When Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, he hoped for a ?new Pentecost?. But that depends on the whole Church, the vast majority of whose members are lay people. It is on their task that the Professor of Theology at the Catholic University of Amercia focuses.

Where do you think the Church will be in 20 years? Hesitate before you answer. No one, attempting to assess the state of the Church upon the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, could have predicted what was to happen in the next ten years: the election of Pope John XXIII; his calling of the Second Vatican Council; the drive for renewal and reform that the council would embody; the dramatic changes that would accompany and follow the council, most visibly in the liturgy, and especially also in relations between Catholics and other Christians and in the approach to the modern world.

When we think about a Church for the twenty-first century, what enters our mind when we talk of ?Church?? The Pope? Hierarchy? Bishops? Priests? Do we respect the fact that 99 per cent of the Church are lay people? And what do we mean by ?Church?? There is not some universal Church, in the singular, apart from all the local churches.

I have found in teaching my students that when I get them to reflect on what comes spontaneously to their minds when they hear the word ?Church?, often they think, first, of ?the institutional Church?, which almost always seems to mean something apart from themselves. I sometimes give them a list of statements and ask them to mark them ?true? or ?false?. I start with ?The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ?; ?The Church is pro-life and therefore opposes abortion and the death penalty?. Then I add: ?The Church is patriarchal, racist, homophobic.? If, as is not rare, they say these last propositions are true, I then ask them whether it is true or false that ?We are the Church?. When they say yes, I ask them whether that means that ?we? are patriarchal, racist and homophobic. It is at this point that I usually hear them speak about ?the institutional Church?, as something other than themselves.

That is exactly what ?the Church? can never be.

An ancient definition of the Church is that it is the congregatio fidelium, the assembly of believers. That is the fundamental notion of the Church, identifying the social body to which all other designations apply: People of God, Body of Christ, Temple of the Spirit, and the rest. The Methodist New Testament scholar John Knox has written that the difference between the world as it was before Jesus lived and the world as it became after he lived is that now there is a group of people who believe in him and in what God did and is doing through him. They make a difference. The world is different if there is a genuine Church in it.

When I was teaching in the seminary in New York, the pastor of a Bronx parish arrived one day. When I asked how things were going, he explained that he had come away in order to prepare a difficult sermon he was about to deliver. A white teenager in his parish had just been murdered by a black teenager, the second such tragedy in recent months. Angry calls for revenge were being heard, including from Catholics, and he had to preach next day at the funeral.

Let us consider what is at stake in that homily. One possibility is for the priest to fan racial passions, giving the cycle of violence and death another turn. This could certainly happen; we have seen it in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East, in the former Yugoslavia, in Africa. The other possibility is for the priest, instead, to call the grieving congregation back from the temptation to angry revenge and to reinforce their Christian identity. He recalls the premature and unjust death of Jesus of Nazareth and his last words on the cross, which were a prayer for forgiveness. He reminds them that they will soon come up to receive Communion, the Body of Christ, that they will all, black and white, by that Communion in the eucharistic Body themselves become the Body of Christ which is the Church, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white. And he tells them that they betray what they are doing if, when they leave the church, their differences in race prove to be more important than their communion in Christ. Suppose, then, that this sermon and this eucharist prove the beginning of new efforts to promote racial harmony and justice in the Bronx.

This incident is a parable of the relation between Church and world. ?World? here means that section of the Bronx, ?Church? that congregation gathered for its distinctive celebration. If that world includes a genuine Church, the number of people in that world who subscribe to the retributive law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is smaller than it would otherwise be, and the number of people for whom forgiveness and reconciliation are primary, self-defining commandments is larger. That world is different because there is a genuine Church there. A liturgy, a homily, an act of faith, that make the Church become really the Church are also redemptive of the world.

And who are the actors, the primary protagonists, in this drama? The preacher, yes, the one who leads the worship of the community. But the primary protagonists are the lay Christian believers, all those who leave that funeral and then act as Christians should, out there in that world.

Over the past 2,000 years, the Christian Church has made a difference in the lives of billions of men and women. It has enabled them to live decent and even heroic lives in the face of the common challenges of birth, life, and death, the weight of sin and the freedom of grace. At its best it has made a difference also in the construction of our Western society and culture, in relations among ethnic groups and nations, in the definition of the family, in the defence of the dignity of the human person, in the rights of children and of women, in the care of the poor and sick, in relations between Church and State, in the arts, in the development of philosophy. There is very little in Western culture that is unaffected by Christianity.

On the other hand, no pope more than Pope John Paul II has ever admitted as clearly and as strongly that Christians have often failed to make the difference that the Gospel and grace ought to have enabled them to make. They have often used the great gifts received for evil purposes or used improper and even evil means to promote them, becoming thereby counter-witnesses to Christ. This heavy burden still prevents us from being listened to when we preach the Gospel. Christians have often not made a difference, and at times the difference they have made has not been Christian. It is these failures that in part explain why modernity has often defined itself apart from and even in opposition to Christianity. The engines of progress ? economics, politics, science, technology ? are now often conceived to operate autonomously, by some inexorable laws to which religion and morality are foreign. When our political or economic judgements are inspired by religious convictions, we often have to struggle to make ourselves heard and to be taken seriously. The separation of Church and State is often taken to mean the irrelevance of religion to society, as if those whose lives are guided by religion are the only ones who may not participate with equal right in the public discussions.

In the United States all the polls say that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God, have had religious experiences, pray regularly. But what might be called the dominant elite culture, reflected and expressed in the major newspapers and in the other media, is not at all representative of that wider popular culture. Here something like secularism tends to prevail, with religion often presented as a relic of the past or dismissed as inevitably fundamentalist or linked to right-wing politics, a view not all that different from Jesse Ventura?s notorious statement that institutional religion is for people who need crutches.

The decades since Vatican II have seen the emergence of a large variety of ministries and other opportunities for lay involvement in the Church. This development is important and gratefully to be received, but comparatively less interest has been shown in developing a theology of the lay Christian in the world. It is as if the council?s far more positive embrace of the world was interpreted to mean that the world could go its worldly way quite well on its own. Only lately has one begun to hear again of meetings to discuss the Christian in the marketplace, or in law, or in medicine. Only lately have Catholic colleges and universities returned to the question of their substantive identity, that is, what makes them Catholic in terms of programmes and curricula, areas of research they pursue, types of career they encourage. Slowly, faculties in economics, politics, law and the media, are asking what they should include in the courses and programmes they offer in order to justify and express their existence as Catholic institutions. If in these respects there are no differences, why bother to found and try to sustain Catholic colleges and universities?

Catholics have to do something about a political system that often seems corrupt, dependent on money and lacking in ideas and courage, and about an economic system that, both in the West and worldwide, is benefiting the few often at the expense of the many. They have to redress the revival of nationalism and ethnic particularism that threatens us, and a popular culture whose materialism and sensualism deaden the heart and shackle the mind. Nothing serious can be done in any one of those areas ? politics, economics, foreign policy, culture ? without the laity undertaking the task, there where the laity live, at the heart of modern life, working in its engine-rooms. It was Pius XII who said that the laity are the Church in the world. A pope, a bishop, a pastor will do what he can; but the Church that is supposed to make a difference in the world is composed, 99 per cent of it, of lay people and it will be through them above all that a difference will be made, if one is made at all.

The Catholic Church is a communion of a billion people, with its long history, its sacramental system, its detailed code of law. But at its heart is its Christian faith, its obligatory reference to Jesus Christ as a living and enlivening person, powerful among us who are his Body, able still to inspire, to comfort and to challenge. If we are a genuine Church, grateful and obedient to him, then he still makes a difference, he still is the redeemer, even of our world today.

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