I'm confused about the term "catechized" as in "minimally catechized". Does this mean the three folks you mention didn't go to Sunday school? Or that they haven't received any sacraments? I think all three identify as Catholics, which should indicate at least some education in the Church and some level of sacraments, unless they are lying, which would seem foolish. Two questions, then:
1. What exactly qualifies one to be catechized?
2. Who is qualified to be the judge of such a qualification?

In order for civilizations to survive, not everyone needs to demonstrate true faith and piety (because that never happens) but there needs to be a certain critical mass of piety and obedience for the wheels of civilization to keep turning. Likewise, it's hard for a farmer to know exactly how many barn cats he needs to protect his grain bin, but he'll soon know if there aren't enough cats. The danger is, once the rats take over, there won't be enough cats in the whole county to bring things back to the old equilibrium. For him, the world will have changed.

I believe that mcasey points to the circular or syllogistic reasoning that plagues this sort of argument: namely, if A were properly or deeply catechized, he/she would think like we do (or, at least, couldn't possibly think the way he/she does). Moreover, if there is a fault here, it lies within the Church, not with outside forces. While I am largely sympathetic toward what Mr. Weigel has to say, I see lurking beneath it an ongoing theology of fear, which itself is contrary to the gospel.

Great questions, Mcasey.

For English speakers, the start would be to read, fully understand, and begin living the Baltimore Catechism. Sine qua non.

This deserves repeating:

"One of the oddities of the post-Vatican II Church is that its concrete life has often inverted the Council’s teaching on the roles of bishops and priests, on the one hand, and lay Catholics, on the other, in the public square. Bishops and priests were to recover their prophetic role as teachers and formers of the Christian conscience; the laity were to be empowered by their bishops and priests to bring the Gospel into the world. Yet the omnipresence of episcopal conference statements on every conceivable issue of public policy has filled much of the public 'space' that was to have been shaped by the witness of a deeply catechized and formed laity, while the phrase 'Catholics in public life' has come to mean the likes of Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Joe Biden, none of whom qualifies as minimally catechized, much less deeply catechized."

My singular mission over the last 20 years has been to encourage any pastor willing to begin lay formation. It must start with a pastor (in a bona fide assembly lifethat exists nowhere that I know of in the Catholic Church, and I have been convinced by the Holy Spirit that there is no other way). Every pastor I have tried to encourage refuses for the simple reason that they are all engaged in holding on to what they have usurped from the laity, and why even at the Domincan (Order of Preachers) parish I belong to that has three full-time, highly educated priests, most of the preaching and teaching is left to lay persons who havenot the wherewithal to establish an assembly life, something every pastor I know resists with every once of energy it takes when he is confronted with it.

What a good time for the body of Christ to revisit Martin Luther's The Priesthood of All Believers and embrace it! We might need to give up some church traditions, which would be uncomfortable, but many would be free to operate in the callings that are unfortunately laying dormant in their beings. For sure, much would be ruffled among the feathership.

Mr. Weigel,

I ask a favor of you:

Present to bishops, priests and lay persons exactly what is required to begin lay formation (something that has not yet occurred). I would love to work with you in putting it together for presentation (I guestimate a week of writing and a week of editing).

I know I possess the knowledge on how lay formation can begin, because it was gifted to me from the Holy Spirit. But you have what I lack: the writing and intellectual skills and name recognition: you have a wide audience and persons of good faith who would trust what you have written.

The book would be simple enough and short, about 110 pages, outlining the responsibility of the priest to teach, govern and sanctify; and the responsibility of the lay person to be sanctified, governed, catechized, and sent out (how this had been attempted in the past had been terribly misconstrued and thus misfired on all fronts).

I am aware of all the major impediments, but am not able to put them in a historical perspective, or in methodical points of intellectual clarity. I am aware of the unique problems we are faced with today, especially how all the many efforts to begin lay formation have ended in failure. But the truth is that it can all be easily overcome for those willing to take on what I see as the most important mission of the Church in these post-modern times, a time where Satan as adversary has successfully presented his case like never before.

Peace be with you,

Gil

Note: The correct title of Marcello Pera's book is "Why We SHOULD Call Ourselves Christian," not "Why We Must..." That will make it easier to find on Amazon.

Not minimally catechized? Mr. Weigel is too kind. Such folk are not marginally Catholic, and the tragedy of our church here and abroad is that there does not appear to be any bishop with the cojones to say so.

I found this ancient letter of mine to a priest:

I never tire of saying that lay formation is not possible without a community of lay persons who live the meaning of their lives as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. Parish is for laypersons what Order is for religious. Priests and religious rightly have their own Eucharistic community of brothers and sisters to sustain them and thereby easily overlook how a parish is elemental for the life of a layperson—they don’t relate to the deprivation. It would be inappropriate for a priest to celebrate mass for any particular lay group within a parish because this would establish that group as the Body of Christ severed from the rest of the lay community, an act of spiritual violence, yet within our parish, as in every parish I have belonged to, groups, ministerial or other, behave as if this would be natural. This is the key point I have continually failed to communicate.

We laypersons are so radically in the world under relentless assault from Mainline Media, the cultural enterprises it bows to, and the children they spawn. We need a depth-oriented and broadly based community of love to sustain us. We are involved in spiritual warfare, and the injuries inflicted on us daily, although welcomed as an abiding with Our Lord on the Cross, oftentimes batter us into numbness and inactivity because there is no support from a (now non-existent) community that provides spiritual rest and encouragement, a community of love that the disciple John alludes to in Revelation. This community of love is the preeminent model of Christian unity, what Jesus publicly prayed for, what John and Paul fought so fervently for, and what is most forcefully resisted throughout the life of the Church, a sustained resistance which is the direct cause of our spiritual exhaustion. A Eucharistic community of love is the only way for the world to know us, and the only way for us to come out of hiding, from the world and from ourselves.

This hiding from the world and ourselves is our spiritual sickness, rooted in a collective embarrassment at being Catholic, which is grounded in an embarrassment at failing to be Catholic. This sickness cannot be overcome with great homilies and great education (something we laypersons are very fortunate to receive at Blessed Sacrament); nor can it be overcome by insulating ourselves in little Christian world fabrications, failing in our singular mission to go out, even if it costs us our lives. It can only be overcome by a lay formation that occurs within parish life in a Eucharistic community of love, something we should not pretend we presently have. And this failure is not something we should beat up on ourselves about, because the condition is apparently entrenched and universal. It will therefore take a miracle to overcome, and we can be optimistic because we are a religion that thrives on the miraculous.

Amongst the leadership at Blessed Sacrament, we have a catechist who has rejected all the Marian dogmas—The Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Perpetual Virginity and Mary’s Assumption into heaven. We have a lay leader who openly teaches that gay marriage is a good, as are homosexual acts, and that the Catholic Church offends justice in not embracing it. They must be forgiven in not knowing what they are doing. And besides, the root of the problem is not with what they are doing. It is our resignation, our spiritual exhaustion, our being numbed into submission by Satan’s opus (Bob Dylan sings, “People no longer live or die—people just float”).

As I have mentioned in two of your classes, I am convinced that, according to Scripture, the beginning of wisdom (not wisdom itself) is fear of the Lord. On both occasions you were quick to point out St. Thomas Aquinas’ discernment that once one is spiritually mature, this fear translates into awe. This is true, but I hear this so often from so many priests, catechists and theologians that I am left to wonder if we have not talked ourselves out of looking at where we often actually reside (part of the dynamic of hiding from ourselves), in a place that should engender not awe, but real fear of the Lord. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his miraculous little book, Christian Meditation, has this to say: “‘Perfect love’ does, of course, cast out ‘fear’ (1 Jn 4:18), but we shall never be able to attribute such a love to ourselves. ‘Fear remains allied to punishment’, and we know we have deserved it. We may, nevertheless, consider this punishment as a form of God’s mercy, meant to purify us, and assert that we are ready to accept it as such from him. This is a broad theme, for readiness to accept punishment for our guilt is inseparable from suffering with Jesus for all guilt and, therefore, implies readiness to atone with him for the guilt of others, both known and unknown.”

Why should the complex inner-life of the guilty be left to the discernment of the giants of atheism—Sartre, Joyce, Beckett, et al—or to the masters of the ineffable outside the Church, like Kafka? We have the advantage of knowing that dialectics is a sign of our limited knowledge, that we cannot see as God sees—there should be no need for us to explain guilt away as was unsuccessfully attempted by ascendant secularists in the now dying Age of Psychology. So it is that both Aquinas and Balthasar are right, and to reside in truth we must choose to reside in this dialectical tension, humbly acknowledging our limited knowledge, which serves to have us rely more and more on what the Holy Spirit wants us to know beyond the dialectical mind, moving us to live more deeply in the mind of Christ by committing to being a member of his body, and I contend that it is only in that knowing that we truly experience the awe St. Thomas speaks of.

What is curiously absent at Blessed Sacrament and I suspect most parishes, is any semblance of a forum where parishioners can openly speak their minds. Balthasar argues that these kinds of gatherings are essential in communities of every kind, especially parish communities if one is serious about lay formation. He stresses that major disagreements between persons or groups of persons within the community need to take place for the community to remain spiritually healthy, and that the suppression of these voices, although seemingly a nice thing to do in avoiding most forms of confrontation (nice is never enough) renders the community spiritually sick. It is the same in families that unconsciously agree not to talk about what makes family members resentful of each other. He goes on to argue that the end result of these encounters is the gifts of all the persons of the community becoming visible within the community, and out of that process ministries are peopled by those actually called to those ministries. This must occur as a community and not established by individuals or by committees because the gifts will otherwise end in serving the individual or cliques, and the community as a whole suffers, and with it the whole Church. In his words (from his book Test Everything: Hold Fast to What is Good):

“If charisms are exclusively personal, they can hardly claim the Holy Spirit of the Church for themselves: it is from the wholeness of the Church that he distributes his gifts.”

“…the Church, too, is a bodily reality and not an abstraction; neither is she a mere collective (as ‘people’), nor just a sum of particular members (‘particular’ churches), but already in Mary a truly organic-corporeal entity. Mary is Mother, and brings forth the Son of God from her own body. Her motherhood is so fundamental and irrevocable that her crucified Son makes her on the one hand the Mother of the beloved disciple, and therewith Mother of the Church, and on the other, because of this, his spouse.”

There is no way around it: if a parish does not organically become the Body of Christ at this particular place in this particular time, with not a single member being cut away, then the leadership inevitably becomes pharisaical, lording it over others, banishing them or simply ignoring them.

There is always hope. The leadership that fails the laity today could be the leadership that assists us tomorrow. With God all things are possible. But for that to happen, the leadership must acknowledge why it fears lay formation and the Holy Spirit who seeks to actualize it, and the wisdom required to do this begins with fear of the Lord.

To truly be a parish, we must be of one mind spiritually in all things (as the Mystical Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ). Where we most often err is in trying to exclusively occupy the mind of Christ in order to be of one mind (see Ephesians 5:21-33; also John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, pgs. 314-318). This is especially true in many intellectual pursuits, getting trapped in a matrix of high abstraction, dissociating from the beating heart of Christ’s Body. We forget that we are the Body, and Christ is the head—we blindly move into a Gnostic notion, rejecting the Body and opting solely for what we perceive is the cognitive reality of Christ. We succumb to a process of discerning how Christ would think about a problem, abstracting information from Biblical scenes, from our personal history, from Mainline Media, from the secular sciences and from groups in and outside the parish we associate with—all of this oftentimes distancing us from the Body of Christ, the core of who we are as persons, what is called The People of God, but in fact is more than the People—it is the People coalescing with Tradition, Scripture, Liturgy (sacramental worship and every kind of prayer) and authority embodied not only in the faithful, but the Magisterium and doctrines utilized for discernment of exactly what the Way is, always open to how the Holy Spirit is moving us. Krishnamurti famously said that we do not listen to what others are saying [including the Holy Spirit] but to our opinions of what they are saying.

All of this must be approached through the heart, one in love, and for the lay person it must occur in parish life under the leadership (governance) of the pastor. It must occur in this particular place at this particular time, in this eternal now, in heaven and on earth.

Gil:

It may be that more qualified, educated priests do not speak ... because after all, what they have to say would be instantly criticized by lay persons.

Are we as laymen, prepared to face the religion of educated persons?

Sally,

I have been fighting this fight for 20 years, and I speak with authority when I say that most lay persons are indeed prepared to face the religion of educated persons if those educators abide in Christ.

I encountered one priest who attempted to genuinely initiate lay formation, and on the night of the first assembly where we gathered as parishioners and prayed to the Holy Spirit to guide us, He in fact did. It was a miracle. We all sat in a circle with chairs haphazardly place around. There was a mic placed at the center of the auditorium, freely open to any parishioner who wanted to speak. The most impressive speaker that night was the first person I had ever heard who understood in depth what lay formation means. I went up to her after the gathering ended and told her how impressive her contribution was. And she said, “You know…I’ve never done that. Even as a child I would refuse to get up in front of the class when called upon. I was always too terrified. But tonight the Holy Spirit moved me.”

That evening was a miraculous encounter with true Christian unity in love, and we all knew when we left that night that we were called to go out into the world as missionaries with our unique gifts, peculiar to the areas we moved in. We had taken the first step in becoming who we truly are, which shreds all remnants of meaninglessness.

The meeting for the next month was cancelled. In its place the pastor scheduled an abstract academic presentation. It turned out a lay person in the education department was terrified by what had happened. She was able to cancel all future assemblies, and she established for herself a paid position as a leader in lay formation. I approached her and asked her why she worked so hard to end assembly life, and she responded, “Lay persons aren’t ready for assembly life. They need to be educated first.”

I tell you this, Sally, because you are qualified as is every lay person to begin a missionary life. I don’t care how much education you have or don’t have. I haven’t met a Catholic yet who doesn’t know the Apostles Creed, and if you know that Creed, you can learn really quickly catechetical basics.

The one thing that is required and is perpetually absent in all the bogus attempts at lay formation (authentic lay formation is suppressed by pastors and lay persons encrusted in protecting their paid positions of prestige within the Church) is the Eucharistic love that unites us.

The pastor who was sincere in beginning lay formation was truly gifted and enthusiastic in his mission to teach and sanctify, but he failed to govern, allowing his governance to be usurped by fear-based lay persons seeking position, prestige and paid salaries.

Gil:

But could the religion of many lay men, and even many homilies, be simply too simple? Is there a more complex, "mature" faith?

Think in fact, of the first, simplest lessons from pastors: consider the emphasis on the Eucharist. The Eucharist is emphasized as a first, simple principle. But later, when we read further in our Bibles? We find that Christ himself, sat at table, offering his blood and body - and yet he noted that even one of his own disciples, one with his hand upon the very table of the Lord, would still betray him. Suggesting that even the Eucharist might not save us.

Is there a higher theology, than what we first heard from priests? A more "mature" theology? That at first, seems like a betrayal of what we heard as children. But then, on second sight?

The Catechism and the Bible allow that priests can teach different things to people, according to their abilities.

Surely you yourself, should be easily able to move on to a more sophisticated theology?

As in large part, you already have.

We like to think that the basic principles that we heard as children are timeless. And in a way they are. But in other ways, they are the first simple lessons, only. That need to be refined, by our developing intelligence.

Which you yourself should be easily capable of doing.

Sally,

Perhaps a viewing of Liliana Cavani's film "Francesco” might help. St. Francis, whom many, including 99.9% of the intellectuals who joined his Order during his lifetime, believed Francis was educationally/theologically deficient, but he in fact established one of the greatest missionary movements in all of Christian history. I especially recommend that you pay close attention to how Cavani films the scene where Francis is being questioned (some would say interrogated) by the Vatican Curia in an effort to get his Order affirmed by the pope. Every time he is asked a question with deep theological significance, the camera zooms in on his ear, signifying that he is listening for an answer from the Holy Spirit, which is provided. And weren’t we promised that in revelation? That when we are brought before inquisitors we need not fear how much education we have, how much theological depth we possess, but only that we remain open to the Holy Spirit?

At the first and last assembly meeting that was to begin lay formation in my parish, the Holy Spirit moved freely among all of us, educated and non-educated (we have a diverse parish) voices spoke all around us, many whom we had never heard from, and they were obviously, like St. Francis, speaking what the Holy Spirit suggested they say, and that is what terrified the lay authority: they feared their prestige and paid positions were threatened by this all-knowing Spirit. Yes, even the "ignorant" among us spoke with authority.

Unity is how they will know us, and unity is possible only with a Eucharistic unification in love in assembly life: that's my point. And the case I am making is that the leadership of every parish I know of resists the Holy Spirit because they are locked inside an educational model, a pharisaical dilemma. This of course in no way is a criticism of the important work of catechesis. What I'm saying is that the educational carriage cannot be put before the horse that is the freely moving Holy Spirit: yes, that horse cannot be reigned in because there are no reigns. And that's what pastors and lay authorities at parishes fear the most, NOT the ignorance of the laity as they claim.

I have heard it come too often from the lips of priests and lay educators to not be clear on what they fear most: the Holy Spirit.

What is genuine love? And how can it be accessed in parish life through assemblies as the number one requirement for the beginning of lay formation? Hans Urs von Balthasar explains the dilemma:

"When man encounters the love of God in Christ, not only does he experience what genuine love is, but he is also confronted with the undeniable fact that he, a selfish sinner, does not himself possess true love. He experiences two things at once: the finitude of the creature’s love and its sinful frigidity...[what is required is a] radical conversion—a conversion not only of heart, which must in the face of this love confess that it has failed to love until now, but also a conversion of thought, which must relearn what love after all really is."

"...The evidence cannot be gainsaid by any skeptical theory of the will to power or self-fulfillment. We see eros at play beyond the sphere of utility; we see the animal's service and devotion to its young, and the individual’s self-renouncing sacrifice for the whole. At the human level, what was an ephemeral relationship enters into the sphere of spiritual and supratemporal significance: the passing moment of eros can be the gateway to a lifelong fidelity that outlasts this particular moment, which allows the relationships to one's young to deepen into a familial love that embraces both nature and spirit; the loss of the individual that passes away in relation to the greater power of the species that endures can give rise to the notion of the individual’s self-offering for the sake of the community, the clan, the people or the nation; and in death one can gather up one's entire existence in a gesture of self-renunciation and receive an intimation of the of being itself as love [note even here in this sacrifice it is still only intimation].

"But though all of this may point the way, it does not accomplish the journey, for there are other equally strong, or stronger, powers that set a limit to love’s movement: the fight for one's place under the sun; the terrible stifling of the individual by the surrounding relations, the clan, and even by the family [and parish life not guided by the Holy Spirit]; the struggle of natural selection, for which nature itself provides the strength and the arms; the laws of time's decay: friendships, once thought to be forever, grow cold, people grow apart, views and perspectives and thus hearts too become estranged [etc]...the beloved’s faults and limitations become unbearable [etc]...The event of the Passion exposes the truth of humanity—made up of Christians, Jews, and pagans. AS the mask is mercilessly torn away, 'every mouth falls silent', and 'every man' who speaks of love proves himself 'a liar': 'None is righteous, no, not one;...all have turned aside, no one seeks for God,...the way of peace they do not know, there is no fear of God before their eyes' (Rom 3:4-19, passim)."

Unconsciously, this is ultimately what pastors are up against, and they quickly, after a stint at being an enthusiastic pastor in faith, succumb to an exhaustion that leads them into a stabilized, even charitable cynicism. This is the root cause of clericalism (and the new clericalism, where the cynical mode is passed on to lay authorities within parish life).

Only the Holy Spirit can liberate us in a Eucharistic assembly life, for He wants to approach us not primarily as individuals, but as the Body of Christ, and only as the Body of Christ can we put on the mind of Christ. All other minds of Christ are anti-Christs.

Lay formation is where prophetic Pope Pius VI said we must go. That was how long ago? A half century? We haven't yet begun, and we won't begin until we walk away from the educational model, which is geared toward suffocating individualism, and enter the life of the Holy Spirit in parish life through assemblies where we call on the Holy Spirit who will reveal our gifts and give us the loving courage to go out into the world inside our missionary identities, living in Christ and He in us.

Gil, you speak of lay formation, something which is as I believe is an emerging pillar in church building. Yet when in some situations where others claim to have the "leading" of the Holy Spirit through discernment and when such leadeing clearly contradict church teachings and even the magisterium, quo vadis? I believe good, solid lay formation is a sythesis of spiritual and theological sense. It is the fashioning of this synthesis that needs to be defined by the vatican for all clergy and laity.

edmond,

Go here to read Pope Paul VI's Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, published Nov 18, 1965, close to 50 years ago:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651118_apostolicam-actuositatem_en.html

Here are some selections:


"An indication of this manifold and pressing need is the unmistakable work being done today by the Holy Spirit in making the laity ever more conscious of their own responsibility and encouraging them to serve Christ and the Church in all circumstances. [And I have been insisting that stifling structures within the Church, having their origin in a regressive clericalism, persist in suppressing that work of the Holy Spirit.]"

"One engages in the apostolate [including lay apostolate] through the faith, hope, and charity which the Holy Spirit diffuses in the hearts of all members of the Church."

"...the Christian vocation [all Christians, including laity] by its very nature is also a vocation to the apostolate."

"Since the laity, in accordance with their state of life, live in the midst of the world and its concerns, they are called by God to exercise their apostolate in the world like leaven, with the ardor of the Spirit of Christ."

"From the acceptance of these charisms [gifts from Holy Spirit], including those which are more elementary, there arise for each believer the right and duty to use them in the Church and in the world for the good of men and the building up of the Church, in the freedom of the Holy Spirit who 'breathes where He wills' (John 3:8)."

"This should be done by the laity in communion with their brothers in Christ, especially with their pastors who must make a judgment about the true nature and proper use of these gifts not to extinguish the Spirit but to test all things and hold for what is good (cf. 1 Thess. 5:12,19,21). [Why I insist that lay formation must be established via the governance (authority to unite us in love) of the pastor, and this can only be accomplished in parish life through assemblies.]"

"In the Church there is a diversity of ministry but a oneness of mission. Christ conferred on the Apostles and their successors the duty of teaching, sanctifying, and ruling [governing] in His name and power. But the laity likewise share in the priestly, prophetic, and royal office of Christ and therefore have their own share in the mission of the whole people of God in the Church and in the world."

"They [laity] are consecrated for the royal priesthood and the holy people (cf. 1 Peter 2:4-10) not only that they may offer spiritual sacrifices in everything they do but also that they may witness to Christ throughout the world."

"Impelled by divine charity, they do good to all men, especially to those of the household of the faith (cf. Gal. 6:10), laying aside 'all malice and all deceit and pretense, and envy, and all slander' (1 Peter 2:1), and thereby they draw men to Christ. This charity of God, 'which is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us' (Rom. 5:5), enables the laity really to express the spirit of the beatitudes in their lives. [And if a pastor presides over the omnipresent malice, deceit, pretense, envy and slander that dominates parish life today, then the Holy Spirit is successfully stifled; again, only through assembly life with the pastor fulfilling his threefold mission of teaching, sanctifying and especially governing (uniting) - not siding with liberals, conservatives or any other group that would subsume their faith into ephemeral identities, but welcoming all parishioners into the fold regardless what ephemeral identity they wear in going out to spread the Gospel.]"

"The apostolate in the social milieu, that is, the effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives, is so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be performed properly by others [especially bishops and priests, alluded to In Weigel’s essay, which amounts to the expropriation of the lay apostolate by clergy]."

"True apostles however, are not content with this activity alone but endeavor to announce Christ to their neighbors by means of the spoken word as well. For there are many persons who can hear the Gospel and recognize Christ only through the laity who live near them."

"The hierarchy should promote the apostolate of the laity, provide it with spiritual principles and support, direct the conduct of this apostolate to the common good of the Church, and attend to the preservation of doctrine and order."

"...the lay person should learn especially how to perform the mission of Christ and the Church by basing his life on belief in the divine mystery of creation and redemption and by being sensitive to the movement of the Holy Spirit..."

"In addition to spiritual formation, a solid doctrinal instruction in theology, ethics, and philosophy adjusted to differences of age, status, and natural talents, is required. [Why I insist that the Holy Spirit guiding us is primary (the basis of the pastor’s mission to sanctify, to open our hearts sacramentally to receive Christ’s Spirit, most especially in the Eucharist), and an education model secondary (pastor’s mission to teach), a carriage that is inspired/moved by the Holy Spirit, and assembly life is essentially the Body of Christ gathered in this particular place to listen to the Holy Spirit and respond as the Body of Christ.]"

Gil:

I too believe in the importance of the laity. But with the following reservations.

In particular? Regarding charismatic voices and so forth? No doubt, the Spirit speaks to many. But? The Bible itself warned there are many "false spirits" out there. So that we cannot ever safely assume that the spirit we hear, is really the Holy Spirit. For this reason, 1 John 4.1 told us to "test the spirits," to see if they are really from God.

For this reason? I am less inclined to be a charismatic.

Though to be sure, there is a particular body of lay voices that I trust somewhat (if not totally): folks with doctorates in religion, from good universities.

If you want to be exposed to some lay voices, and help them take a greater role in religion? I'd recommend enrolling in a good graduate program in religion somewhere.

Otherwise? We're hearing voices, spirits - but how can we be sure they are really from God? That they are not the false spirits that the Bible warned us about, over and over?

Susan,

Your concerns are valid, especially your concern about persons speaking for false spirits, and to avoid this as John suggests, there must be a "testing of spirits", a responsibility of the pastor in his governance, a responsibility every pastor I have known has failed to embrace. And the first step in correcting this is for the pastor to begin assembly life where the Holy Spirit is called upon under the pastor’s governance, where the Holy Spirit can move freely among members and speak through them, and the pastor can then confirm if the voice is from the Holy Spirit.

The Charismatic Movement has been sanctioned by the Magisterium, but it can become a problem when pastors assign it to a Catholic ghetto outside of assembly life, where charismatics have to set up shop far from the parish life or with a suffocating role (unrecognized by the parish as a whole), where their gifts don't benefit the Church as a whole. In fact, they are too often stigmatized as weirdoes and ostracized from parish life.

The radical sectioning off, the intentional isolating of, not only charismatics, but any number of parish cells inspired by the Holy Spirit reflects the radical disunity throughout Christendom and the slamming of metal doors on the Holy Spirit, and Jesus' command that we should all be united in love, that that is how they will know us, begins with an assembly life in individual parishes, the establishment of a model for Christian unity where all cells and valid movements within the church are embraced as essential as members of the Body of Christ. Otherwise we will continue to function as schizophrenics, a fractured life that no thoughtful person will be impressed by.

Susan, your perspective is representative of how we have gone wrong in making the educational model primary: "Though to be sure, there is a particular body of lay voices that I trust somewhat (if not totally): folks with doctorates in religion, from good universities." And you continue with, "If you want to be exposed to some lay voices, and help them take a greater role in religion? I'd recommend enrolling in a good graduate program in religion somewhere." And of course you would dismiss me quickly enough, having only participated in school up to the 3rd grade.

Where would a St. Francis or a Thérèse of Lisieux fit into your model of lay formation, the one that has been universally adopted where lay formation has begun? And then there is Hans Urs von Balthasar, on par with Augustine and Aquinas in saintliness and theological genius, where he reminds us: “We can…see that Christianity, as a genuine revealed religion [not one mastered at any university, but in Christ through his Spirit], cannot be a communication of knowledge, a ‘teaching’, in the first place, but only secondarily.” What kinds of degrees did Peter, John and Andrew possess? At Pentecost, did the Holy Spirit spread his fire of wisdom only on those in the room with degrees? Balthasar continues, “God’s action on man’s behalf is, instead, ‘intelligible’ only insofar as it is not understood and justified in terms of incomplete anthropological and cosmological fragments; in light of such standards, it cannot but appear as ‘foolishness’ and ‘madness’…There can be no possibility of working out a speculative interpretation of this ‘foolishness’, because that would mean reducing the sphere of the translogical ‘whylessness’ of the personal gift of love (that is, the sphere of the Holy Spirit) back to the sphere of the Logos, understood as comprehensive cosmological and anthropological reason…”

Gil:

Of course I don't believe formal education is everything; you for instance, seem pretty articulate, for an essentially self-educated person. But? Hear the case for a little conventional book-learning.

1) Oral seminars and so forth, can be hard to manage. It may be that the reason that many priests and so forth do not want to guide a lay instruction class, is that it can be too demanding and often chaotic: what do we do with a room full of persons spouting a hundred different points of view? Why not be humble - one of the great Christian virtues - and submit to some more conventional educational regimen?


2) St. Peter to be sure, did not have much formal education: but for that matter, Peter made so many mistakes, that in Mat. 16.23, Jesus himself called Peter "Satan."

3) There are some voices that seem to speak against formal education, in religion. On the other hand though? The Bible tells us to seek wisdom and "instruction." And even suggests that "fools despise knowledge." Obviously, Gil, you yourself are no fool: so why not humbly pick up a book or two, before asking for personal guidance?

4) Personally, I have respect for self-educated persons. But? Often they lack the balance, perspective, that a more formal program of education would provide.

Advanced degrees are not everything of course. But on the other hand?

5) Keep in mind particularly, the warning about "false spirits."

6) There is a kind of pride in demanding a priest's personal time; why not just pick up a few books? Preferably, according to some kind of organized, monitored reading program.

7) In a way, we are all self-educated. But the dangers of that, not being in a fairly organized program, is that you may follow not just your positive inclinations, but also your more destructive ones too.


8) By the way, Dr. Weigel's article here, has a title with a double meaning, it seems to some. It might refer to a) the church's education of lay persons. Or? A b) program of laypersons, trying to "reform" the Church.

In fact, many conservative lay persons have been trying to educate the Church for some time. To get it to adopt their own political views, as gospel. This illustrates the really serious danger, in the interaction between laity and the Church. Particularly a laity that is not humble, and wants to assert its own voice, its own spirit. Without the humble spirit of listening, after all, to what the Church (and the Spirit) are really saying.

If I were to offer one piece of advice? I advocate humbly, listening. And if there are no suitable geniuses living in your neighborhood? Seek out the writings of the best minds we have, in print. In a balanced reading program.

Susan,

I first want to thank you for being so open and honest, for in fact your voice does represent the norm, the fears and the subsequent approaches taken by every pastor or lay person I’ve come across in experience and in published essays attempting to establish lay formation. I will now respond to each of your points, which will be a way of responding to the pastors involved in lay formation who do not participate in public debate concerning lay formation, especially at their parishes, for they remain fearful of lay voices in being fearful of the Holy Spirit. Their encrusted beliefs that you express here notwithstanding, the Holy Spirit is present to every Christian, and those voices are best expressed as the Body of Christ, which occurs most profoundly during assembly life.

1) When I talk or write about assembly life, I am not referring to seminars, instruction classes or any educational regimen. There is a place for the educational model in lay formation, but this model will not be conducive to the Holy Spirit moving freely among parishioners as the Body of Christ. In terms of the educational model you recommend, I agree wholeheartedly for educational purposes. It just remains secondary to the movement of the Holy Spirit in assembly life.

2) The implication here is that Jesus would have done better appointing an educated person as head of the Church, that the Church would have fared better. Being human, Peter was prone to mistakes like every other person, including persons with degrees, which was obviously the case with the educated Pharisees in Jesus’ time.

3) I am certainly not an opponent of formal education in religion, and in fact acknowledge its value. There have been many learned men and women saints, and we certainly need as many as we can get today. The point I have been trying to make is that those who are not learned, in terms of having advanced degrees, have been gifted by the Holy Spirit with charisms, just as the learned have, and the Church would be wise to allow those gifts to be used in the Church’s mission, and this process, in my opinion, begins with assembly life; and priests and lay leadership resisting assembly life is in essence, regardless how ignorant they may be of this, a fear of the Holy Spirit, and that fear is founded in an unrecognized guilt at having failed in their appointed mission by the Holy Spirit. You claim I am no fool, but I strive to be a fool for Christ; and I have picked up many books in my life, but have finally settled on one after the Bible, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Love Alone is Credible”, what I consider a 150-page synopsis off all he had to say, and he is the Aquinas for our time. For I have only one mission left in my remaining days (which the doctors claim aren’t many): to encourage bishops and priests to seriously consider actually beginning lay formation.

4) Advanced degrees aren’t everything, of course. But for a Christian, to know how he/she is called, to know his/her charisms, and to have the Holy Spirit present in an assembly life where one’s gifts and callings emerge, is everything. That because, as in Jesus’ life, mission is everything.

5) I’ve already addressed this in my prior post.

6) I have never demanded a priest’s time. I have only attempted to encourage him to fulfill his calling to teach, govern and sanctify (his appointed mission), and in that context, to stop siding with groups, political or otherwise; for the world of politics is where the laity is to reside in their mission. As Weigel alluded to, too many priests have little time for their mission, being so involved in work that is tantamount to an expropriation of the mission of the laity. I am particularly concerned about the pastor’s refusal to govern, which in essence is a failure to unite all parishioners as members of the universal Body of Christ, for the priest is gifted with the power to unite from the Holy Spirit. The singular gift of all laity is to “go out” once united in love by the pastor.

7) Again, I’m not opposed to instruction. I have in fact attended more religious instruction classes than most Christians. My point is the elephant in the room: the absence of assembly life. I am convinced that without assembly life at the parish level lay formation is impossible.

8) My concern is not the education of the laity, which I acknowledge is important (and there are many volunteers to accomplish it), or any process that members of the laity are involved with in reforming the Church, something that has been perennial throughout the Church’s history, an essential part of its character. My singular concern is the absence of assembly life, which is the direct cause of lay formation not ever getting off the ground, no matter how many lay education classes are established and no matter how many lay persons are involved in reform.

My concern is not how much conservatives and liberals disagree. I am concerned with a pastor taking sides politically because that undermines unity, which is a failure of his mission to govern. For example, a pastor, in governing, through a process of sanctification, especially calling on the Holy Spirit in assembly life after mass, can point the way to conservatives and liberals in how to best carry out their mission within the political parties they belong to. There is plenty both conservatives and liberals can do in their mission to actualize what popes have written on social justice, but first and foremost is the mission to bring the gospel message to those environs they inhabit. Again, you fear false spirits, and I’m stating emphatically that the best way for testing spirits is in assembly life.

What the Holy Spirit has been telling me to say over and over again until a bishop or priest somewhere finally gets it is that assembly life is where lay formation will truly begin.

The great Russian filmmaker, AndreyTarkovsky, had this to say: "Knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life. The more we know, the less we know: going deeper, our horizon becomes narrower."

Not that he sees knowledge as an enemy, as is evident in his reflections on cinema in "Sculpting in Time". His critique of knowledge as the way to liberation is a critique of Gnosticism. He simply agrees with Dostoyevsky’s 6-syllable summing up: "Knowing is not enough." Which implies that knowing is not primary, but secondary. This is why Jesus didn't choose Gnostics as disciples. Yes, Matthew was no doubt an educated man, but notice that when Jesus called him, Matthew abandoned the complex matrix of what he knew with human authority, all his accumulated knowledge of how the world works, and how people move about in the world.

It is not the broad gate of ever-expanding knowledge that will set us free, but the narrow gate of love absolute in faith, the road endlessly shunned for the obsession with a “broader perspective", even among pastors. Only a few will enter the narrow gate, and once inside he/she might find that he/she is called to expand his/her knowledge not for egocentric self-aggrandizement or a more profound expression of the faith, or a more clearer path toward the Omega Point (“My Summa is all straw” Aquinas concluded), but to reach those intellectuals trapped in a Gnostic way, for God desires that all be saved. This, for example, was the mission Kierkegaard was called to.

Look at some of the great Gnostic Christians of European history: Descartes (who would sell us the Cognitive God: He thinks, therefore He is), Kant (who would sell us the Ethical God, Hegel (who would sell us the World Spirit God), Teilhard de Chardin (who would sell us the Evolution God, or perhaps he, as poet-mystic, was indulging poetic license), and finally, Rene Girard (who would sell us the Anthropological God). All of them Christian, destined for heaven, but all of them blindly passing Christ on the Gnostic road.

Because many Christian intellectuals now seem intent on embracing Girard’s Anthropological God (this might go on for at least another century), one must keep in mind that this Christian genius founds all his great and important discoveries on the principle of the Cross as a dismantling of the scapegoat mechanism that has trapped and tortured humanity since the founding of violent human culture, represented in the story of Cain and Abel. And to edify this anthropological principle to the heights of Christian revelation, Girard dismisses the dogma of Atonement (Christ suffered because man by sin had incurred a debt to Divine justice and that this required a satisfaction that could be paid only by a God-Man). And what does his dismissal amount to? Hans Urs von Balthasar answers best:

"It is always the dogma of the removal of guilt through representative substitution that shows most decisively whether an approach is merely anthropologically or truly christologically (that is, theologically) centered. Without this dogma, it always remains possible to interpret everything in rational terms as an expression of human possibility, no matter how much historical mediation one wishes to build in. Our inability to resolve this dogma into gnosis is the true scandal; it is a signal and a warning that this is where genuine faith begins. For it is precisely here, in this deed, that genuine divine love begins and ends, a love that overwhelms us and exceeds all capacity to think it—and thereby becomes completely evident as love."

Exceeds all capacity to think it.

To live in Christ, and he in us. That is what it means to be Christian, the narrow way. And how is that accomplished? By receiving his Spirit, who is also the Spirit of the Father. And to receive that Spirit in assembly life is what will guarantee our fulfilling what Jesus commanded of us, to be united in love as His Body. THIS is how they will know us, not by how well we are read or how accomplished we are at jumping through cognitive hoops.