Over the summer holidays, tourists to the City of Philadelphia, the “cradle of American liberty,” thronged to a new interactive museum which is dedicated to the 215-year-old Constitution that established the form of our national government and defined the rights and freedoms of American citizens.
Fathers and Brothers
At one exhibit, while amplified patriotic music swells, visitors to the Constitution Center can become “signers” of the document that begins: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility…. [do] establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” By encouraging such “participation,” the Center portrays the Founding Fathers’ composition as a living document that can adapt and endure in the third millennium.
The Catholic Church, too, has a document that authoritatively defines its structure and the dignity of its members: the Dogmatic Constitution of the Second Vatican Council entitled Lumen Gentium, a Latin phrase meaning “Light of the Nations” (see Lk 2:32). This Constitution on the Church is so fundamental that passages from it are incorporated into the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the new Catechism.
The big difference between it and the US Constitution is that the Fathers at Vatican II were not revolutionaries and founders. As Pope Paul VI explained in his “Address at the Opening of the Third Session” of the Council (September 14, 1964), the bishops had gathered in Rome, not as framers or innovators, but as caretakers, “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1). “We represent here the entire Church, not as delegates or deputies of the faithful toward whom our ministry is directed, but as fathers and brothers who personify the communities entrusted to the care of each one of us, and as a plenary assembly legitimately convoked by the Holy Father.”
Note that the language here is familial first, and only then political. The Church’s members have been born again as children of God, “members of the household of faith,” through Christ’s saving action in the sacrament of baptism. This crucial point is missed in attempts to view the Catholic Church as a democratic institution.
Paul VI suggests a more fitting image that goes back to the Old Testament: the Church is the “people of God,” which makes the council Fathers the elders of various related clans who have been called to consult with the anointed ruler.
While it is historically and theologically true that the Church is “the people of God,” it would be an exaggeration to claim that that tells the whole story. The first chapter of Lumen Gentium examines several Scriptural names for the Church: the kingdom or the building of God, the Mystical Body or the Bride of Christ. Each image expresses one aspect of the mystery, in much the same way that physicists describe the phenomenon of light both as packages of particles and as waves.
The Church founded by Christ is, in the words of the Dogmatic Constitution, “one complex reality which comes together from a human and a divine element. For this reason the Church is compared, in a powerful analogy, to the mystery of the incarnate Word” (LG 8). As Christ took on a human nature to serve as the instrument of salvation, so too the visible, social structure of the Church serves the Spirit of Christ which is its “soul” or life-principle.
Ecclesial Riches Common to All
The new emphasis on the human side of the Church as “the people of God” was meant to offset a traditional, legalistic way of talking about the Church. Instead of looking to canon law or to Scholastic theology, the Council Fathers turned to the Bible to develop their teaching.
Describing the Church as “the people of God” also corrected the impression sometimes given in official documents of the past, that the laity were the Christians left over after you had spoken about the bishops, priests, and religious. The structure of Lumen Gentium is deliberate. In Chapter Two it describes the ecclesial riches that are common to all members of the Church, the “people of God,” without distinction. Only then does Chapter Three explain the hierarchical structure of the Church and the duties of its clergy. The fourth chapter deals with the laity, defining them positively in terms of their particular task of sanctifying temporal or worldly activities.
A key insight is expressed in paragraph 9 of Lumen Gentium and repeated verbatim in #781 of the Catechism: “[God has] willed to make men holy and save them, not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge Him and serve Him in holiness. He therefore chose the Israelite race to be His own people and established a covenant with it…. as a preparation and figure of that new and perfect covenant which was to be ratified in Christ.”
Under the Old Covenant, God guided His people by sending them priests, prophets, and kings. Christ exercised these three offices in his own public ministry, shepherding and instructing the people of God and offering Himself as a sacrifice for their sins. Upon those who believe in Him and are baptized, He bestows the supernatural life of grace that makes Christians Christ-like. This makes the Church a “kingdom of priests” (Rv 1:6), “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pt 2:9).
A scholarly article by Cardinal Journet, “The Mystery of the Church According to the Second Vatican Council,” summarizes and explains the teaching of Lumen Gentium. In his discussion of the priestly, prophetic, and kingly character of the people of God, he clarifies what it means specifically for lay Catholics:
“Those who are baptized form a priestly people. They are consecrated so as to offer to God their activities along with themselves as a holy and living sacrifice.” Sacramental ministry is reserved to the ordained, hierarchical priesthood. The common priesthood of all the faithful is exercised “by the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving, … [self-denial] and active charity” (LG 10).
The laity share in the prophetic office of Christ by professing the faith and witnessing to it by their lives. Cardinal Journet notes that when the faithful are governed by the Holy Spirit and loyal to the magisterium, then they are “protected from error…, sustained by a supernatural and infallible instinct that theologians call the sense of the faith, the sensus fidei.”
Christians share in Christ’s royalty by the gift of freedom from sin and the exercise of self-control. Then the laity are called to act as leaven in the community, “as members of earthly cities, of secular associations, of the kingdoms of this world.” Cardinal Journet explains what is required of them: “to devote themselves to these temporal occupations with the spirit and the charity of the Gospel in their hearts and so, without in any way confusing — or divorcing — the world and the Church… to work for the coming of a Christian temporal order… for a Christian culture that is truly, fully, and integrally human.”
Updating the Church, Renewing the World
At the pope’s request, bishops from all over the world gathered at the Second Vatican Council to discuss aggiornamento — ways to update the Church. They could not reform her essential structure (which is divinely founded and therefore unchanging), but rather sought to adapt her pastoral mission to contemporary men and women.
The laity, on the other hand, can best exercise their Christian freedom by helping to renew the secular world in which they live and work. “By reason of their special vocation, it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will” (LG 31). The faithful should “distinguish carefully between the rights and duties which they have as belonging to the Church and those which fall to them as members of the human society. They will strive to unite the two harmoniously, remembering that in every temporal affair they are to be guided by a Christian conscience” LG 36).
Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were deists and believed in a God who designed the world like clockwork and left it to run on its own. As Catholics, we believe in a loving God who has “visited and ransomed His people” (Lk 1:68) and gathered them into his Church.
With the US Constitution, the people of the American colonies founded the government of a new nation. But by initiating His merciful covenant, God Himself established a people to be peculiarly His own. We don’t sign papers to join; He “signs” us as Christians with the indelible character of baptism.
The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive document. It legislates nothing and presents no novel teaching about the People of God. Instead, it meticulously maps out what it means to belong to the Church and, in particular, how lay Christians are called to “be in the world but not of it” as good citizens of the “City of God.”
Michael J. Miller translated the books entitled New Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church Vols. 1, 2, 3, and Married Saints and Blesseds for Ignatius Press.
This article originally appeared in Lay Witness, a publication of Catholics United for the Faith, Inc., and is used by permission. Join Catholics United for the Faith and enjoy the many benefits of membership.
