The Slow Recognition of a Vocation Outside the Clergy

Laity comes from the Greek laos, simply the people, and the earliest Christian use of it was not flattering: it named those who were not clergy, defined by an absence rather than by anything of their own. Even so, the distinction was already assumed by the late first century, when the letter known as 1 Clement, addressed from Rome to Corinth, uses lay in exactly this negative sense to argue that lay believers should not perform priestly functions reserved to the ordained. For most of the medieval period the laity's religious life ran through structures that let them participate without ordination: confraternities organizing charity and burial, pilgrimage, and from the thirteenth century the mendicant orders' third orders, lay associations attached to the Franciscans and Dominicans that let married people outside a monastery live under a version of the rule.

The word's meaning did not fundamentally shift until the twentieth century, when the Second Vatican Council's 1964 constitution Lumen Gentium described holiness itself as a universal call rather than a clerical specialty, giving the laity a positive theological description for the first time rather than defining them only by what they were not. Protestant traditions had already gone further in practice, since the Reformation's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers denied that ordination created a separate spiritual class at all.