It is obviously not enough to seek out and raise up apostles. They always have to be trained. I have never found a ready-made militant. What is more, they must be trained ‘with what is available’, with people as they are; just as we were trained, just as Christ trained his own apostolic companions.
The Church prescribes six years of formation for those who intend to go into the priesthood before sending them into the world to evangelize. Can we be irresponsible enough to think that the layman’ can be sent into the world—an indifferent, often hostile, sometimes corrupt and increasingly pagan world—without a deep and solid formation? I am convinced that without this he will find it impossible to face and cope with the situations that he will meet in non-Christian environments.
He needs this a fortiori if the Church demands that he transform a paganized world, sanctifying and consecrating it for the glory of God. After all, this is the layman’s explicit mission, and how can we expect him to fulfil it if he is not prepared for it?
In just the same way that there can be no priest without a seminary, no religious without a novitiate, no doctor without a university, and no craftsman without a technical school, there can be no lay apostle without a specific formation. We need a kind of lay seminary thhose methods are perfectly adapted to life if we want to make Christians capable of saving the world. I want to make it quite clear that I am not talking about forming specialists in the apostolate, in the sense of ‘full-time’ leaders, or in the way that UNESCO trains experts in basic education. No, I am talking here about all lay apostles, whoever they may be, who are working quite simply as witnesses in the limited sector of human life in which the Lord has placed them; those who are carrying out in their everyday life what today we usually call the Tbasic’ apostolate; those of whom people say ‘they haven’t got the time’ and who must learn to transform their whole time into the most fruitful of apostolates.
It is not because people call him, slightly incorrectly and probably for want of another expression, ‘the simple layman*, that they can rest content with a too rapid, simple minded, or even superficial or childish formation for him. There must be no cheap Christianity, no so-called popular formation! We must aim at an authentic, thorough, profound, demanding formation for everyone, even the simplest and the least humanly endowed, which while certainly taking into account the methods and adaptations of healthy popularization, will be centred on the profound work of grace in every soul, intellect and will, which blossoms there into a theological life that cannot be measured in human dimensions.
If we talk about ‘the simple layman’ like this, there is all the more reason to apply these considerations to those who bear wider and more specific responsibilities. Formation must be related to the mission. We must always come back to the starting-point, which is the layman’s actual mission in the Church and in the world if his formation is really to correspond with his needs. ‘ This must never be forgotten and must be repeated time and time again: the mission that belongs to the layman, because he is a layman, consists in discovering the secular and divine mission of humanity and linking it with the mystery of the creation and the redemption; he must give the temporal world its divine, religious and redemptive meaning.
Source
Joseph Cardijn, The formation of lay people for their apostolate, Chapter X, Lay people into action (Joseph Cardijn Digital Library)