I know a few dangerous men. One of them dons an apron monthly and makes hundreds of pancakes. Another trains adolescent boys on how to use a compass and other skills to survive in the wilderness. Yet another organizes a weekly prayer schedule for vocations. 

All of them, you might have guessed, are lay members of my parish. Some are retired, and all are old enough to be grandfathers. But the longer I’m Catholic, the more I’ve realized how integral they are to the survival and perpetuation of Catholic life in America. Without the volunteer efforts of these prayerful, virtuous men, our parish would lose much—if not most—of the community and culture that binds it together across generations. As we contemplate this new year, it’s worth considering in what ways we contribute to the survival and growth of the Church.

The spiritual potency of the laity was something St. John Henry Newman understood in a way that few in the 19th century did, as Oxford scholar Paul Shrimpton expertly explains in his new book, “The Most Dangerous Man in England”: Newman & the Laity. That amusing honorific derives from a statement from papal chamberlain George Talbot, who wrote to the archbishop of Westminster: “Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.” That sentiment, as the history of our increasingly secularized world has demonstrated, was embarrassingly shortsighted.

When Newman became a Catholic in 1845, he encountered an English Catholic Church that was widely uninterested in the laity’s contributions to the Church. “Old Catholic” Charles Weld remarked: “There is no limit now to the clerical ambition in England to ignore the laity altogether with their services and their sufferings and to reduce their flocks to a condition utterly exposed to absolute authority.” As English clericalists circled the wagons and blocked lay participation in educational ventures, laymen, in turn, retaliated with exaggerated rhetoric of ecclesial independence and meddled in strictly ecclesiastical affairs. It was an unproductive cycle.

Newman had other ideas. He wrote:

I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.

He believed men could be independent and self-governed while still respecting ecclesiastical supremacy. This thinking motivated Newman’s most ambitious ventures, such as his Oratory in Birmingham and the Catholic University of Ireland (today University College Dublin).

In a letter to married friend John Hungerford Pollen, Newman praised the conjugal life’s “merit of the anxiety and toil, which the care of a family involves.” He told Pollen: “Your state is in fact one of ‘perfection,’ when compared with ours, and there is a day in prospect when the first shall be last, and the last first.” Such words could not have been uttered in public at the time. 

The English cardinal also believed the laity had a “special right to interfere in questions of devotion,” which certainly correlates well with perhaps the most miraculous event of the 19th century: the 1858 Marian apparition to the Occitan peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. And, in his Grammar of Assent, Newman notes that it was the laity, unlike a majority of the bishops, who remained faithful during the Arian controversy of the fourth century. 

Given all of this, many have argued that Newman’s writings anticipate the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on the role of the laity. Paul VI, for example, commented that “many of the problems which [Newman] treated with wisdom…were the subjects of the discussion and study of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, as for example… the emphasis on the role of the laity in the Church.” Benedict XVI similarly declared: “The Council’s appeal to the lay faithful to take up their baptismal sharing in Christ’s mission echoed the insights and teachings of John Henry Newman.” 

Sadly, however, the implementation of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the laity has been widely misinterpreted. Shrimpton, for example, writes of the 

pervasive, shrunken notion of the laity in our times, one that struggles to emerge from the sacristy and see beyond Eucharistic ministers and participation in parish councils, and that blinks in the face of the need of Christians to re-evangelize culture and the world of politics and the press. 

Robert Royal makes a similar point in his book A Deeper Vision, bemoaning the mistaken idea of “empowering” the laity through performing clerical tasks, serving as lectors, musicians, and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and acting on advisory boards for parishes and dioceses. Newman would bemoan ‘the mistaken idea of “empowering” the laity through performing clerical tasks, serving as lectors, musicians, and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and acting on advisory boards for parishes and dioceses.’Tweet This

This is not what Newman had in mind. Rather, the English convert hoped that, in wake of an increasingly secular West, the Catholic laity would, if properly encouraged and catechized, rise up to take on educational and evangelistic efforts once considered exclusive to the religious. And he saw this happening without recourse to large organizations. “All great things are done by concentration and individuality. They have been ruined by coalitions,” he asserted. “Deliverance is wrought, not by the many, but by the few, not by bodies, but by persons.” 

This ecclesial vision is why I view the men and women who run various lay ministries at my little Virginia parish as so impressive. Volunteerism and organizational membership is plummeting, not only in secular America but even among the religious. The loneliness and depression epidemic continues across generations, spurred by smartphone and social media addictions that require Herculean efforts to resist. Thus, every effort by individual Catholics to bring the faithful together in fellowship, prayer, and education create little oases of grace that curb the often soulless, atomized America we currently inhabit. “I am sure [the laity] may be made in this day the strength of the Church,” Newman predicted.

Some of our closest friends are people we met after Mass in the parish hall because a handful of lay organizations weekly volunteer to make coffee for hundreds of parishioners. My son, this past summer, enjoyed his first canoe trip because an enterprising parishioner founded his own Catholic version of the Boy Scouts exclusively for our parish several years ago. Men from my parish get together regularly for drinks and swap stories about how to best share the Catholic faith with neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers. All of this happens with the approval, but rarely the participation, of our priests, overwhelmed as they are with manifold other duties.

American society is in trouble not only because it is increasingly antagonistic toward the Catholic Faith but because it is antagonistic toward what makes us most human. Our nation is increasingly reliant not on ourselves or each other but on an anonymous commercial culture that engenders anxiety and groupthink. And yet the human soul ever yearns for friendship, for knowledge, for the transcendent. Thus the question, à la Newman, is: How are you dangerous?