Denver Catholic

13 DENVER CATHOLIC | JUNE-JULY 2024 our thoughts, desires and actions. Our mission requires conformity to Christ, allowing him to live and act through us, transforming us and those around us from within. No matter the details, it intends to draw us into Christ's gift of himself on the Cross, which, in turn, opens to us a transformed life in his Resurrection. The particularities of time and place differ, but the fundamental Chris- tian vocation remains the same: to be Christ in the world. If we remain focused on the immediate demands of the day and self-focused desires, we may miss them or realize them only in part. Throughout our lives, God keeps calling us to listen, find peace, receive healing and act as his grace wells within us and overflows. TH E FI R ST CH R I STI A N S A N D TH E I R M I S S I O N Our secular culture encourages us to think only of the clergy as driving the Church's mission, but from the beginning of the Church, the laity embodied and spread the Kingdom of God. The first community sold its property, laying it at the apostles' feet to give birth to the Church's charitable mission. The faith spread throughout the Mediterranean primarily through the friendship and witness of ordinary Christians, who clearly had found something worth living and dying for in a spiritually anemic culture. In the Middle Ages, faith shaped daily life, with the laity forming confraternities to build bonds rooted in prayer and service, which formed the backbone of medieval economics and education. Faith shaped public life, and everyone had their role, which they uncon- sciously fulfilled, in offering God a sacrifice of praise through daily prayer, work, service and festivity. TH E CH R I STI A N I N TH E WO R L D Only in our day, when we are told by society to keep our faith to ourselves, has the Church found it necessary to remind us that every Christian is called to holiness and mission. Because secular culture attempts to keep the Church out of public life, the lay faithful now bear a heightened role in bringing faith into the world. The Second Vatican Council reiterated that all the faithful are called to holiness in Christ, taking up his mission in their own way: "Now the laity are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth. Thus, every layman, in virtue of the very gifts bestowed upon him, is simultaneously a witness and a living instrument of the mission of the Church itself " (Lumen Gentium, 33). In a world without Christ, we must ⊲

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