Peace be to you.

The greatest untapped reservoir of spiritual power is to be found in the Christian laity.

It is mainly through the laity that the church enters into the world.

Lay men and lay women are the meeting place of the Christian and the non-Christian.

They are the bond between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the sacred.

The laity fulfills his Christian vocation in the world.

When he comes to church, he receives life and truth and grace.

He receives them for service.

Service in the world.

And in the world, this Christian truth and grace and life of His

comes into an encounter with other men who may lack it, or certainly its richness.

A Christian vocation is the exercise of the ordinary manifestations of life in such a way that the glory of God is made manifest.

There is, of course, a twofold danger.

One is that on the one hand the Christian laity may form a kind of a ghetto.

That is to say, consider their religious activities to be confined only within the church

and keeping the commandments.

Then Christians huddled together in the kind of an igloo, completely divorcing faith in action.

The other extreme would be to become so worldly that they can do nothing with it.

Now the result of this separation is that, I mean the separation of religion and the world, is that

culture has emancipated itself from Christ and become demonic.

The laity are to be effective, they have to do three things.

First of all, they have to be conscious of the fact that they are members of the people

...