Our Mission as The Laity is to engage with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, with our priests, religious and seminarians, with the staff and volunteers within the Church, and indeed with our fellow laity, to encourage all to embrace the universal and immutable teachings of the Catholic Church. Most of all, our mission is to offer our prayers and support to enable everyone to some day experience together the beatific vision in Heaven. This is what we are called to do as Christians, as the followers of Christ.
We are called to shine a light on any liturgical, financial, sexual and doctrinal abuse that we witness in our parishes in the Archdiocese of Hartford. As members of this archdiocese our humble goal is to speak the truth to every abuse we witness and to help rectify it in as charitable a way as possible, and as quickly as possible.
As Catholics, we believe that every person is created in God’s image, and that every person is entitled by virtue of being a child of God to be treated with compassion, dignity and respect. We are, each and every one of us, called to live our lives in chastity according to our station in life.
We have been given a great gift, a pearl of great price (Mt. 13:45-46), a gift so great and precious that we want nothing more than to share this gift with others; indeed, we are called by this tremendous gift to “go … and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19).
We are also called to live out our faith in private and in public, in charity. Charity – which the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines as “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God“(CCC 1822) – means that we cannot turn a blind eye to what the Catholic Church teaches is objectively sinful, particularly when that sin is embraced by members of our own community (Mt. 18-15-17). “Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love.” CCC 1827.
As disciples of Christ, charity requires us to preach the Truth, even in the face of a social order that is hostile to the Truth. We pray as Jesus prayed to the Father (John 17:13-19):
But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely. I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.