Lay Spirituality....

I can't believe it has been a whole week since the last post here on Catholic Laity. I have been reading the November issue of crisis Magazine. Their cover story, "Benedict and the 'True Time' of Vatican II", by Randy Boyagoda-unfortunately not available online, is worth the read.

Below is an excerpt from John Meehan's Two Towers (of course available from Requiem Press) on Lay Spirituality and Vatican II.

Genuine lay spirituality embraces all the activities of and integrates practically a lay person’s baptismal and human existence. Whether in marriage or in single, celibate life, even in the most ordinary conditions and commonplace situations of daily living, from regular labor to social and family engagements, there the laity are immersed in the practicality of lay spirituality. ....

The Fathers of Vatican Council II place lay spirituality in its proper setting. The setting in place has surpassed, sometimes with difficulty, the petty idea that a lay person has no specific spirituality; or, if he or she has one, it is limited to a number of external devotional practices that, more or less, are artificially imposed on their duties in life; or, more fallaciously, devotional practices replace the duties of his or her state in life; or, more destructively, he or she is taught to imitate clerical or consecrated religious spirituality. It certainly would have been of little use for the Council Fathers to proclaim the ecclesial right of lay people to their own spirituality, to allow the laity to follow their own spirituality within the unity of the Catholic Church, unless they were given adequate freedom to exercise that right fully. Within the basic unity of lay spirituality, then, the unique features of a particular lay person’s spirituality is not only to be recognized, it must be guarded.