In various ways I have been thinking about formation of the laity all my life. I have seven children and twenty grandchildren with whose religious formation I am very involved; I teach in a Department of Theology where we have almost 900 majors and minors. We attract them because we are very intentional about creating courses that lift up the beautiful ideals of our faith. And at the McGrath Institute for Church Life, we have programming designed to help local churches build credible cultures of formation in their parishes and schools. I have tried to distill these reflections from this ongoing experience.
In his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis talked about the “recrudescence” in the modern Church of various forms of dualism rejected by the ancient Church under the heading of “Gnosticism.” Gnosticism, Francis said, “refused to acknowledge the reality of the ‘salvation of the flesh.’” It was a “disembodied spirituality” (DN §87). It resurfaced in Jansenism and continues to resurface today in “a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God.”
This secular mentality creeps into the Church in the form of a programmatic mentality. Francis says there is “another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes.” “The result,” Francis says, “is often a Christianity stripped of the tender consolations of faith, the joy of serving others, the fervor of personal commitment to mission, the beauty of knowing Christ and the profound gratitude born of the friendship he offers and the ultimate meaning he gives to our lives. This too is the expression of an illusory and disembodied otherworldliness” (DN §88). Surely the ideals mentioned as “stripped off” here by these organizing activities are precisely what we would think of as goals of the formation of the laity.
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With thanks to Church Life Journal and John C. Cavadini, where this article originally appeared.
