During his weekly General Audience, Pope Leo XIV highlights the important role that lay people play in the Church’s mission in bearing witness to the Gospel, as he continues his reflection on the conciliar document "Lumen gentium."
By Isabella H. de Carvalho Lay people’s contribution, service and witness is essential to building a Church that reaches out to all and spreads the Gospel, along with justice, charity and peace, Pope Leo XIV said during the Wednesday General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on April 1. “The vast field of the lay apostolate is not confined to the Church, but extends to the world,” Pope Leo underlined. “The Church is present wherever her children profess and bear witness to the Gospel: in the workplace, in civil society and in all human relationships, wherever they, through their choices, show the beauty of Christian life, which foretells here and now the justice and peace that will be accomplished in the Kingdom of God.” Pope Leo XIV continued his catechesis series on the Documents of the Second Vatican Council, reflecting again on the 1964 Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium. In this week’s catechesis, he highlighted that lay people play an important role in creating a Church that “goes out,” as Pope Francis liked to say, meaning “a Church embodied in history” and “always open” to the mission of bearing witness to the Gospel. Equality of all the baptized Pope Leo emphasized that the fourth chapter of Lumen gentium seeks to explain “in positive terms, the nature and mission of the laity, after centuries in which they had been defined simply as those who are not part of the clergy or the consecrated life.” Citing his predecessor Pope Francis, he noted that “lay people are, put simply, the vast majority of the people of God,” while ordained ministers are the minority and at their service. The nature and mission of the laity, Pope Leo continued, are founded in the chosen People of God being one and sharing the same common dignity in Christ. “Before any distinction of ministry or state of life, the Council affirms the equality of all the baptized,” he insisted. “The Constitution does not want us to forget what it had already affirmed in the chapter on the People of God, namely that the condition of the messianic people is the dignity and freedom of the children of God.” People of God is not a formless mass Having explained that the laity’s important role comes from the dignity of their baptism and being part of the People of God, the Pope noted that the Council also emphasized their mission “in the Church and in the world.” Citing point 31 of Lumen gentium, Pope Leo underlined that the laity “are in their own way made sharers in the priestly, prophetical, and kingly functions of Christ; and they carry out for their own part the mission of the whole Christian people.” “The holy People of God, therefore, is never a formless mass, but the body of Christ or, as St. Augustine said, the Christus totus,” meaning the whole Christ, the Pope continued. The People of God “is a community organically structured by means of the fruitful relationship between the two forms of participation in the priesthood of Christ: the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood,” the Pope said. “By virtue of Baptism, the lay faithful participate in the very priesthood of Christ," he added. In conclusion, Pope Leo recalled that St. John Paul II in his 1988 Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici highlighted that the Council “has written as never before on the nature, dignity, spirituality, mission and responsibility of the lay faithful” and summoned all the laity to be active in the Church through their apostolate. "May the Easter we are preparing to celebrate renew in us the grace to be, like Mary Magdalene, like Peter and John, witnesses of the Risen One," Pope Leo concluded.