The Lay Apostolate

(899) 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, that is to say, the community of the faithful on earth, under the leadership of the Pope, the common Head, and of the bishops in communion with him. They are the Church." (Pope Pius XII)

(900) Since, like all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with the apostolate by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, they have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth. This duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ. Their activity in ecclesial communities is so necessary that, for the most part, the apostolate of the pastors cannot be fully effective without it. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, #899-900)

Our Work

The LampStand Foundation is a lay apostolate in solidarity with penitential criminals, whose work in the world springs from the waters of baptism, through the gateway of the social teaching of the Catholic Church, informed by experiential and academic knowledge shaped by professional experience, and embracing the Church's call of the apostolate to share the tools from a life of transformation and communal reentry, to serve penitential criminals, the organizations they create, and the public supporting them, on the path of deeper conversion to the communal life.

Pope John Paul II reminds us of the call of the Catholic Church: "...Millions of people, who, spurred on by the social Magisterium, have sought to make that teaching the inspiration for their involvement in the world. Acting either as individuals or joined together in various groups, associations and organizations, these people represent a great movement for the defense of the human person and the safeguarding of human dignity. Amid changing historical circumstances, this movement has contributed to the building up of a more just society..." (Pope John Paul II: Centesimus Annus)

Criminal reformation, the key to solving the reentry problem, has been a well-documented failure for decades. LampStand proposes the idea that only the reformed criminal can reform criminals. The difficulty of understanding and interpreting the culture of the criminal world and guiding the often misunderstood motivations and desires of the criminal into effective rehabilitation, has been insurmountable for the rehabilitation practitioner, but, LampStand contends, may not be so for the reformed, educated, and trained former criminal.

Transformed criminals with advanced degrees and Catholic social teaching knowledge, working through grassroots community organizations, can help reverse the long-term failure of criminal rehabilitation programs, as they possess the elemental experiential knowledge of the criminal world allowing them authentic access to penitential criminals.

The reentering criminal will only respond to a reformer with an experiential understanding of the issues involved in the world and way of life he is being asked to give up as well as the learned perspective of the world he is asking to reenter (really enter for the first time) as most professional criminals are born into the criminal world rather than the communal world they are seeking to "reenter".

The criminal world is otherwordly when compared to the world of the people largely charged by society to help the criminal transform and that is a central aspect of the failure of traditional rehabilitation. That otherworldy nature is perpetuated by the inability of rehabilitation practitioners to often even understand what it is criminals are saying, beyond the words they are using.

Few human beings are farther from God than criminals, yet the first canonized saint of the Church Christ established on the rock of Peter was the criminal Dismas, the Good Thief, who Christ took with Him from Calvary to heaven, thereby revealing the eternal path to criminal transformation.

The prodigal son's return - the transformed criminal's leadership in the community - can address the four central criminal justice issues of our time: 1) our nation's youth who are at risk of becoming criminals, 2) the failure of prisons to rehabilitate, 3) the failure of reentry, 4) the increasing criminalization of culture.

"The desire to work for the common good is not enough. The way to make this desire effective is to form competent men and women who can transmit to others the maturity which they themselves have achieved." (St. Josemaria Escriva, Conversations with Josemaria Escriva, p. 115)