“Ganito Noon; Paano Ngayon?” The Dignity and Mission of the Laity

Part 3

In the Medieval Times.  The word “laity” as designation of one segment of Christian population came to connote subordination and inequality in the Church as experienced politically and spiritually. Politically, all power and authority in the Church came to be vested upon the body of clerics in the Medieval times. The laity’s participation had been greatly curtailed. Personal charism was sacrificed in favor of the charism office. Spiritually, at this time, Christian theologians tended to be ambivalent about the world, understanding it as essentially good inasmuch as it is of divine source but at the same time as a source of evil and distracts Christians from spiritual things. In effect, while the clergy became identified with the realm of the sacred and the holy, the laity was naturally linked with the profane and secular. A layman could be holy only in a metaphorical sense by having a religious element in an otherwise neutral life. If Christians wished to take seriously their Christian calling, it is only by way of monasticism or religious life. The way of counsels was the preferred means of Christian fellowship. Because of their inherent weakness and the inferiority of state, the laity had to be content with a minimalist ethic: simply the way of the commandments. The laity’s loss of position and dignity in the Church can be symbolically seen in the screen that separated them from the clergy during the liturgy or the monastery and convent cloisters and grilles that kept their negative influence away from religious life.

This understanding of the laity culminated in the ecclesiology of Vatican I. Here, the understanding of the church was equated with the three-fold powers of teaching, sanctifying and governing. The Church was identified with the hierarchy which teaches, sanctifies and governs and the laity were passive, subordinate and simply recipients of the things necessary for salvation available only through the ministrations of the clergy. The Church is the “perfect society” but of “unequals.”