To Be a Layperson Is a Vocation

Here are some extracts from the address of Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko, newly–appointed President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, at the Congress of Lay Catholics in the former Soviet Union

What does it mean to be lay faithful? What is the identity of a lay Christian? The Council reminded us that to be lay people in the Church and in the world is a call of God, a real, proper vocation. And certainly not a second-rate one!

It is the vocation that springs from the sacrament of Baptism. In this regard the Pope writes, “It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole existence of the lay faithful has the aim of bringing him to know the radical Christian novelty that derives from Baptism, the sacrament of faith, so that he might live all its commitments received from God.… Here then is the starting point: the need, for each of us, to rediscover the importance of this sacrament in our lives, because in Baptism is the “genetic code,” as it were, of the Christian. Sadly, these days this awareness is very shallow and for not a few Christians their own Baptism is nothing but a distant episode of early childhood, totally irrelevant for adult life.

The Christian is a new creature (cf. 2 Cor 5:17) and therefore has the duty to testify in the world to the novelty and the fascinating beauty of this life he has received free of charge from Christ.…

Christianity is not a theoretical and abstract doctrine. Christianity is a Person. The Pope writes in the Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte, “We shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which He gives us: I am with you!” A Christian has encountered Christ in his life and this encounter has radically changed his existence.…

There is a tight and unbreakable bond between the vocation and mission of laypeople. The Christian vocation is of its very nature a missionary vocation. It is in the mission in the world and in the Church that the greatness and the beauty of the Christian vocation becomes visible.…

The lay faithful fulfill their missionary vocation both individually and in ecclesial associations and movements, which in our times are gaining more and more importance and of which the Pope has spoken in his letter Christifideles laici as a vital expression of a “new season of aggregation” in the Church. The ecclesial associations and movements are a great gift of the Holy Spirit for our age. Thanks to the wealth of charisms they bear, they become privileged places of formation and mission in whose breast the lay faithful exercise in a direct way their own co-responsibility in the Church’s life and mission.

Never forget Christ’s words, “I have told you these things so that you may have peace in me. In the world you will have troubles, but take courage, I have conquered the world” (Jn 16:33). And St John comments on this phrase of the Master’s, “All that is born of God conquers the world, and this is the victory over the world: our faith” (1 Jn 5:4).