June 1, 2025 - Pator Message
June 7, 2025JUBILEE 2025 LUMEN GENTIM (cont.)
JUBILEE 2025
LUMEN GENTIM (cont.)
“I urge you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. For by the grace given to me I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than one ought to think, but to think soberly, each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned. For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:1-6).
Lumen Gentium’s proclamation of the universal priesthood of all Christians, whether that of the baptized or of the ordained, is part of the universal call to holiness. Holiness is nothing other than God-likeness, or beatitude, and to be like God means to be like Christ, who reveals God fully to us and gives us the gift of God’s Spirit to enable us to live in holiness. When we are baptized, we are united with Christ and made into his likeness by the Holy Spirit, which we symbolize during the baptismal liturgy by anointing the person with Sacred Chrism. As Christ was anointed by the Spirit at his baptism as priest, prophet, and king, so we too share in those sacred offices, each in ways proper to God’s call for us. By living out our divine vocations with the inspiration and grace of the Holy Spirit, we become more like Christ and grow in holiness.
The universal call to holiness is not new. It is deeply rooted in Scripture and Tradition, but Lumen Gentium’s renewal of that call in the modern world struck many Catholics as revolutionary. Lay people certainly understood the call to moral uprightness and support for the Church and by that, with the help of a lot of grace from God, they hoped to find their way to heaven, or at least avoid hell. But they never thought of themselves as holy, or even imagined it as a goal for their lives. Holiness was for the clergy and religious, who already had one foot in heaven, not for lay people who were firmly grounded in the world. They didn’t realize that it is precisely through living their faith in the world that they attain holiness. It is worth quoting Lumen Gentium on this subject at length: “What specifically characterizes the laity is their secular nature…They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope and charity. Therefore, since they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs it is their special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs in such a way that they may come into being and then continually increase according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer” (31).
The special gift and vocation of the laity and their path to holiness is not to avoid the world or hold themselves above it, but to go right through it, shining the light of Christ they have received in Baptism into every corner and facet of it in all the ways only lay people can. This is also the special challenge of the laity, because they are called to go into the lion’s den that is a world still under the power of the Enemy (1 John 5:19). That is why they need the help and support of the clergy and the witness of the religious, all of us working and growing in holiness together, each in our own way, on our way through this world to the kingdom, where our union with God will be perfect.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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