The church engages the world in two ways: through the life of each individual believer and through the common action of believers working together. Every Christian life, and every choice in every Christian life, matters. There's no special headquarters staff that handles the action side of the Gospel. That task belongs to all of us. Baptism, for Catholics, does not simply wash away sin. It also incorporates the baptized person into a new life; and part of that new life is a mandate to act; to be God's agent in the world. Laypeople, clergy, and religious all have different tasks within the community of faith. Everybody, however, shares the basic mission: bringing Jesus Christ to the world, and the world to Jesus Christ.I am privileged to see this sort of Catholic witness every six months, although this is at a time when my Beyond Cana retreat team friends are stepping out of their daily lives. They willingly and gladly step up and make heroic sacrifices to serve married couples in our parish. Most have little ones and must arrange babysitting for an entire weekend. When they return home, they are plunged right back into the thick of daily life with no time for rest. Couples with babies as young as 1 month old have sacrificed mightily in order to give a talk or serve even a greater role ... not because they lightly offered, but because there was no one else to step in, because the need was great and they could help.
Laypeople have the special task of evangelizing the secular world. And this makes sense. Most Catholics--the vast majority--are laypeople. They have jobs, friends, and families. They can witness Jesus Christ on a daily basis, silently or out loud, directly or indirectly by their words and actions. If we look for opportunities to share our faith with others, God always provides them. This is why self-described Catholics who live so anonymously that no one knows about their faith, Catholics who fail to prove by their actions what they claim to believe with their tongue, aren't really living as "Catholics" at all.
It's also why asking Catholics to keep their faith out of public affairs amounts to telling them to be barren; to behave as if they were neutered. Nothing could be more alien to the meaning of baptism. The Christian idea of witness, which comes from the Greek word martyr, isn't limited to a bloody death in the arena for the faith. All Christians have the command to be a martyr in the public arena-to live a life of conscious witness wherever God places them, no matter how insignificant it seems and whether or not they ever see the results.
Tom and I were called to this ministry at a convenient time with our children in high school and now in college. We do not have to give what these couples give. However, we see it as a moment when we can witness a microcosm of what the Church does in the lives of others each and every day ... through the lives of laypeople.
