Presentation Delivered By Charles Avila – The Gardener For the Lay Society of Saint Arnold Janssen (LSSAJ) At Tagaytay City November 30, 2024
We propose to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the SVD in 2025 with an in-depth series of discussions, seminars, symposia, or even small group sessions regarding Saint Arnold and the doctrinal and pastoral evolution of Church as Laity and the Laity as Church.
This would complement the traditional feast of writings or “Festschrift,” if such has already been planned elsewhere. In the German world, where the SVD first sprung, “Festschrift” meant a collection of writings published to honor an important event, like what we’ll celebrate this coming year. The series of discussions we propose would emphasize our situation as laypeople in modern times.
The idea proposes to focus on face-to-face discussions in the firm belief that, as Jesus promised, where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there in their midst. The hoped-for result would be a greater awareness of who we are as people of God and what we must be about most of the time—in other words, a more heightened lay mission spirituality and a stronger resolve to allow our faith to transform our lives.
So, that’s the proposal in essence.
A lay society?
St. Arnold Janssen started three missionary organizations – Divine Word priests and brothers, Holy Spirit sisters, and Perpetual Adoration sisters.
According to his ninth successor, former Superior General Antonio Pernia, SVD, St. Arnold wanted to form an organization of the laity but died before he could realize his plan. When he wrote in 1894 to his missionaries in South America that “we can no longer save the world with sermons and liturgy alone…You cannot avoid becoming politically involved because the struggle between faith and atheism is being fought in the public arena,” he might have already realized the urgent need of a lay society to undertake such mission in the world.
Some of us joined his congregations for a while and learned in time that we were meant for something else.
What is that “something else”?
It turns out this “something else” is vital, indeed. It is the call to ride the crest of a historic wave of faith development – a call to be a significant part of the modern rise of the laity in the Church.
But first, a word on words: “lay, laity, laiko.” Let’s make sure the foreign word or sound does not prevent us from grasping its true, simple meaning. Then, once we do, we may go back to using them. For lay (laity, laiko) really and simply refers to – and this is its real meaning –“ordinary people, karaniwang tao, tayo, you and me” and millions upon millions of others, some 99.96% of the global faith community: they have no titles and no entitlements; they are ordinary and unordained; they are not part of the professional full-time religious class, neither clergy nor hierarchy; they are ordinary and busy living an ordinary life in the world – the messy world of economics, and politics, living or eking a living in that temporal order which “us ordinary folks alone” can transform “in the Light of the Word and the Spirit of grace,” to use the words of Saint Arnold.
So, next time you hear or read that foreign-sounding word “lay, laity, laiko,” you know it’s you the word refers to, it’s us they are talking about: “we the people.” This is one major theme we shall discuss in depth a little later.
Moving on, allow me to discuss with you three themes or interrelated topics as staples for the content of our proposal: I. The Essence of our Faith; II. The Essence of our Church; and III. The Essence of our Struggle on Earth at this time.
- Let us start with the first – the essence of our Faith.
- Centuries ago, Christian thinkers talked of “faith seeking understanding”; following Vatican II, we would now place more emphasis on “faith seeking action.” It has always been understood that faith has three moments. Faith seeks to hear (auditus Fidei), to understand (intellectus Fidei), and to act (actio Fidei). In this, we are mindful of Jesus’ unequivocal line as to who will be part of the Kingdom of Heaven. Who? Jesus was quite clear: “Not he who says to me Lord, Lord! But he who does the will of my father who is in heaven…” So, it is actio Fidei.
- Thus today, our lay society proclaims that the faith of its members must seek to transform life or it is no faith at all; it seeks good works, or it is dead at the start. A lay society must be a communion (koinonia) or a society of the Word-become-flesh, alive, dwelling among us.
- The undeniable fact is that the major living faiths (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and others) are all one in identifying the most profound essence of religion, and that is the love of God above all and of neighbor as oneself. This means that either you love God, yourself, your neighbor, and all of creation, or you love no one, nothing.
- But if love is the essence of religion, and our faith, it is important to ask: What is the test of love? In other words, how do we know that we truly love our neighbor – when we are ecstatic in her or his presence? No, the real test of love is how much we are willing to sacrifice, even to get hurt, for the person we love.
- A friend of yours can go up to your house one evening and say, “Friend, if you love me, can you pray for me?” I am sure you won’t hesitate to answer, “Of course, friend, how many rosaries do you want?”
- Or a friend could go up to your house one evening and say, “Friend if you love me, could you give me some advice? You see, I have a big problem. My girlfriend left me.” Again, you’ll probably not hesitate to answer: “Surely, please sit down, let me make some coffee and you can benefit from my wisdom the whole night through.”
- But if a friend goes up to your house one evening and says: “Friend if you love me, can you give me ten thousand pesos?” The chances are this might be the beginning of the end of love. For your friend is asking for money and money hurts.
The Good Samaritan
8. Jesus knew how to test human nature, for when someone asked him “What is the test of love,” he answered, as usual, in the form of a story describing the test in terms of money.
9. So, there was this lawyer who wanted to be clever and asked Jesus: “What is the test of love? How should I Iove my neighbor?” In biblical terms, “Who is my neighbor?”
10. We know the story-answer of Jesus but let us look at it again. A traveler was attacked by robbers, and as he lay dying on the wayside, a priest passed by. You won’t disagree with me when I say that the priest must have felt pity for the victim. Whose heart though as hard as stone would not break on seeing a man half-dead? And so, out of pity, the priest may have prayed for the victim although the Bible does not clearly so state.
Or he may have even given the victim precious advice, like stooping down and saying, “Be careful next time.” But after that, he just went to the other side of the road and passed on.
11. Next a Levite came. Like the priest before him, this religious person also passed on – as if he had not seen the victim at all: “dedma.”
12. Then came the Samaritan – an outcast in the society of Jesus’ time. The Bible does not state whether he prayed for the victim or gave him advice.
What is emphasized is that out of true compassion, he attended to the physical and material needs of his neighbor, an official enemy (for the Samaritans and the Jews were much like Hamas and the State of Israel today); anyway, he brought him to the inn, stayed with him for one night, and the next morning gave some money to the innkeeper and said: “Please take care of this man for I have to go; but if there should be more expenses, I shall pay.”
13. So now, the lawyer had asked, “What is the test of love?” And Jesus’ answer is dramatically clear: “If there should be more expenses, I shall pay.” The answer to a spiritual question is in material terms- in terms of action against hunger, sickness, and misery. He does not say anything against the devotional aspects of religion for these could be a big help in cultivating feelings of love in our hearts but he certainly focuses action in terms of our material condition.
Look at the life of Jesus, how he got into trouble with the “institutional church” of his time, as he focused on going around doing good to manifest to people the compassionate nature of his heavenly father (“Abba” “Papa” “Tatay”) and to spread around the kingdom of heaven (“Basileia tou theou”).
Anyone can encounter many “kingdoms” on earth. The “kingdom” in which Jesus wanted his contemporaries and us to believe was a “kingdom” of love and service, a “kingdom” of human brotherhood and sisterhood in which every person is loved and respected because he or she is a person. We cannot believe in and hope for such a “kingdom” unless we have learned to be moved with compassion for our fellow beings.
So, before anything else, Jesus said, seek that “kingdom” first and set your hearts on it (Mt 6:33). The invitation is to make the “kingdom” of God your priority in life and set all your hopes upon it. It is a hidden treasure or precious pearl, stake everything on it.
Final Test
14. And just to be sure no one misunderstands this focus on faith needing action or love being tested in the material conditions of existence, Jesus made a cinemascope presentation of humanity’s final exam. During this last judgment day, it is determined who is part of his “Kingdom”. He sits in judgment as King, Christ the King, and explains the reasons for inclusion and exclusion.
15. The interesting part is that Christ the King, like a good judge, will give the reasons for his judgments. He will say why some people are coming to his Kingdom, and why others are not. He will give six reasons, and these must be the principal reasons; or why would he mention them and not the others?
- He will not say: “Come, because in your lifetime on Earth, you prayed so many rosaries a day and you went to Mass twice on Sundays,” although, as already said, it is quite important to pray as Christ prayed.
- Nor will he say: “Come to heaven, because in your lifetime you became Miss Universe or the President of the Philippines or the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila,” although it may not be bad to become Miss Universe or Philippine President or Cardinal Archbishop of Manila.
- Rather, he will say: “Come, because I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, imprisoned and you came to me, a stranger and you took me in.” These six reasons must be the principal reasons for being considered sanctified – for being considered qualified for Heaven; otherwise, why does he mention them and not others?
- If feeding the hungry is the principal reason for going to heaven, the principal form of sanctification, we might also ask – how do you feed hungry persons? Your answer can take many forms like fighting for food security, working for better credit facilities and production technologies, helping out in proper social welfare dispensations, and fighting what they call corruption as this takes away much of what could have gone toward financing the solution of feeding millions of hungry people.
- Clothing the naked is a principal reason for going to heaven, a principal form of sanctification. Question: with what do we clothe a naked person? Obviously with textile, and how much does textile cost? So, again we see that this business of sanctification is truly a worldly business, impinging on finance and economics and other disciplines and activities affecting the material conditions of human existence.
- Conversely, Christ the King gives six reasons why other people are not coming into his Kingdom: “Depart from me, for I was hungry and you did not feed me, thirsty and you did not give me drink, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and you did not visit me, imprisoned and you did not come to me, a stranger and you did not take me in.”
- Christ the King as judge is very consistent, indeed: if feeding the hungry is in itself a justifying-sanctifying act, conversely, not feeding the hungry when one can, must be unjust, for only the unjust will miss out on his Kingdom. True Christianity is admittedly demanding and positive. We are condemned not so much for what we do but for what we fail to do.
Yes, there will be a lot of surprises on that final exam day with individuals asking when they did or did not give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. And Christ the King is quite clear: “What you did or did not do even to the least of my brethren, you did or did not do to me.”
- What we do to the people or against them, we also do to Christ or against him. Think of this now. Saul was persecuting the followers of Jesus, but Jesus clarified the deeper reality: “Whom you are persecuting is me. I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” I am Jesus whom you are extra-judicially killing. I am Jesus, whom you are lying to all the time. I am Jesus, whom you keep in poverty, slavery, and oppression. I am Jesus, who, in the 20th Century alone, you murdered more than a hundred million times in two world wars, in other major wars, and, daily, in economic systems that demand no end to war and oppression.
- To put it in unequivocal terms: the essence of our Faith is not in good feelings only but in action for the promotion of justice. It is not the denial of the fact that we are made for God. By our Faith that is a given – that happiness is ascension to spirituality. What makes us human is precisely our experience of the Infinite, the fact that we are never satisfied, that – in the words of St. Augustine, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But one does not love God less by loving people too. To speak about love for God and love for human beings is to speak of the same reality. Matthew 25 has clarified this.
- Matthew’s Gospel also clarified earlier that “Thy Kingdom come” means praying for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Continuing the thought, Saint Paul wrote the Romans that God’s Reign is justice and peace as well as joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17). This is the essence of our Faith – make no mistake about it. We will now see in the following two considerations how to go about living our Faith.
II. Let us now go to the second – the essence of our Church.
- When Jesus walked the earth, he formed the first lay society. The group that Jesus started, which is the same as the Church that Jesus founded, was a lay missionary church. It was not a group of clerics and priests and Levites and professional religious but a group of ordinary folk – thelaos, the laity. He sent them out and made them conscious and feel that they were sent just as he was sent. Have no doubt: from the start, the group we subsequently called church was a lay missionary faith community. It was not a clerical, hierarchic church. He did not call the priests and the Levites and the synagogue officials and the High Priest nor even the doctors of the law and the Pharisees and theologians but ordinary folk, the laity, ordinary folk, the fisher folk, the farmers and shepherds, yes, the sinners like tax collectors and radical zealots, a select group, maybe, but one culled from the ordinary, majority populace.
- In sending out his first missionaries, ordinary folks, Jesus said: “You are the light of the world; you are the salt of the earth; be therefore perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” – (Matt. 5, 6, 7) and he correspondingly empowered them to cast out unclean spirits, and to heal all manner of sickness and disease (Matt. 10).
- He reminded them to tell each and all that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and that this “kingdom of God is in your midst and within you.” The reign of love in your heart and the constancy of a new consciousness in your mind point to the primacy of spirit and the diminution of ego. So, he was sending them out (ad extra) but reminding them that their real strength is within (intra). This simply meant that if you welcome his unfailing love within you, you immediately have the power to work miracles and transform everything else around you. So, welcome everyone to the Reign of Love, the Kingdom of God.
- Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) declared that the laity (tayo) “are called, each according to his or her particular condition, to exercise the mission which Christ entrusted to the Church to fulfill in the world.” How?
- Within organized bodies such as the age-old Catholic Church, power flows along the lines of two fundamental and concrete issues. The first is authority and the second is purpose. Authority: who is in command? Who lays down the law as to what Catholics must believe and what sort of morals they must practice? Purpose: what is the purpose of the Catholic Church in this world?
- For the longest time, authority to command and to teach descended through a hierarchic structure from Pope to Bishops to priests to laity. As to purpose, again for the longest time, it was solely to make sure that each individual had the means of reaching the eternal life of God after death – an exclusively other-worldly purpose.
- Today, after Vatican II’s redefinition of the Church as “the people of God,” a “people’s church” has been evolving, going back to its origins, while not abolishing the hierarchic church. And today, too, the people’s church is of the “Church Militant,” praying and working for the coming of the Reign of God – the Reign of Love, of Justice, of Peace, and of Joy on Earth (in this world) just as it is in Heaven.
- John Henry Cardinal Newman, the early philosopher and theologian non-pareil of the development of Christian doctrine, was declared Saint of the universal church – to underscore the ever-evolving character of the church of Jesus Christ.
- Five hundred years ago, in the matter of evangelization, there was a big shift from the monastic and mendicant orders to the new idea of having a contemplative army –“contemplatives in action.”
- The necessary reform in the divine/human church that was rushed into being by those who preferred to abandon the church of Rome – reformers like Martin Luther, John Knox, Calvin, Henry VIII, Zwingli, and others – was now more than balanced by reformers who preferred to stay within the church, led by Saint Ignatius Loyola and his Society of Jesus. This was the time of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. That was 500 years ago – about the time the announcement of the Good News was reaching oriental shores (1521, 1565).
- A little more than fifty years ago, the realization became quite acute that the church once again needed a radical updating. Saint Pope John XXIII called everyone together – more than 2,000 Bishops from all over the globe – and we had the Second Vatican Council. As a result, we now live in a new age. A new big shift has happened/is happening. In God’s good time, the torch of evangelization is being passed from the religious to the laity. The church is evolving.
- With Vatican II, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) made it very clear that: “The Sacred Power in the church is vested in the entire people of God through the all-pervading presence of the Spirit. It is present and operative in the ordained and non-ordained[who]unfailingly adhere to the faith, penetrate it more deeply through right judgment, and apply it in daily life” (cf. LG12). This, indeed, is a far cry from the focus on the hierarchic element of the church in 1563, at the Council of Trent’s Session XXIII, which affirmed the hierarchical structure of the church. It took only a full 500 years for a 180-degree turnabout, and we have not fully understood it yet.
- Two Points: First, fundamental oneness and equality
It should be clear to all how Vatican II moved away from identifying the essence of the Church with its hierarchical element, underlining, instead, the original unity that exists among the members of the Body of Christ.
“The chosen people of God is one: ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’” (LG 32). Members of the Church “share a common dignity from their rebirth in Christ” (LG 32) so that the laity can no longer think of themselves as a separate and subordinate rank in the Church. Rather, we can only be more and more aware that to be laity is to be Church.
- The second Point is the diversity of service
We would now be quite conscious that the categories of “lay” and “cleric” no longer refer to different classes within the Church but to different functions where there is unity of purpose in diversity of service (cf Vatican II Decree “Apostolicam Actuositatem” 2).
We hear the same call to holiness, the same vocation to follow Jesus, as we also are one in sharing the three-fold munera or functions of Christ as priest, prophet and king in the universal comunio of the baptized.
“Priestly”: we the people sanctify through prayer and sacrifice, and above all, through virtuous living as many as we can touch and bring closer to one another and to God.
“Prophetic”: we the people denounce, announce, and pronounce –denounce false doctrine and immoral values; announce Gospel truths amid cynicism, negativism, and moral hazards; pronounce moral directions clearly through fearless teaching.
“Kingly”: we the people rule with Christ the King by seeking to serve and not to be served, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to care for the sick, to help the destitute and attend to the hapless, to engage in social reform and sustainable development. A lay society sees this as Christian governance at its core.
- In this updated doctrine, then: Each one has a specific contribution to the community, a particular function to perform, and different gifts are given by the Spirit to build up the faith community – the people of the Triune God.
Incorporation into Christ is more than registering a corporation with the SEC where persons contribute money or material goods for the functioning of a fictitious juridical personality. No, here as referred to by the Code, it is people themselves who become constituent and integrating parts of a real mystical body, Christ.
- It is a singular and profound incorporation:
Persons themselves are intimately bound and made one. The Greeks called this koinonia while the Latins called it communio. Unlike the SEC incorporation, here both material wealth and poverty are essentially irrelevant as are languages, races and cultures.
This koinonia or communio is reality, not a hypothesis, not an opinion: the descent of the Spirit proclaimed it, the parable of the vine and the branches illustrates it, the doctrine of divinization (in the East) asserts it, the literature of the indwelling Spirit (in the West) supports it – it is the same pattern: mysteriously (mystically) one Person (Christ) in the billions of persons baptized into and following Him.
- Consequently, there is a to build a people society, a lay society, a living society that can gather together in many strong vibrant groups the many charisms or gifts given by the Spirit to so many who must be recognized in their different functions and endeavours, while always maintaining true unity in the one Spirit that enlivens and strengthens all.
III. Finally we go to the third – the essence of our Struggle on Earth now.
- We only know we’ve grasped the essence of the struggle when we’ve committed to make our world other than it is. Remember the earlier statement of Saint Arnold originally quoted by his ninth successor: “We can no longer save the world with sermons and liturgy alone…You cannot avoid becoming politically involved because the struggle between faith and atheism is being fought in the public arena.”
- It is within human power aided by God’s grace to make the world more just and thus beat the Evil One. We can no longer pretend that the inequalities and injustices of our world must be borne as part of the inevitable order of things. The Church Militant must resist evil and come up with a new plan following CST or Christian Social Teaching.
- Because the structures of society – the political systems, the banking systems, the hospital systems, the transport systems, the construction industries, the military-industrial complexes, the educational systems – are among the principal formative influences of our world, we the people (we the Christian laity) must consider as our own in a personal as well as in a collective manner the struggle to transform them. We can more effectively do so by creating solidarity with the voiceless and the powerless, thus allowing the Holy Spirit to empower us and “renew the face of the earth.”
- We the people know that democracy, by which we protect our God-given freedoms, does not “fall from heaven” but must be built “brick by brick” first by a few and ultimately by the many. Today, however, more of us note how it is again being dismantled brick by precious brick and we must put a stop to the madness.
- Through our prayerful faith and the hopeful good works of justice and charity, we shall together as lay partners have many a chance to cause the darkness of sin and the night of cynicism and unbelief to vanish before the Light of the Word. This was Saint Arnold’s prayer for us. Let that always be ours with him.
So, these are just some of the themes – there are many more but these are the essential ones we could discuss for our in-depth realization in the year of celebration 2025, the 150th of the SVD, and another Jubilee Year of the Universal Church. FINIS.