"The king's good servant, but God's first"

Here you will find a summary of the homily that Pope Francis gave the employees of the Vatican Bank on the danger of the Church-as-babysitter:

http://www.johnthavis.com/pope-francis-on-the-risk-of-a-babysitter-church#.UXAmcWS9Kc1

Francis is talking about the danger of going through the motions, getting through Confirmation and then being complacent. "I have my identity card all right. And now, go to sleep quietly, you are a Christian." At the end of the piece, there is a quote from an interview that Pope Francis gave when he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires:

“We priests tend to clericalize the laity.We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own disease.And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path. We cannot fall into that trap —it is a sinful complicity.”

I think there is a definite tendency, a definite temptation, to think that "participation" for the laity consists entirely of things that they can do within the Parish Church. Retreats, Eucharistic Ministry, Discussion groups, etc. As if being Christian can be safely quarantined between the four walls of the Church building.

But this is wrong. It's not what the gospels say, and it's not what Vatican II describes as the role of the laity. We are called to be the light of the world, and we shouldn't be putting that light under the bushel basket of a building. The models for the laity should be people like Dorothy Day, who took took no vows, but lived her life in voluntary poverty, dedicated it to the poor, and proclaimed Jesus wherever she went. Similarly, St. Thomas More was the "King's good servant, but God's first" and he payed the ultimate price for his witness. This is much harder than simply being a lector or Eucharistic minister, byt it is what we are called to as Christians.