James Francis Cardinal Stafford was born in Baltimore, Maryland, July 26, 1932. In 1957 he was ordained a priest in the Baltimore diocese and rose to auxiliary bishop there in 1976. In 1982 he was became bishop of Memphis, Tennessee; four years later he was made Archbishop of Denver, Colorado. In 1996, Pope John Paul II appointed him as president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. This dicastery, according to the Vatican web site, “assists the Pope in all matters concerning the contribution the lay faithful make to the life and mission of the Church, whether as individuals or through the various forms of association that have arisen and constantly arise within the Church.” In 1998 Archbishop Stafford was elevated to cardinal.
In November 2002, Cardinal Stafford sat down with This Rock editor Tim Ryland and discussed the laity’s call to evangelization.
This Rock: Let’s talk about the biggest challenge that faces the laity in today’s Church.
Cardinal Stafford: There are so many different opportunities for the laity that I’m reluctant to say this is a number-one priority or that is a number-one challenge. Without question, the unrealized vision of the Second Vatican Council is one of the top priorities: the laity’s engagement of their faith in the world—that is, of making incarnate the eternal truths of God in everyday life. This means bringing to bear the person and the mission of Jesus on one’s everyday life of marriage, family, raising children; of life within the financial district and political parties. Catholic lay men and lay women must form their whole life with their Catholic faith, and that truly is one of the great challenges.
TR: How do you think the Council Fathers, if they could have an accurate snapshot of today’s Church, would view the changes that have occurred in terms of the involvement of the laity?
CS: There would be a great deal of rejoicing over the expression of lay life in the new communities, the new movements within the Church that have surfaced with the laity. The best fruit of the Second Vatican Council is being realized in the lay movements.
TR: When we say the laity has the duty to evangelize, I’m thinking specifically of a passage, for instance, in the Pope’s Lay Members of Christ’s Faithful People document. He talks about the parable of the workers who are hired at various times of the day and he writes, “It is not permissible for anyone to remain idle.” Or again, in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, it says the laity must make the Church “present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it is only through them that she can become salt of the earth” [33]. Yet when we publish articles pointing these things out, we receive disgruntled letters saying it’s not the laity’s responsibility because they’re too busy with the everyday trials of earning a living and raising a family and that, really, responsibility for evangelization lies with the clergy. How would you respond to that?
CS: It is precisely in the everyday challenges and suffering the laity undergo as parents, as working men and women, that they are to rediscover the wonder of Christ’s redemption. The greatest challenge facing the whole Church, not just the laity, is to recover a sense of wonder—as if we were perceiving the first day of creation or experiencing the wonder that led to Andrew and the other disciples responding to Jesus’ invitation, “Come and see,” when he invited them in Galilee to follow him. They remembered the precise time that happened. It is that kind of experience as adult men and women—the new Andrews, the new Mary Magdalenes, the new Mary[s] of Bethany, the new Johns—that needs to be found among the laity today. We need to recover the sense of wonder before creation and before redemption today as we experience it in the challenges of being parents, in the challenges of sickness, et cetera.
TR: It seems what you’re saying is that we experience Christ in life’s quotidian moments. But what specific actions should we take to evangelize? Or is it enough to evangelize by leading a good and holy life?
CS: The first challenge that we face is to contemplate the face of Christ concretely in the scriptures. The Bible was the creation of the Catholic Church, and to recapture sacred Scripture we should use the wonderful methodology of prayer that the monks outlined for us that is a four-rung ladder. In Latin it was lectio—that is, to read; meditatio, to meditate, to mull over, to look at other similar passages; then oratio, to pray about it and to make it one with your own life; and then, finally, to rest in it becomes contemplatio, or contemplation. Begin with that and then, having contemplated the face of Christ and been taken out of one’s self in wonder and love of Christ, we are called to mission in the world.
TR: I understand what you’re saying: You cannot be an effective evangelizer without being in union with Christ. But let’s say that you are in union with him—then where does your responsibility begin in terms of spreading the good news to non-Catholics? What concrete actions should we engage in?
CS: It is not simply a responsibility to evangelize—it is a natural outcome. Once one meets Christ, one wants to call others. As soon as Andrew met Jesus, immediately he went to his brother Peter and said, “Look we have discovered this extraordinary man. We believe that he is the Messiah. Come, come meet him.” And so Peter—Simon—went. In the gospel of John it says Jesus saw Simon and immediately said, “You are Peter,” and Peter was taken out of himself. The same with Nathaniel—Jesus saw him. That’s key: Jesus saw him first, and Nathaniel asked him, “How do you know these intimacies of my life?” Jesus said to him, “I saw you sitting resting under the tree, but more greater than this will happen to you, Nathaniel. You will see the angels coming forth and they will be going up and down the ladder on the last day”—that is, on the day of the crucifixion. So these disciples stayed with Jesus, and their stories eventually have come down to us in the New Testament so that others would have the same joy. What it’s all about is to share that happiness and joy with others—the joy of having the company of Jesus.
TR: Yes, but we have to look for our moments to share that joy. In other words, you wouldn’t, say, walk up to someone in the supermarket and grab him and say, “Come with me and see Jesus.” You would have to be a little more subtle than that.
CS: One can’t say that Jesus was subtle. Jesus is our model. He said, “Unless you leave mother and father and brother and sister and wife and children you are not worthy of me.”
TR: We should be that bold in evangelizing?
CS: Why not? Of course, we have to respect where the other person [to whom we are speaking] is. The challenge of whether we are subtle or unsubtle in approaching another in the name of Jesus is whether we ourselves are authentic disciples of Christ. That means living out the profound forgiveness that we are called to live. In Acts 2 and 4 are clear indications of what the Christian community is to be about—that is, we are to be of service to others. We are to share with others our financial resources and other physical resources. Of course, that begins in the parish.
TR: Speaking of the parish, I wanted to touch on the Vatican’s instruction regarding the collaboration of the non-ordained faithful (On Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priest, issued August 15, 1997). How should the Church go about enforcing an instruction that seems for the most part to have been ignored?
CS: Ignored in what sense?
TR: In the sense that regarding some of the abuses that it asks to be addressed—for instance, the proliferation of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist—it doesn’t seem to have had that much of a practical affect. I know of a parish—where by the way the pastor is a prayerful and thoroughly orthodox priest—every Sunday, every Mass there are ten extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist so that Communion under both species is available to every communicant. And my understanding is that this is a type of practice that the instruction was trying to reform. How does the Vatican, or how do we as lay people, go about trying to get the instruction followed?
CS: Much depends upon circumstances. The word extraordinary has to be applied to the local conditions. If the local conditions are such that you have large numbers of people every Sunday receiving the Eucharist and you have only one or two priests, and those priests are already saying perhaps three Masses on the weekend . . .
TR: Let’s say there are sufficient numbers of ordained priests and deacons to handle the number of communicants such that everyone can receive under one species fairly easily or quickly.
CS: I think the lay person, assessing the challenges that the priests and the ordained deacons within their parishes are facing, could call the pastor—should call the pastor—to that lay person’s understanding of the misapplication of that document. Do it respectfully, which means speaking to another adult person who is the ordained representative of Christ within the parish and pointing out to him the facts as you understand them—both the law and the circumstances within the particular parish—and ask the pastor how he is perceiving this.
TR: If the pastor disagrees [that there is a problem], do we then just resort to prayer? Where do we go from there?
CS: One could go to the chancery and—again with as much understanding both from a pastoral and theological view of what purpose of the document is—explain to the bishop why you are concerned, taking into account the particular circumstances of one’s own parish. Indicate to the bishop one’s judgment that it is a misapplication of the mind of the Church to allow extraordinary ministers to the extent that that particular parish does. But once the bishop responds I think one has to accept that in obedience. Even though one may disagree.
TR: When the Holy See issues a directive such as this, does it do so with the expectation that it will be followed? Or is it trying only to influence the dialogue within the Church?
CS: It’s clearly with the expectation it would be followed.
TR: And when it is not—given these steps you’ve outlined—in the lay person’s mind it has not been addressed, does one just deal with it in prayerful obedience? Is that what you would recommend?
CS: In prayerful obedience you continue to pray for a deeper understanding, within that local church, of the dignity of the ordained and dignity of the lay person and that dignity is manifested in the Eucharist in different ways.
TR: How do you think the laity’s involvement in the life of the Church will evolve in this new millennium? For instance, in liturgy—do you see any trends? The pendulum has swung, I think, a great deal in one direction following the Second Vatican Council, and there might have been some negative.aspects of that—for instance, those addressed by the directive we’ve been talking about. Do you think that the pendulum will swing back to more of a middle point in terms of the laity’s involvement in the liturgy?
CS: The great challenge that we face now is to recapture the meaning of ordained ministry—that is, of the priesthood within the Church. That requires pastoral decisions today to ensure that the liturgy manifests clearly those complementary but distinctive roles of the laity and of the priesthood. One of the initial challenges that the local churches face is that the bishop himself must recognize that the distinctive roles of the priest within the Eucharist are essential for the development of the priesthood in the new century, especially in terms of priestly vocations.
The dignity of the laity is to be sustained, but in the way that the Council speaks of it: in that redemptive love that is made present to us—truly present—in the Eucharist. Giving witness to the world outside of that self-emptying love of Jesus: That is their [the laity’s] dignity. The priest’s role is to sustain them, to support them, to encourage them, to gird them as Paul says with the armor of Christ as they’re moving out into the world.
The local bishop has to have clearly in his own mind the dignity of the priest that is represented by his role within the Eucharist and the dignity of the lay person that is represented in his or her role in the Eucharist. Those roles are very different. And only after that recognition is acknowledged and pastorally implemented can vocations to the priesthood arise within the local church because the laity will see that the role of the priest is to enhance their own evangelizing, missionary role in the world.