Confident and Competent: A Challenge for the Lay Church

A generation of lay leadership may have been lost because of the Catholic church's preoccupation with internal affairs and a devaluation of the laity's social responsibility. This was the gist of "A Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern," a statement issued on the third Sunday of Advent, 1977, by a group of Chicago area Catholics and directed to the church in the United States. The statement pointed to three post-Vatican II developments among American Catholics that in their opinion had led to the devaluation of the laity's social responsibility: The first was the movement to involve laypersons in the church's official ministries with decreasing emphasis on the secular mission of the laity; the second, the tendency of some members of the clergy to pre-empt the layperson's responsibility for social reform; the third, a trend of diminishing interest in Christian social thought as the mediating ground between the gospel and specific political and economic issues. This book is, in summary, an extended commentary and elaboration on the main themes of the Chicago Declaration. The authors - both Easterners who have faced the culture shock of becoming naturalized citizens of Chicago - did not sign the Declaration and were not involved in the consultative process that led to its publication in 1977. In the main, however, they agree with its basic thrust and, on the basis of their own experience and in the light of post-1977 developments in the church, have attempted here to flesh the statement out, so to speak, and to bring it up-to-date.