decades in a variety of Muslim countries. I first met Natali the day after I graduated from college and thought of her as a sophisticated “older” woman. After all, she was married and in her thirties with both a house and a profession. Over the next two years, we became good friends — and then she left to live in the Middle East.
Every summer since, we have gotten together when she returns to the States for vacation. Natali downloads her year with me in long, rich conversations, telling amazing stories of God at work in and through her relationships in some of the most complex and difficult places on earth.
Today, Natali would strike a stranger as a quite ordinary, five-foot-nuthin’ wife, mother, and grandmother. And what a mistake that would be. She and her husband spent years equipping themselves to be “tent-making” missionaries — that is, Christians who (like St. Paul the tentmaker in Acts 18:3) work at a secular profession that enables them to live where no overt missionary work is possible so that some living witness to the love of Jesus Christ might be found there. She speaks the language fluently and has a real charism in this area. She frequently goes places where no Western women go and where she has developed many friendships. She is credible and approachable because she is a housewife and mother and so can connect with the other women who are also raising their families. With them, she not only shares goat and spiced coffee but the love of Jesus.
What she does is possible only because she is a layperson. No “official” missionary, no pastor, priest, or nun would be allowed into the country. No man would be allowed to enter the situations and relationships where she has been welcomed as a woman. My friend is supported in her efforts not only by her husband but also by her Protestant congregation back home and an international missionary organization.
When a lay Catholic embarks upon an apostolate outside the standard ecclesial structures in the United States, he or she usually has to carve out an individual, and often, quite lonely path. Lay Catholics serious about their secular mission usually have to be remarkably independent and persistent.
A few years ago, I taught a three-hour graduate class on the development of the Church’s understanding of the laity from 1497 (St. Catherine of Genoa and the Oratory of Divine Love) to 1957, the year of the Second World Congress on the Apostolate of the Laity. I was trying to help my students grasp the experience of the Church regarding the laity over those 460 years, because that experience had shaped the bishops attending the Second Vatican Council and, therefore, the debate over the vocation, mission, and charisms of the laity that took place in October 1963.
My students were surprised to learn that Pope Pius XII had been a great champion of the term “lay apostle.” In his address to the Second World Congress, Pope Pius XII referred to “lay apostles” twenty-three times. In fact, he observed that, in 1957, “‘lay apostle’ is one of the terms most widely used in discussing the activities of the Church.”12
Five years earlier, in 1952, Pius XII had spoken of his intense desire for huge numbers of both priestly and lay apostles:
We would love to have vast phalanxes of apostles rise up, like those that the Church knew at her origins … and next to the priests, let the laity speak, who have learned to penetrate the minds and hearts of their listeners with their word and love. Yes, bearers of life, penetrate, in every place — in factories, workshops, fields — wherever Christ has the right to enter. Offer yourselves, see yourselves among your own kind, in diverse centers of work, in the same houses, closely and tightly united, in one thought and desire only. And then open wide your arms to welcome all who come to you, anxious for a helpful and reassuring word in this atmosphere of darkness and discomfort.13
The Pope was calling the laity to be magnanimous. The virtue of magnanimity is the aspiration to do great things, to bear great fruit for God and his Kingdom. Pope Pius XII knew that St. Thomas Aquinas called magnanimity the “ornament of all the virtues.”14 The magnanimous person has the courage to seek out what is truly great and become worthy of it.
When I first encountered the idea that aspiring to this sort of holy greatness was considered to be a virtue by the Church, I had difficulty taking it in. Saints do great things for God. But aren’t ordinary lay Catholics supposed to be humble and not presumptuous, to minimize our abilities and significance, and avoid big expectations?
As we have observed hundreds of times in the Called & Gifted discernment process, even the idea of having charisms and being anointed for a mission unnerves many lay Catholics, especially those who are older. Believing that God might do something genuinely important and supernatural through them seems to lack humility. Over and over in the course of helping laypeople discern their charisms, they have told me of their deep belief in the virtue of living small and expecting little of God. As one particularly charming eighty-four-year-old Scot told me in a lilting brogue, “I couldn’t have charisms! It wouldn’t be humble!”
We must recognize that humility is magnanimity’s necessary partner, the attitude before God that recognizes and fully accepts our creaturehood and the immeasurable distance between the Creator and his creation. But in Catholic thought, humility never stands alone. Without magnanimity, we don’t see the whole of our dignity as human beings. Magnanimity and humility together enable us to keep our balance, to arrive at our proper worth before God, to persist in living our mission, and to persevere in seeking our eternal destiny despite apparent frustration and failure.
C.S. Lewis captures perfectly the significance of the responsibility that all disciples bear for one another’s development in this area:
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.15
1 “Margaret Haughery,” Wikipedia (online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Haughery, as of May 5, 2017).
2 A. D. Lindsay, “The Two Moralities,” quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers, The Whimsical Christian (New York: Collier, 1987), p. 131.
3 St. Pacian famously observed in a letter, “Christian is my name, but Catholic my surname”: “Letter 1: On the Catholic Name,” 7, in The Extant Works of St. Pacian, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church 17 (1842), pp. 317-327 (online at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/pacian_1_letter1.htm, as of May 5, 2017).
4 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 46.
5 Pope St. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis (“I Will Give You Shepherds”), 40 (online at http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031992_pastores-dabo-vobis.html, as of May 5, 2017).
6 America’s Changing Religious Landscape, Pew Research Center (May 12, 2015), pp. 35 and 41 (online at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/, as of May 5, 2017).
7 This is a very brief review. To learn more about the thresholds, please see chapters 5-8 of Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2012).
8 Adapted from “Five Thresholds of Postmodern Evangelism,” by Doug Schaupp, 1998 (online at http://www.illinoisgcf.org/execplanning/resources/FiveThresholdsPaper.pdf, as of May 5, 2017).
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