News- Latin America

The Laity Comes to Life

All across Latin America, lay movements are springing up, breathing new life into the work of the Church.

By Rosanna Goni

Jesus Magana could not have been happier than he was on that sunny afternoon, as he stood outside the Colombian capitol building in Bogota. A tall Mexican-born man in his early 30s, Jesus--the leader of VIVE, the most influential pro-life movement in Colombia--was celebrating one of his group's most important victories: a resounding success in beating back a new attempt to legalize abortion in Colombia.

Thanks to VIVE and other local Catholic lay groups, Piedad Cordoba, a legislator from the Liberal Party, was unable to fulfill the promise she had made months ago during the UN conference on Women in Beijing. At that time, speaking to her feminist colleagues from around the world, she boasted that she would "twist the priestly arm and achieve free and legal abortion in Colombia."

But back at home, Cordoba never really saw a "priestly arm" in her political opposition. Instead, she and her project were overrun by a group of lively, attractive young lay people. That network of the laity showed such consistency in putting pro-life arguments before the legislative hearings, and such dedication in rallying political opposition, that Cordoba saw she could not succeed. Eventually she was forced to withdraw her proposed new legislation, in order to avoid a humiliating defeat.

Jesus and VIVE are becoming less the exception and more the rule in Latin American political life. "There is no doubt that lay people are displaying a new, unfamiliar vitality which is reinvigorating Catholic life," says Archbishop Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, the president of

the Latin American Bishops' Council (CELAM) and a strong supporter of the many new lay groups and movements that are currently sprouting throughout Latin America. According to Archbishop Rodriguez, the lay awakening in the region "comes at a moment when it is certainly needed, because most of the challenges the Church is facing here come in circumstances in which lay people, not priests, are the main actors." So the sudden rise of so many lay movements is a double blessing, he says; "There is no doubt that

this is a gift of the Spirit for us."

Pedro Morande, a Chilean Catholic sociologist and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, says that this phenomeno--the rise of so many lay organizations--has no precedents in the history of Latin American Catholicism. "The life of the Church on this continent traditionally has pivoted around priestly and religious life--not only in term of hierarchy, which is natural in our Church, but in terms of initiatives," he says. In fact, Morande recalls the days, as recent as the late 19th century, when a Latin American bishop described the laity's role in the Church as "sitting during the sermon, kneeling during the consecration, and putting his hand into his pocket during the collection." Another bishop was accustomed to saying that the laity's role was "to hunt and to have children." Morande admits that such expressions were meant as jokes; nevertheless, he insists, they did convey a common frame of mind. And that perspective is now clearly changing.

According to Archbishop Rodriguez, "One sign that this process is a gift of God is the fact that, without any previous coordination, lay groups and movements are flourishing almost at the same time, but in different places and with different tasks."

The President of CELAM quotes the case of Semper Fidelis in Mexico. Semper Fidelis, a lay organization closely associated with the Legionaries of Christ, dramatically changed the usual way of responding to the challenge posed by the fundamentalist Protestant proselytism. The group insisted that insofar as the Church was losing members to these aggressive new preachers, the root of the problem lay not in the shortage of priests, but rather primarily in the lack of involvement among the Catholic laity. That lackadaisical attitude, Semper Fidelis reasoned, made it easy for fundamentalist preachers to capture the interest of the public; too many people had simply never before encountered signs of enthusiasm for the Christian faith.

As an outgrowth of that vision, Semper Fidelis launched a campaign aimed at transforming the average middle-class household into an efficient instrument of evangelizations--and thus a front line of defense for the Church. In fact, it is the individual households to which the fundamentalist missionaries appeal, traveling from door to door late in the morning, when women are likely to be at home alone with their children. Once the group began providing families with some basic catechetical formation, and equipping households with simple materials such as images of the Virgin Mary and posters that proclaimed "I am a Catholic," these homes became formidable walls to stop the fundamentalist onslaught.

But Semper Fidelis did not want to view its mission in a strictly defensivs light. Recognizing the importance of the full-time commitment undertaken by fundamentalist missionaries, they have asked for the support of Catholic entrepreneurs who might be able to give some of their workers a month-long "apostolic vacation" at full salary. After a crush course in cathechesis and Bible study, these workers dedicate eight to ten hours every day to going door to door, just like the Protestants, encouraging Catholics to make their own new religious commitment. Because this approach only requires a small number of priests to provide counseling and sacramental attention, the scheme has been quite successful in Mexico City. Now other Mexican bishops are asking Semper Fidelis to move into their dioceses.

Other lay initiatives, dedicated to specific social purposes, have been springing up simultaneously in countries all through the region. In Honduras the Life and Love Foundation attends to the needs of HIV-positive children; the Casa Don Orione" shelters the homeless in Argentina, where unemployment is endemicl; the Catholic Union of Entrepreneurs aims to apply Catholic social doctrine to the practical workings of the Mexican economy.

But most of strength that can be found in the Catholic lay revival in Latin America is expressed through lay spiritual movements, which according to Professor Morande, "provide a total environment in which lay people realize that daily life can become Christian life, thus overcoming the usual tension between being a Catholic at home or in the parish and being a 'common citizen' outside." In fact, the names of groups and movements such as Comunion y Liberacion, the charismatic renewal, Schonstatt, Focolares, and Movimiento de Vida Cristiana have begun to crop up more and more frequently in Catholic discussions in Latin America. And of course that is no accident, since these movements are spreading from country to country and attracting a sizeable number of young people.

Early in the 1980s, some bishops were hesitant in their response to lay movements, because they saw in them a potential for competition with parish life and a menace to the usual Church structures. But according to Archbishop Rodriguez, "in the 1990s experience has shown that lay movements often provide an acceptable alternative to parishes, but also have helped a great deal in bringing life and renewal to many of those parishes."

At the same time, lay movements have become a rich source for priestly vocations in a region marked by a dramatic priest shortage. In fact, Central America has registered a 40 percent increase in priestly vocation in the last decade; while in South America that figure is even higher, at 60 percent. Archbishop Rodriguez believes that his phenomenon, which also has no precedent in Latin American Church history, "is certainly related somehow with the kind of the deep Christian commitment movements promote among young people."

Moreover, bishops have discovered that among the people who will become their most loyal and hard-working helpers can often be found among the lay movements. As early as 1985, the Socialist Italian magazine Panorama described Catholic lay movements in the region as "Wojtila's extremely loyal army in Latin America."

No wonder, then, that in a reference to lay movements and general, and to the Peruvian-based Movimiento de Vida Cristiana in particular, Archbishop Francis Stafford--the former Archbishop of Denver and current head of the Pontifical Council for the Laity--said: "if this is the kind of lay witness that Latin American Catholics are offering to the world, then praise be to God, because the future of the Church is in good, loyal hands."