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Laity (OSV Encyc. 1997)
"Laos" means people. The laity are "prototype" members of the People of God; each one has been divinely chosen with a specific calling and mission. The proper place of the laity is in the world. What is asked of them there is to sanctify themselves through their ordinary work and life, so that their presence, friendship and example can lead others around them to God.
The first task for the lay Christian is to sanctify his or her ordinary secular life and work. This involves: a) work humanly well done (with effort, study, thoroughness, generosity, sacrifice); b) work done out of love for God (with purified intention, trying to overcome vanity, meanness, self-centered ambition)...
Along with the search for personal holiness, each lay person has the ecclesial right and duty to exercise the christian apostolate. Each one ought to feel the call and urge to bring Christ to those around him or her (c. 210). A Christian "who does not work at the growth of the body [of Christ] to the extent of his possibilities must be considered useless both to the Church and to himself" (AA, 2).
The apostolate specific to lay people, which all of them can do, is in their own secular walks of life: job, family, social or public activities. Certain aspects of Church life (various parish activities, for instance) call for lay participation; but this type of ecclesial-structural apostolate can ordinarily engage or involve few lay persons, and for even fewer still can it offer full-time outlets. The special apostolic vocation of lay people lies in their work, and in their social and family activities: "by reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will. They live in the world, that is, they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life which, as it were, constitute their very existence. There they are called by God that, being led by the spirit of the Gospel, they may contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven, by fulfilling their own particular duties" (LG 31).
Lay people are not "lesser" members of the Church than the clergy. The essential ecclesial rights and responsibilities of the Christian flow from Baptism, and these are possessed by laity and clergy in equal measure. Lay people therefore are not a "long arm" of the clergy, to carry out a christian infiltration of the world. They are in the world, and they have their own specific mission there: "the special duty to imbue and perfect the order of temporal affairs with the spirit of the Gospel" (c. 225; cf. LG 31; CCC 898; 909).