By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).
“I believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” (CCC 914-945).
“What do you do for a living?” is an all-too-familiar question, common to most adult small talk. But once, when I answered someone that I worked for the Church, they asked, “Are you a preacher?” Heavens, no! Sadly, I must admit that apart from his out-of-the-ordinary follow-up question, I cannot recall any other details about that conversation. However, it made me question: Does my life need to look nearly the same as a Catholic priest’s in order to be holy?
There’s a temptation to assume that the Christian life is either one extreme or the other. You’re pious or you’re not. You go to daily Mass or only once a week. You pray every night, or you don’t pray often enough. Your life resembles a priest’s, or you don’t pass the test of “looking” like a Christian. But all of these are false dichotomies! While the Catechism does say, “Christ proposes the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity and obedience), in their great variety to every disciple” (CCC 915), it would be a mistake to assume that the common priesthood shared by the lay faithful needs to look identical to that of the ordained priesthood of the clergy. As the Catechism also says, “Lay people share in Christ’s priesthood: ever more united with him, they exhibit the grace of Baptism and Confirmation in all dimensions of their personal, family, social, and ecclesial lives, and so fulfill the call to holiness addressed to all the baptized” (CCC 941). Likewise, as part of their prophetic mission, lay people “are called … to be witnesses to Christ in all circumstances” (CCC 942). It must be said that while all disciples of Jesus are called to live out poverty, chastity and obedience, they are to do so, each according to their state of life. But what does this really look like?
Simply put, a lay person’s living out the counsel of poverty does not mean total rejection of money or possessions, but virtuous stewardship and detachment from one’s material wealth. Similarly, chastity does not necessarily mean celibacy, but it always means the proper stewardship of one’s god-given gift of sexuality. Our obedience is to Mother Church and to the commandments of Christ given to us through scripture and tradition. On a deeper level, Vatican II’s teaching clearly states, “For this reason the laity, dedicated to Christ and anointed by the Holy Spirit, are marvelously called and wonderfully prepared so that ever more abundant fruits of the Spirit may be produced in them. For all their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne — all these become spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Together with the offering of the Lord’s body, they are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, as those everywhere who adore in holy activity, the laity consecrate the world itself to God” (Lumen Gentium 34).
In a homily given while visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1979, John Paul II makes this clearer, “…The laity are the most immediate protagonists of the renewal of men and of things. With their active presence as believers, they work at the progressive consecration of the world to God. This presence … has been called by God to be in permanent communion with the world in order to be in it the leaven that transforms it from within.” Like how yeast leavens dough to make it rise, evangelization and the Christian life aren’t usually flashy. Neither is the process of our ongoing conversion, where God continues to work on us in the mundanity of life, and even while we sleep. The difference in the Christian life lies in both the celebration of the extraordinary moments, rare as they may be, and all the while intentionally consecrating the ordinary to God to bring about His kingdom on Earth.