Responsibility For The Christian Mission
Since Christians are other "Christs", they are in a sense co-redeemers with him, and have, so to speak, the same role as Jesus Christ—to save other men, and make them children of God. "As members, they share a common dignity from their rebirth in Christ, they have the same filial grace and the same vocation to perfection... Because of the one dignity flowing from Baptism, each member of the lay faithful, together with ordained ministers and men and women religious, shares responsibility for the Church's mission."
Because the laity—that is, ordinary Christians (not priests or consecrated religious) -- are children of God, they have a specific role to play in the world: "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. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer. The initiative of lay Christians is necessary especially when the matter involves discovering or inventing the means for permeating social, political, and economic realities with the demands of Christian doctrine and life. This initiative is a normal element of the life of the Church: Lay believers are in the front line of Church life; for them the Church is the animating principle of human society. Therefore, they in particular ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church." (CCC 898-99)
Read more about this topic: Divine Filiation
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