world, there are many single women, employees or civil servants, who have a regular job, without monopolizing responsibilities.

Once again, please understand my thinking. I am not saying that the spirit of the evangelical counsels is not needed in a lay life: poverty, chastity and obedience, nor that it is not useful, even necessary, to group and frame the laity who want to live according to this spirit, to give them the armor of an interior norm and the support of a fraternal group, as certain secular Institutes do. There is nothing in this that is not normal and praiseworthy, provided, however, that one avoids a surreptitious return to a properly religious life and that one does not want to gamble and win in both areas. But this conception of the spirit of the evangelical counsels, lived in the full lay condition, is completely different from the previously common conception of «religious life in the world».

Once again we are faced with the need to decide. One must choose: lay or priest, lay or religious and, in all cases, loyally accept the consequences of one's decision.

2. THE SECULARIZED LAITY

«Clericalism, behold the enemy...»

I now refer to inversely symmetrical types: the secularized laity.

Let no one be mistaken, I am not insinuating that these lay people are not good Christians; they can be better Christians than I am. But there is in them a certain way of conceiving the Church and of living the ecclesiastical life that shows that they have been influenced by a spirit, no longer lay, but laicist, with the deformations that this disinence brings with it.

I see two major species: the old and the new.

I know the old one well, because it is recruited in milieus where I have many friends. These lay people can be deeply Christian, even pious, even blessed, with an interior and personal piety, but they are always under reserve, and almost, one might say,

«watchful eye» in the presence of the Church, or more precisely, of the institutions and men of the Church, always fiercely and zealously concerned to preserve their autonomy. They are not always wrong, since some of the Church's institutions, which do not depend on the essence of the Church but on contingencies, can be outdated or have excessive powers, and since some Churchmen can be abusive.

But they exaggerate their fears and their scruples, sometimes to the point of becoming punctilious and fussy. Deep down, they are attached to the liberal tradition, and we find them precisely in the media in which this tradition persists.

Some of them, when they have to choose a school for their children, will take them a priori, and as a matter of principle, to neutral schools. The question of the choice of school does not arise for them any more than it does, in the opposite sense, for other Catholics of opposite tendencies. They would not be far from presenting their choice as a necessary consequence, if not of dogma and morals, at least of the apostolic will. Others will be careful not to belong, however little, to an officially Catholic organization, in particular to a Catholic Action movement. They will frequent the sacraments

They will pay regularly their «denarius» of the cult, but that's all: do not ask them for more, they appreciate their freedom too much. Some will prefer, always a priori, the neutral Press, even hostile, to Catholic newspapers, more or less suspicious of clericalism or, at least, of conformism. Always without further information, some will look askance at temporary groups, unions or parties, which confess to be of Christian inspiration, and will give their support only to a neutral, even anti-Christian group. In case of conflict between the representatives of the spiritual and those of the temporal, these secularized laity will almost automatically take the side of the temporal, it being clear to them that the spiritual is wrong by definition and that it is almost always outside their sphere.

Perhaps someone will find that my portrait looks rather like a caricature. I do not think so. I underline only the facts to make them stand out better. The spirit of the secularized layman is not so widespread, but it is not a chimera, and it seems to me that it does not respond to what the Church and the world expect from the Christian layman.

It should be noted that, in this ancient species, one would find represented, approximately in equal numbers, right-wing Catholics and left-wing Catholics, to use excessively facile expressions. I have known secularized laymen among right-wing Catholics, and even extreme right-wing Catholics, who distrusted everything that is ecclesiastical, even ecclesial. Certain left-wing Catholics joined them in this distrust, and for this reason, and almost only for this reason, the two categories were fraternal!

An «adult» who runs away from responsibilities

The new species of secularized laity is crazier, but perhaps more sympathetic. It groups together the Catholics that I call, and who proclaim themselves, sometimes very loudly, «adult, elderly and emancipated».

I would add that the Catholic of this species is rarely of the «right», almost always of the «left», and often of the extreme left.

He is not afraid of red, quite the contrary.

You are right to want to be an adult. But I can't help but wonder, are you as adult as you think you are? I have at least two reasons to doubt it: the first is that when you are truly adult, you don't feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. The adult state is a rather heavy thing to bear for a loud and constant demonstration. The vindication of the adult state characterizes, on the contrary, the adolescent: «Well, Dad, when are you going to let me go out at night? Well, Mom, when will you let me wear your lipstick?»

My second reason for doubt is that, if it is proposed to the Christian to call himself an «adult, older and emancipated», some of the responsible activities that belong by right to the adult, often slip away, always with good pretexts. However, the adult is the man who knows how to face responsibilities. How many vindictive, critical and prophetic lay people I have known who, in the presence of any responsibility, went off on a tangent. They gave the impression of refusing the active participation in the life of the Church that they never ceased to demand, because, from the day they actually participated, they could no longer enjoy the sweet voluptuousness of «grumbling», pleasing to every man, but even more pleasing to adolescence, a critical age in every sense of the word.

In a moment of bad humor and black humor, I defined the «adult, elderly and emancipated» laity as the faithful who say about their bishop how bad a religious blows him. It is unfair and a bit malevolent: is it completely false?

This seductive adult layman is often closer than he thinks to the altar boy who has grown up a little too fast for his red cassock.

3. «NEITHER MEAT, NOR FISH...

The «do-gooder-thinker»

I must speak of the intermediate classes between the clericalized layperson and the secularized layperson. I think first of the «bien-pensant», without hiding the fact that the expression is neither new nor original.

From the pastoral point of view, it is, if you will, the great mass of our parishes, and from the sociological point of view, it is the parishioners who are associated with the parishes.

The majority of French parishes, i.e. the middle classes and, from now on, especially the salaried middle classes, as opposed to the middle classes with variable incomes.

The «right-thinker» has the characteristic of always being of the same opinion as these

«He was not a »gentleman« ecclesiastic, on condition, however, that these gentlemen were of his opinion and did not »change his religion", since he was horrified by novelties.

He hardly allows himself to be compromised. However, he allows himself to be carried along to a certain extent, but he is careful to provide himself with an emergency exit. He willingly gives to the Holy Church a little of his money, less of his time, much less of his heart. Although he looks like he is in the Church, he is outside it. He is neither a true layman, who accepts his responsibilities in the Church and in the world, nor even a clericalized layman like those I have presented and whose deformations are even sympathetic, because in the end they come from a misunderstood generosity.

He is a «good man», honest, decent, respectable, colorless, odorless and tasteless. For him, religion seems to have behaved like one of those deodorants advertised in American newspapers, for the use of men or women looking for a good wedding. It would seem that the Church has acted as a factor that has taken away the little virility with which nature had endowed him and which was no longer much at the starting point.

The evil-thought

At the opposite extreme, here is the ill-considered layman. He also believes himself to be inside the Church, but he is found rather in our movements than in our parishes, or, if he frequents the latter it is, so to speak, in passing, in order to «hear Mass there,» in haste, in the little time available to him, with the firm resolution not to hear the sermon that might be in the course of this Mass (perhaps he is not always wrong in hardening, if not his heart, at least his ear, but it is a matter that for the moment does not concern me).

As a rule, he belongs either to a minority category in the sociological composition of the Church or to a majority category, but in the latter case, he is more or less in revolt against his milieu of origin. Thus, for example, such militant workers or such university students, teachers above all, or such intellectuals, or even such young people, in whom the age class this time replaces the social class. (But then there are some chances that this young person will one day become well thought of, since from well thought to ill thought the graduation and evolution are sometimes insensitive, and it may suffice to retain ideas that might seem «ill thought» in the course of his youth, to become, in old age, well thought of). The wrong-thinking may be active, self-sacrificing and generous, but his general attitude is one of protest and, to use a fashionable word, of rebellion. He is, not in the theological sense, but in the etymological sense of the word, a «protester,» for he never ceases to protest. He never agrees a priori, and only rarely a posteriori, with Christians as a whole. He instinctively opposes them and his non-conformism is sometimes so systematic that it becomes an inverted conformism.

The right-thinking person does not participate fully in the life of the Church because of passive resistance. The wrong-thinking person does not participate either, but by active resistance. Moreover, having read Bloy and Bernanos - excellent readings, moreover, but without always having understood them well and above all without placing them in the context of their time - he is quite easily transformed into a prophet, a minor prophet who often contents himself with repeating, out of place and quite badly, what other Christians, authentic prophets, have said before.

The Chapel Layman

Third intermediate category: the layman of full exercise, but of small chapel. This one is more generous than the well thought-out and less thorny than the badly thought-out. As for the rest, they belong a bit to both categories: the ill-considered, because they are active and non-conformist in relation to large groups; the well-considered, because they are conformist in relation to a group of which they are an active and integral part, and which they willingly confuse with the Church as a whole. This group can be a spiritual family, a Catholic Action movement or any other organization. What matters, in the end, is not so much the nature, extension or importance of the group, but the confusion established by the layman between his group and the Church.

With this last type, which in the end I reproach only for its limited scope, the typology ends.

DISCOVERY OF THE LAYPERSON: HIS OR HER MISSION

In the portraits I have just drawn, in the manner of La Bruyère, where is the layman, the true layman? To my humble understanding, he is nowhere to be found, for he is something else.

To the extent that we give in to the deviations I have just analyzed, we would not be true laity, but caricatures of the authentic laity. So, where to look for the laity?

In the «turba multa», in the articulated and living whole that forms the group of the faithful who are neither priests nor religious, and who assume in, for and by the Church, their proper functions as laity. The laity could not be compared to a pyramid comprising at the top the secular Institutes, a little below the movements and organizations of Catholic Action, and at the base, very much at the base, mixed and in bulk, what a priest I know called «the remains of my parish» when he indicated the order of the Corpus Christi procession. The laity is, in the bosom of the Church, an organic and ordered reality, with diverse but complementary functions and vocations, according to the charisms indicated.

by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians. To oppose these functions, these vocations and these charisms, or to establish among them provisional and always somewhat artificial hierarchies, would be to ignore the vitality and originality of the Holy Spirit, who inspires the laity as he does the whole Church.

More specifically, where to look for the layperson?

The very concrete and practical enumeration I am about to make of the spiritual places where he can and should be found will perhaps dispense me from a return to theoretical considerations.

Where to look for the layperson?

In his parish, naturally, as befits his state, in order to participate as actively as possible in the life of the Church, within an elementary cell. But not

necessarily as sacristan or assistant at Mass, not even as a member of the curial council, when such a council exists authentically, which is perhaps not the case in all parishes.

Where to look for the layperson?

In the «Catholic Action movements» naturally, to collaborate there in the apostolate of the hierarchy. But, at the risk of causing a bit of scandal among some, I will still specify: not necessarily and not always, since life and action force one to choose. Adherence to Catholic Action organizations, however generalized it may be, corresponds to a personal vocation, indicated by the attractions, aptitudes and possibilities of each person. In order to act as Christians, to carry out their Catholic action, it is not necessary that all Christians belong to Catholic Action movements, and they will not be less Christian if their vocation keeps them outside the «official cadres». It can even happen, in certain cases, that the activities of Catholic Action constitute impediments to other activities more in conformity with the possibilities and responsibilities of this or that Christian, for example, in temporal activities.

Where to look for the layperson?

In the «properly spiritual groups» and - why not - in the «secular Institutes».

The lay person needs to constantly renew and reinvigorate his or her spiritual life. It is therefore normal for them to belong to what are called, sometimes a bit scornfully, pious organizations, or even to secular Institutes, when these, fully lay, do not transform them into religious substitutes. But the choice of the group is a matter of personal vocation. The Christian layperson can have a deep spiritual life without belonging to an organized group. Third Orders-Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, Oblate, Benedictine-nothing obliges me to choose among these different «conservatories» of spiritual life, except the preferences of my reason and my heart, that is, my vocation. And if I do not want to choose among them, but seek something else, I am free.

Where to look for the layperson?

I think that he should be found living and working as a Christian in his home, «in the family milieu». If I declared before that it was not indispensable to be married and to be a father of a family to be a layman, I do not retract it at all, but I will hasten to add that the experience of the single layman always has something exceptional, whatever the reason, and that the ordinary, if not normal, layman is the man who founds a family, in order to increase, by conjugal and paternal love, the people of God.

Where to look for the layperson?

He must be found, working as a Christian, «in the workshop», like St. Joseph and like the adolescent Christ. By workshop, I mean the work that turns the world back to God and all the dependencies and consequences of the tra-sid, before the forms of professional action.

Where to look for the layperson?

In his neighborhood, an extension of his family and an introduction to the life of the city. It is his function to be there and to act there as a Christian.

Where to look for the layperson?

It is not that priests or religious cannot also contribute to the cultural life of the world and to the work of civilization, but that they have not chosen the priestly or religious life for this purpose, as the missionary who goes to a distant country does not go to bring «civilization» but to establish the visible Church of Christ, until such time as the local Church will be able to live its own life. When the layman, on the contrary, works in human culture and for the passing civilization, he is in his place, in his place, in his function.

Where to look for the layperson?

In the city, Caesar's dominion. Caesar, although appointed by God and bearing, by consecration, the divine anointing, is essentially a layman, since he embodies temporal power.

Victor Hugo spoke of «These two halves of God, the Pope and the Emperor».

This antithetical vision, a bit simple, like everything of Victor Hugo, carries, however, a part of truth. Caesar, if he is not half of God, is nevertheless, because he is responsible for the temporal common good, the symbol of the laity.

The Layman: Christ and the Church in the temporal realm

It is there, in all domains, that the Christian layman and his task must be sought. It is there that he must act with the freedom of a fully submissive child of the Church, who does not expect from her what she cannot and will not give, for example, precise and detailed indications about her temporal action, but something else of which she is essentially the bearer: a light and a warmth, the light and warmth of a supernatural flame, according to the phrase of St. John of the Cross, «the flame of living Love».

The mission of the laity is the consecration of the world to God through Christ and the Church, the presence of the Church and of Christ in the world in the everyday and in the temporal, since the everyday hides the temporal and, by a mysterious and holy alchemy, creates the eternal.