The Laity’s Individual Rights & Responsibilities Under Canon Law: Why WE Must Enact Laws that Enable the Laity to Enact Laws:

Under a section added to Canon Law in 1983 called “The People of God,” the rights of the Catholic laity are specified.

On their website, the Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) notes that those rights “include:

 Making known our needs, especially our spiritual needs, and our wishes to our Pastors (“Freedom of Speech,” Can. 212)
 Access to the Sacraments (Can. 213)
 Freely establishing and directing associations which service charitable or pious purposes or which foster the Christian vocation in the world (“Freedom of Asso- ciation” Can. 215)
 A Christian education (Can. 217)
 Knowledge of Christian teaching (Can. 229)”

We also have responsibilities. The VOTF describes those responsibilities and what obligations are evident in the context of clergy abuse:

“According to the 1983 code, we have the obligation ‘to work so that the divine message of salvation is made known and accepted by all persons everywhere in the world’ and ‘to imbue and perfect the order of temporal affairs with the spirit of the gospel.’

Those who are married are bound by ‘to work through marriage and the family to build up the people of God.’

Many of us have been drawn to the work of renewal by our concern for our children and our desire to share the gospel with them. When we cannot trust our pastors to keep them safe, when a Diocesan bishop cannot pass the background check necessary to work with young people in his own Diocese, we are clearly obligated to make our concerns known.

How do we respond if our rights to meet and to discuss our concerns with our pastors are denied?

The 1983 code as approved by the Commission authorized Episcopal Conferences to establish in their territory ‘administrative tribunals’ to deal with grievances, but these canons were “deleted” before the new code was promulgated.

How do we make violations of our rights known in the absence of any formal channel?

As lay Catholics, we have been conditioned by centuries of clericalism and are often reluctant to assert our rights even if we are aware of them. But if we do nothing in the face of church leaders who refuse to meet with us, or teach us in any meaningful way, or forbid us to meet
in our parishes or speak to one another across parish lines, or refuse access to the sacraments directly or indirectly by failing to consider new modes of ministry, we are yielding our rights without a struggle.

Let us resolve to speak openly when we experience abuse of power. Let us demand honest,
open and meaningful dialogue with our Pastors when they make apparently arbitrary and unjust decisions. Let us assert our right to free association with others to foster a Christian vocation in the third millennium. And let us reach out to others like the Leadership Conference of Women Religious as they struggle to define what a true Christian vocation and true Christian leadership look like in our time.”

The Millstone Mission agrees with the views expressed above by the VOTF. We believe that the solution lies in changing the way the Catholic Church operates and that Catholics must take action to make those changes happen. Words alone are not enough.

We must enact laws that empower the laity to enact laws.

We must enact laws that empower the laity to enact laws. Currently, we stand powerless. There is no process in place in which the laity can act collectively to enact change at a grass roots level. There are no lobbyists working on behalf of laity as there are in democratic countries. There are no elections where the laity gets to vote their voice and hold the Church accountable.

The system in place is a feudal one. It is one meant for an uneducated class of people who are satisfied with obeying without question—no matter if corruption is running rampantly before the world’s very eyes.

If we want things to change, there must be some process in place that enables the changes we seek to make happen, happen. Otherwise, it is all just pointless complaining, preaching to the choir, and wishful thinking.

So what actions do we take? That’s the question.