Religion: Out Loud

• Share

Making and keeping the world Christian was once largely the job of priests. In the past century the Roman Catholic Church, for one, came to realize that these shock troops were not enough. Since Pius IX (1846-78), all the Popes have urged the rank & file of Catholics to the front lines—through Catholic Action, defined as "lay participation in the apostolate of the hierarchy." Last week the Church's outstanding lay expert on Catholic Action, Paul McGuire of Adelaide, Australia, was in the U. S. on a coast-to-coast lecture tour, to expound the lay apostolate under the auspices of the Knights of Columbus—itself an excellent example of Catholic Action.

Selected by the Catholic Book Club as its January choice was A Guide to Catholic Action ($2), edited by Paul McGuire and Rev. John Fitzsimons of Liverpool. Of Layman McGuire, a writer of detective stories on the side (Funeral in Eden), his publishers, Sheed & Ward, say: "There is nothing quite like him for stirring a kind of steady enthusiasm for Being Catholic Out Loud." Some of the Guide's pointers for forming Catholic Action groups:
> "The most suitable number for a group is usually about twelve. . . . They are to have a corporate life. They must pray together, study together, act together."
> Each group should elect a Leader, a secretary, a treasurer. "There was a purse-keeper amongst the twelve [Apostles]. For the purse-keeper perhaps there had better be special prayers."
> A group should arrange early to hear from a priest about the Doctrine of the Mystical Body—which holds that with Christ as the Head, all Christians are members of His mystical body, and of one another.
> It takes about three years to build an efficient Catholic Action unit.