The Evolution of the Theology of the Laity in the Work of Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx: Implications for Co-responsibility in a Synodal Church

The first draft of the pre-conciliar De Ecclesia stressed the mutual relations between the laity and the ordained rather than their differences, while asserting the role of the laity in the Church and world in a chapter drafted by the Louvain peritus Gérard Philips. During the last revision of the chapter on the laity in Lumen gentium, the suggestion of Belgian Cardinal Suenens was accepted to grant the laity the possibility of assuming tasks of a spiritual nature in the Church. Some of these ideas were also found in publications on this theme that four Catholic theologians and Council periti – Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and Edward Schillebeeckx – had written since the 1959 announcement of the Council. \nThe theologies on the laity of Congar, Rahner, and Schillebeeckx definitely changed in this period. By 1962, Schillebeeckx had given up his initial conviction of a distinct mission of the laity and the ordained. Until 1966, Rahner defended his thesis of the unique secular orientation of the laity. Congar discovered only in 1971 that he had denied the laity any role at the level of the structure of the Church. From his 1962 book Structures of the Church forward, Küng defended the universal priesthood of all believers as a whole from the basic structure of the Church. Finally, following the synthesis report A Synodal Church in Mission of the first session of the Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops from start to finish, I will highlight lines of thought that can be traced to the works of Congar, Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and Küng.