Reply #12: An article she wrote in 2002

[SoCalDem]

http://sandbox.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2096&var_recherche=opus


The Hour of the Laity
by Mary Ann Glendon

Copyright (c) 2002 First Things (November 2002).

Throughout the twentieth century, leaders of the Catholic Church implored lay men and women with increasing urgency to be more active as Catholics in society, and-since Vatican II-to become more involved in the internal affairs of the Church. The earlier call found a warm response among Catholic Americans in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. But as Catholics gained in affluence and influence, the lay apostolate has suffered, while new opportunities for service in the institutional Church have gone begging. No wonder that John Paul II, with his history of close collaboration with lay men and women, often refers to the laity as a “sleeping giant.” For decades, the giant has seemed lost in the deep slumber of an adolescent. Now that the sleeper is beginning to stir-roused by media coverage of clerical sexual misconduct-it is beginning to look as though the Leviathan has the faith I.Q. of a pre-adolescent. Can this be the long-awaited “hour of the laity”?

The current resurgence of interest in lay organization suggests that the time is ripe to explore what has happened to American Catholics’ understanding of the lay vocation over the years during which they made unprecedented economic and social advances. Are the sixty-three million or so Catholics who comprise over a fifth of the U.S. population evangelizing the culture, as every Christian is called to do, or is the culture evangelizing them?

Since poets and novelists often help us to see things afresh, I propose to approach that question through a lens borrowed from an acute literary observer of the modern world. The protagonist of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller is arguably not a person, but a group-a nomadic tribe of rainforest-dwellers. To outsiders, they are known as the Machiguengas, but they call themselves the people-who-walk. The reader never meets the Machiguengas face to face; we only hear of them from a narrator who is trying to find out whether the tribe still exists. We learn that from time immemorial, the stories and traditions of the people-who-walk were remembered, enriched, and handed down by habladors-storytellers. These stories helped the tribe to maintain its identity-to keep on walking no matter what, through many changes and crises. But as the rainforest gave way to agriculture and industry, the Machiguengas scattered. For a time, their habladors traveled from one cluster of families to another and kept them bound together. The storytellers “were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings.” But anthropologists think that the storytellers eventually died out, that the Machiguengas were absorbed into cities and villages, and that their stories survive only as entertainment. The narrator suspects otherwise, and the drama of the novel comes from his effort to find out whether it is really true that a mysterious red-haired stranger has become the hablador of the Machiguengas so that they will not lose their stories and their sense of who they are.

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