The word «lay» is an old term that the Church uses to designate the people who are not part of the «clergy». On a world scale, the catholic clergy adds up to about 413 000 members, while the official number of lay people (including a non-practicing majority) amounts more or less to 1 195 600 000.

And so, the clergy forms about 0.0003% of the Catholic Church, and the lay people 99.9997%. We can say that it is within a hair's breath that the Church be lay from end to end

Jesus himself was not part of the clergy; besides, he was not a priest. In our language, he was stricly speaking a «lay» person (Hebrews 8:4). Even though after his death, the faith of the faithful proclaimed him a priest to serve as a bridge between God and the human beings, Jesus, during his life on earth, was always a lay person. This did not stop him from being a religious person.

But a religious person belonging to what religion?

The religion of the lay Jesus was that of his Jewish ancestors as it was understood by the great majority of the religious among his people. Still, within that religion, Jesus looks like a revolutionary. He was saying and doing surprising things.

The God of the ancestors, he would say, yes, but not exactly as you see it. The religion inherited from the wise and the saints, yes, but not exactly as you understand it.

God has no owner. Nobody has the right to trap him in the concepts and sayings of another era. We cannot keep him behind bars in an iron cage of which the keys would be confided for ever to a caste of individuals anointed to be its exclusive interpreters and its infallible spoke persons.

The living God is today's God for the human beings of today. He does not enlighten first by the laws and the traditions of the past, be holy as they can be, but by his Spirit whom we cannot put in shackles. He has nothing of a fixed object the one Himself who is the creative force of the world. He is always into action. He blows in the direction of the four corners of the universe.

The Spirit of God does not carry any standard and does not obey to any norm of a particular religion nor of any sect. He is like the wind. He does not know any barrier nor any frontier (John 3 :8).

That Spirit, God spreads Him generously, joyfully and freely over all those who are hungry and thirsty for a life that would fill them to the brim (Joël 3:1; Acts 2:14-17; Luke 11:13).

The disturbing calling into question coming from the lay Jesus so exasperated the «owners» of religion (that is, the clergy of the times) that they rapidly got rid of him by having him crucified.

We also, in the footsteps of Jesus, we should distinguish between religion and religion, between church and church.

There is a church which makes that distinction.

In the footsteps of the lay Jesus and in the great circle of "laicity" of modern society, that church is putting herself at the service of the freedom of human beings. It does not accept anymore any separation between the sacred and the profane, between clerics and non-clerics, christians and pagans, men and women.

Not only does that church is not afraid of reconciling the great values of the modern world with the gospel, but, on the contrary, stimulated by them, it goes back to the unbelievable spirit of freedom of Jesus and to the most beautiful audaciousness of the first witnesses of the Gospel.

But then, that church is neither heretical nor schismatic. She is truly «one, holy, catholic and apostolic» and...LAY!

Priests, bishops, religious men and women are part of that community of lay people in which they render precise services without taking control of it.

Modern "laicity" does not, as such, oppose itself to the gospel. It can look at things with a critical eye, but generally speaking, it does not despise the glorious testimony of hundreds of thousands of church men and women who, out of love for the gospel and for centuries carried on their shoulders the sufferings of the world. What it rejects is clericalism.

It strongly opposes, and not without reason, the ecclesiastical system that, by excessively hardening itself behind the gospel, has developed an immense power that is absolutely foreign to the gospel itself.

Convinced that it has been guided by the hand of God, that power has not spare anything during the centuries to impose its authority all over society. By hiding itself behind a supposedly divine right, it never found it difficult to dispose of the most elementary freedoms of the individual and of the human community.

In reaction to that threat of religion control over all the aspects of human life, the modern lay world refuses that the government of peoples be subjugated to the dogmas of all kinds of ayatollahs, including, of course, the catholic ayatollahs...because the modern world is first and above all itself a human community that have things in hand and accept full responsibility for all that concerns it.

Even though many of its partisans are not believers, the "laicity" of the modern world does not so much oppose itself to God as to all which minimizes society, infantilizes it and makes it dependent on absolutes that endanger the exercise of one's freedom and of one's rights.

The "laicity" of the modern world is not a menace against God, she is the mother of civil liberties and of that which first and foremost is the freedom of religion and the freedom of conscience.

In reality, that "laicity" which cannot be identified to any religion neither to any credo, renders a great service to the Christians, since the glory of God of that Jesus to whom the Christians have the mission to give testimony is comparable to the glory of any good father or mother on this earth. After suffering with their children so that they emancipate themselves and free themselves, the greatest pride of the parents is finally to see their children stand on their own two feet.

To gain one's freedom from God, to free oneself from God, is it not a huge blasphemy? But of course not, since basically we cannot all the same free ourselves from liberty...Yet, God is Freedom, and man and woman are his image.

The people who believe in a God, intelligent and loving source of all that exists, know very well that that God, contrary to what we may think, believes in the human being. That God has a profound trust in the creatures of flesh and blood that we are, in spite of the fact that very often we reject and crucify life.

The believers in that God know that humanity is not only run through by forces of destruction, but also by great energies of wisdom and of life. They know that the world of humans has all that is needed to manage among its contradictions and that one day it will come out of it victorious. No doubt it will come out of it wounded, but also bursting with life.

Otherwise, how could they still believe that the Spirit of God fills up the universe and that he himself gives breath to the great project of humanity?...

It is here that the lay society, without knowing it, rejoins the lay Jesus, he who never admitted that, in the name of God or of laws supposedly divine, the simplest of mortals be persecuted, discriminated, oppressed, marginalized or abandoned... The lay Jesus who, for having emancipated so many poor people who bent beneath the yoke that was imposed upon them by the religious world, was outrageously killed no more no less by...religion!...

Thanks to God, there exist actually in the catholic church currents which stand in that «lay» line according to the spirit of Jesus...and this, even under the nose of honorable «fathers» who, in high places, rip their garments, multiply warnings and send to limbo those impudent individuals who have their power grow fainter

Happily, there are also in the church other fathers who bless that seed of infidels. Bravery is not their forte. Still, when the winds will favor them, they will come into the open...

One thing is certain : one day will come when we will hear again a church, freed from its shackles, proclaim over all the rooftops and in a credible way that « God loves so much our real world – with its errors, its dreams, its audaciousness and its greatness -,he gives it his son, not to condemn that world, but so that through him that world finds life (John 3:16-17) and finds it in abundance (John 10:10).

It is that Word that modern world wants to hear: a true and loving word that liberates and that can be a source of constant rebirth.

Eloy Roy

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages