Verse
Reiter, Thomas
in some shared activity or task. The "small groups," of course, already exist in many places, as branches of various Catholic organizations, family groups, prayer groups, professional groups ete....
...While making allowances for the "loner," the Report makes it clear that encouraging people to be members of groups, rather than of parishes is what the pastoral mission of the Church is all about...
...But what is here being suggested is that members of such a group, or groups, should be envisaged as the normal and ordinary way in which any person who is a Catholic will express his faith...
...I don't personally understand this part of the Report's ideas: but perhaps there is a lot behind the concept which there is no room to spell out...
...Yet surely it is fundamentally correct to see the Church of the future as existing in a sort of diaspora, and not as a Christian icing spread over the whole social cake...
...Here the second major recommendation is crucial: namely for a major shift of priorities towards a relevant sort of adult education program designed to form those who might "animate" and help create such groups...
...ministry of the word...
...But what matters is how such a new pattern of Christian living, such an "alternative church" (for that is what it really is), can be brought into being...
...Probably it will have to begin in a small way, in a few places where a bishop and a few far-sighted others can get together and do some experimental work, and make the mistakes that others can learn from...
...The latter apparently will subside into being just a place for ritualizing births, marriages and deaths...
...mission to the world") it is not .a parish...
...In a pillbox notch an hour's climb above cabanas' rainbow jeeps, the socket of a coastal gun focuses concentric tiers on zero, where an iguana calmly chews a cactus' spines and fleshy pads...
...No doubt, this is a measure of the disarray and ineffectuality of those who take such a stance: but the fact--if it be a fact--is surely bordering on the tragic...
...A "left-wing" Catholic radicalism, which rejects the modern world, not out of nostalgia for a lost spiritual "law and order" authoritarianism, but out of a principled rejection of the general ethos of capitalism, seems hardly to have impinged on the working-party...
...later, they tick in your jacket in the wind at the emplacement's rim...
...Flashbulbs fume and blister...
...In a summary, published earlier, of reactions to the working party's initial repot, it became clear that the only concerted opposition to the new postVatican II spirit of cooperation with the modern world, which that report expressed, came from "the extreme right": to put it bluntly, from the sympathizers with pre-Vatican II sensibilities, from the Lat.in-Mass-enthusiasts and Lefebvre-type conservatives...
...regular correspondent in Great Britain...
...The concept of a "basic Christian community," also mentioned in the Report, is a rather more elusive one...
...The important thing is that this time, in the wake of the final Report, and with the prospect of decisions being taken which will affect the Church for a generation or two at least, the people who represent such a position must make themselves heard...
...education...
...The light is perfect you catch him in...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's...
...Such a shift of priorities (especially remembering the financial implications) will be very hard to achieve, despite the obvious fact that such a program will be far cheaper to run ahd organize than the massive investment in buildings and plant implied in the attempt to provide a place for every Catholic child in a Catholic school (an attempt long ago doomed to failure, and indeed abandoned in practice, though still vaguely left as an ideal in social theory...
...The iguana's gone or hidden at the bottom, where cement's the deadpan color of a bridge abutment, and the earth forces through every flaw a cactus like a stop-action shot of a green geyser...
...I think I understand why this is so: but I think the reasoning is mistaken...
...Indeed, given the foreseeable breakdown both of parish and school structures under the double burdens of financial inflation and priest-shortages, it is pretty well inevitable...
...Obviously this "activist" image of the Church, with its possible implication of social do-goodery and heartiness, is a dangerous one: and the dangers must be recognized and met...
...Commonweal: 391...
...social service...
...This part of the document needs a lot of clarification...
...Although a "basic Christian community" will have most of the functions of the present "parish" ("regular worship...
...Nearby, a cave Pearl Harbor crammed with ammo because the war blew elsewhere is splayed with termite tunnels...
...In this sense, I think the working party Report is on the right lines...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0000 THOMAS REITER _9 SNAPSHOT OF THE VIRGIN ISLANDS Bolts thick as your wrist are rusted fast in the fashionable air...
...If there is a criticism to be made of the Report as a whole, it is that it takes too easily the proposition that the Church must identify with, and work within, the "world" as described in the Introduction...
...Yet without this first move, the strategy can hardly begin to work...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 13
