Archbishop Gaumond presented a paper in French on the formation of the laity, USCCB President William Skylstad discussed "the laity as transformers of the world" in English, and CELAM Vice-president Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes tackled the position of the laity as disciples in the church in Spanish.

The laity's job is to transform the world, said Archbishop Gaumond. While that's happening to some extent, it's "not enough," according to the archbishop of Sherbrooke, Que. "But that's not the fault of the laity," Archbishop Gaumond said. "It is in the major part our fault in the hierarchy. It's our fault because in the past, when we had problems in the church, we looked for the solutions by having more priestly vocations, more religious vocations."

Constantly leaning on the ordained and religious to accomplish the goals of the church has kept the church from realizing its potential, he said. "The solution for the future, and to accomplish the gospel, is to transform everybody, including the laity. The laity is able to have the major part in this process of transforming the world."

Bishop Skylstad, of Spokane, Wash., said that the laity in the United States is increasingly up to the job of evangelizing and transforming the world. At a meeting of U.S. Catholic charitable organizations in Washington, D.C., Skylstad said he met people among more than 500 delegates engaged in the most basic work of the church. "In its own way, that kind of work ends up being a kind of evangelizing presence," Skylstad said. "It's a remarkable whole presence of the church in the world." But Bishop Skylstad also said there was a long way to go. "Have we reached our full potential? I don't think so," he said. "We probably never will in a certain sense because we're all on a journey of conversion, renewal and growth - but the contribution of the laity to the life of the church and to the life of the world has been, I think, tremendous."

Archbishop Gaumond conceded it might seem odd to some people that bishops are meeting behind closed doors to discuss the laity without any lay people present or consulted. But he pointed out that this meeting didn't preclude consultation at some future date. "The first step in this study among us is to address the topic among ourselves," he said. "Maybe it could be the program of the next meeting to have quite the same exercise with the laity. We're not against that."

Since the 1997 Synod of America, the annual CELAM, USCCB, CCCB meeting has chosen themes from Pope John Paul II's exhortation Ecclesia in America. Archbishop Gaumond admitted that when the pope first called the bishops of North and South America together for a synod he was skeptical."When Pope John Paul stressed the importance of talking as America, not Americas but America in the singular, I was not convinced at all.

My conviction at that time was there are so many differences between the south and we in the north," he said. Now Archbishop Gaumond believes the pope had the foresight to see that, in a globalized world where travel and migration brings all kinds of people together, the church in the Western hemisphere would increasingly share the same concerns.

"We realize that our problems are sensibly the same. Our challenges are the same. We have to deal with the modern culture of today in the same way, with the same objective," he said. The meetings ended Feb. 15 with a Mass for the Latin American guests at Blessed Sacrament Church here, at which the Latin American Catholic community of Toronto was invited to attend.

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