Correspondence
GAUGHAN, (MOST REV.) NORBERT F. & TIVENAN, (REV.) JOHN J. & PUGLIESE, STEVEN J. & KEIGHTLEY, GEORGIA M. & ERIC & AMMANN, MARY & GEANEY, (REV.) DENNIS J. & Bensman, David & McTAGGART, BILL
Correspondence ALIENATION IN THE CHURCH RESPONSES TO DAVID O'ROURKE Logansport, Ind. To the Editors: Father David O'Rourke's article "Revolution and Alienation in the American Church" [Feb. 11]...
...We have Mexicans, blacks, and Orientals who have assimilated our middle-class church manners...
...our serious doubts about the very value and purpose of life occur at those moments that do not readily yield the satisfaction that what we do is either worthwhile or important...
...STEVEN J. PUGLIESE Annandale, Va...
...The bishops' thundering about nuclear disarmament is welcome but what is needed is resonance with more humble truths...
...ERIC & MARY AMMANN Calumet City, 111...
...The experience of conversion and commitment that is common on the leadership level of the church is simply not part of the experience of many Catholic people...
...I also think that many lay people would prefer that the church's priorities be established dialogically...
...If this be the case, how can the gap between us not help but widen...
...Lay people now have great difficulty accepting carte blanche positions taken (outside clearly doctrinal matters) by the leadership which sometimes give every appearance of being hastily conceived and lacking sufficient study...
...The church," writes Father O'Rourke, "is leaving the ranks of mainline Protestants and Evangelicals to become like the Quakers, a peace church.'' My thesis is that the Catholic church, with the possible exception of the very early church, was never a peace church...
...To the Editors: My reaction to David O'Rourke's article [Feb...
...We prepare people to celebrate them...
...11] carried a vitally important message that was long overdue...
...She was heavy-set, with the body of a field worker and clad with a peasant's summer garb...
...We burn two-hundred a week and the pastor is opposed to a third stand...
...At every moment of the process their dignity was respected...
...To the Editors: Father David O'Rourke's thoughtful piece [Feb...
...The experience of conversion and commitment," he writes, "that is common on the leadership level of the church is simply not part of the experience of many Catholic people...
...But the church must ask with her Lord for "all your heart and all your mind and all your strength...
...Father O'Rourke sees alienation in the church stemming from the conversion experiences of our leadership in the activist sixties...
...He names the reality we both experience as alienation...
...It cannot be foolish to hope that this is imminently possible...
...Another lay priority has been and will . continue to be that of education...
...Anything less is futile and destructive...
...Her smile means, "No...
...And obviously what is desired here is clerical encouragement and support for the emerging new forms that lay ministry will inevitably take...
...She had heard this when she was here twice before...
...The issue was not nationality or race, but class...
...We all know that, for whatever reasons, the church has been in crisis and revolution since the Vatican Council...
...I hear the horror tales of what happens to people at their hands, but it is not an adequate description of reality...
...It is a trade-off...
...The "peace church" can count among its heralds Catholic lay men and women whose courageous voices tugged at consciences long before our bishops began to squeak at Vietnam...
...Such people have a lot to teach me about the Christian virtues of simplicity of life and generosity...
...We need to be the way and not simply define it...
...What we are actually witnessing in today's church is a decided disinterest in lay priorities on the part of the church's leaders...
...But the church can no longer afford to suggest that there is some middle ground...
...I experience it as a cohesiveness, a coming together as we articulate new goals...
...12] contains a central flaw...
...For example, I think ministry in Gospel-fashion is what the laity wants from the church's leaders...
...The people who had Selma-like conversions make directed retreats, understand contemplative prayer, smile more, and laugh at themselves...
...The same goes for baptism...
...That clerical view misses the thrust of Vatican II and the leadership from within the laity...
...I had many questions about their readiness for marriage...
...The real surprise lies in the direction in which this crisis now seems to be leading us...
...MOST REV...
...Father O'Rourke states that the current growing alienation from the church of "uninvolved Catholics" is a tragedy...
...David O'Rourke [Feb...
...It is suddenly not seen to be as important or as worthwhile to educate the church's own...
...Few of our St...
...25], I incorrectly identified the United Steelworkers Local in Johnstown, Pennsylvania...
...This is too simple...
...I think that in many cases American Catholics wish that the hierarchy would take advantage of the wealth of expertise available to them...
...I, however, would prefer to think of the church as that body of community, continuous both in geography and history, that is first and simply what Lumen Gentium refers to as "the people of God...
...Though it is true that the American bishops have exercised renewed leadership with respect to their collective commitment to nuclear disarmament, our church is not a single issue church and this single commitment, while laudable, does not warrant the suggestion that the gulf between 'the leadership' (which reads: the bishops or the hierarchy) and "many Catholic people" (which reads: the laity) obtains from a margin of moral superiority...
...But our lifestyle by its very nature does not permit us such absolute dedication to any cause, no matter how important or how strong our convictions...
...She does not expect me to give a homily on the blessing of throats and I do not expect her to join our Peace and Justice Commission, which mounted a successful city-wide nuclear freeze campaign...
...That is, O'Rourke is male, a religious, and a cleric, while I am a woman, a wife and mother and lay person...
...O'Rourke claims that significant changes are underway, specifically in regard to (1) church leadership, (2) church priorities, and (3) a new definition of what it means to belong to the church, one involving personal conversion and commitment to social causes...
...For the lay person-and despite the post-Vatican II appearance of parish advisory councils and the institution of the lay commission - institutional leadership continues to affect us in much the same way...
...This is by no means to deny that there are converted, committed social activists to be found among the laity, far from it...
...Because of hesitance to do so, many of us find the "new-wave'' clergy to be just as autocratic and high-handed as their predecessors...
...What worries many Catholic parents' is that their children no longer receive from the church a satisfactory induction in the rudiments of the Christian symbol system which, despite argument to the contrary, does require some degree of expertise that parents themselves do not always have...
...Father O'Rourke does not seem to have picked up on the spiritual renewal of the activists of the sixties...
...I referred them to a couple upon whom we mutually agreed...
...They can be concerned with Salvadorian refugees and express deep compassion for the people in their own parish...
...Last Sunday a parishioner complained that we do not bless throats on the Sunday after the feast...
...What kind of attitude towards our way of life is reflected both in (1) the failure to involve us in the setting of priorities for the local church and (2) present efforts to restrict the administration of those sacraments which ironically are par excellence the sacraments of the lay life- baptism, by means of which we are admitted to its ranks, and marriage, which symbolically validates the unique way we intend to follow Christ...
...No, but I go to a Catholic church when I go...
...I was delighted to do this because the woman is a cleaning lady at the local high school, a model worker who brings joy to all teachers and students with her smile and work ethic...
...When this is combined with the penchant of too many liberals to righteously condemn anyone who they feel lacks the requisite finely-tuned social conscience, the Mystical Body of Christ can become a combat zone...
...A decision may be referred to a staff member like myself, but I know of no refusals...
...It seems to me that in order for the church to fully proclaim the reality of personal conversion and salvation there needs to be a conversion of institution and form as well...
...So they enlist the help of a friendly minister, or settle for a justice of the peace...
...Are we turning people away because of a stricter view of admission to the sacraments...
...It could be argued that an equal number might have left if the overdue changes were not made...
...They insisted they would make it and were eager to participate in our parish engaged-encounter weekend...
...This translates not only into the ritual celebration of liturgy and sacrament but also into help in discerning Christian meaning and value in contemporary life, as well as k guidance in the ways to express one's faith actively in service to others, not just globally, but where it is more difficult and directly encountered-locally and familially...
...The pacifist and the first-strike nuclear bomb-maker both say "The Body of Christ'' when I put the wafers in their hands...
...Most of us have not only ourselves to worry about but have others who depend on us and for whom we are responsible...
...The Risen Lord is present in the American church...
...I told them I would consult with one of the team couples after the weekend...
...Victor's asks that a baby be baptized, the parents are told that they will be visited by a couple from our baptismal preparation team...
...Victor parishioners have a deep interest in either side of the peace issue...
...The church is simply now saying that you can't have one without the other and it strikes many as a new revelation...
...After all, the father in Jesus's par-1 able did not send his wayward son to rehabilitation or "up-date" classes...
...DENNIS J. GEANEY, O.S.A...
...Neither do the majority of us have independent means for a sabbatical year in order to step back and evaluate...
...The error that has caught up with us is not that the church is suddenly so bold as to ask for a change of heart and a faith response from her would-be members...
...The only perceptible difference is that the structure appears to operate a bit more collegially, in that a larger number of priests and now even women religious occupy positions of authority...
...When I was an associate pastor twenty years ago, all one had to do to receive the sacraments of baptism and matrimony was to come to the parish office with the proper documents and give us programmed answers to our questions...
...One of the complaints "I received recently was that there were no more vigil lights available after the 9:30 Mass...
...JOHN J. TIVENAN Roman Catholic Chaplain Wesleyan University Smithtown, N.Y...
...Continued on page 252) Correspondence (Continued from page 226) The church cannot go on without a Spirit-filled body, without a holy people set apart...
...GEORGIA M. KEIGHTLEY without reservations the change of priorities "from self-interest to social interest.'' But we also agree that a whole generation of potentially committed Catholics is being alienated by the way this change is being brought about, especially as it affects the sacraments of baptism and marriage...
...Many people leave the church because they at last feel free to do what they would have done decades ago if they had not felt restricted by their Catholic family tradition...
...After having seen the church changed under their feet without ever having been asked about it, they now see it walking away from them leaving them behind...
...DAVID BENSMAN...
...11] begins to define a question that the American Catholic church will spend many anxious years in answering...
...REV...
...Correction New York, N.Y...
...Often bride and groom live in different towns...
...I find an immediate difference between us to be the way each of us would define that reality called "church...
...The error seems to be that there was a time when it was at least perceived that this was not required...
...We give communion every Sunday to rapists and racists...
...This must be one that takes into account the necessity of our diverse commitments...
...By our very choice we live in the world and we must, particularly in these hard economic times, immediately concern ourselves with the very business of survival...
...Its causes, however, are multiple and complex but not least of which include the clerical elitism that rears its condescending snoot in O'Rourke's engaging but myopic essay...
...She was of Mexican descent brought up in Texas where Spanish was the language of her home...
...The last thing a pregnant woman, inquiring about baptism for the baby due in a few days, needs to be told is "We baptize four times a year, but first you must attend five baptism classes...
...And unlike O'Rourke's clerical examples, our identity crises are usually associated with the most mundane of our routinized daily lives...
...Not in a few saints or isolated groups but in the whole church in all its manifestations from institution to herald and servant of the great King...
...Alienation from the church is ultimately a form of alienation from God...
...When a parishioner of St...
...The couple, who lived across the street from Debbie, discouraged them from marrying...
...To the Editors: In my article on the steel settlement [Mar...
...This approach may save the priest time, but pastorally it is a disaster...
...What we of the laity so desperately need is to develop a spirituality that is authentically and uniquely our own...
...and I found our basic perception of what is actually taking place to be somewhat at odds...
...Admission to these sacraments today almost requires the "conversion" Father O'Rourke talks about prior to their reception...
...Mainly we differ in our analysis of what is developing in the church...
...he ran out and embraced him...
...After the promulgation of the peace pastoral they will both continue to drink from the same cup...
...We are more concerned with their hopes and desires than with the documents they bring us to be stamped...
...People must see and experience the reality of the risen Lord proven in the life of the church...
...She accepts my using the pulpit to talk about social sin as long as I attend to her spiritual needs...
...Which is the greater alienation...
...She would feel out of place as a member of our middle-class church...
...By offering challenges we feel that we are all coming together through prayerful discernment, the opposite of alienation...
...To the Editors: David O'Rourke's article [Feb...
...Are you a member of the parish...
...this supposedly same church now is saying that today this will no longer do...
...We simply live in different Catholic churches, but I was very happy to baptize the baby on her terms...
...Because of this lack, adults in-creasingly encounter young Catholics who not only have a limited degree of commitment to the church but who also find much of church doctrine to be arcane and inexplicable...
...BILL McTAGGART Greensburg, Pa...
...And whose experience of conversion is more evocative of the prophetic mission of the church today than those lay women and men who confront those same bishops in order to name injustice against the disenfranchised (women in general, gay men and lesbian women in particular) the more immediate and chronic threat to peace...
...In the past this was a fundamental point of agreement between clergy and lay...
...Thank you, Father O'Rourke...
...The Catholic church is the church of sinners...
...Does your oldest child go to CCD...
...I certainly agree but I wonder how these people are any more alienated today than at any other time...
...It is due more to a gulf between them...
...A week later Debbie called to say that they were postponing the wedding for a year because of Dave's unemployment...
...in recent times however and as O'Rourke notes, the church's leadership, men and women alike, has almost entirely absolved itself of any responsibility for the educational ministry...
...To the Editors: It is always intriguing' when two people look through the same lens at the same half glass of water and one sees it moving towards fullness and the other towards emptiness...
...It is not our tradition...
...Even the model of spirituality now offered us by the new leadership, which O'Rourke describes so well, is essentially a clerical one...
...In his article O'Rourke seems to presume the right of the leadership to set the church's priorities, his only concern being the haste with which the former have recently forged ahead...
...Maria was referred to me because she did not want a couple coming to her home...
...you have given us a ray of hope...
...If these young people want to get married, perhaps in the bride's parents' home parish, they are informed that they must first attend the required series of Cana conferences...
...When I explained our stance that the sacraments are not magic and that they are celebrated in a community context which implies membership in a parish, there was a feigned smile of agreement...
...A gulf exists, it is true...
...She must do so in a way that, far from alienating, will radically call people to a new life that is immensely possible and imminent...
...Blase Day, but I would be happy to bless her throat and her friends' right to now between Masses...
...Have the "converted" forgotten how long, and what fortuitous circumstances, it took for them to be converted...
...NORBERT F. GAUGHAN Auxiliary Bishop Middletown, Conn...
...At which point the parents remind themselves that the priest is only a witness anyway...
...The answer does not lie in sub-culturating the people of God...
...The team couple shook their heads...
...REV...
...11] speaks out of his experience as pastor as I do as associate pastor...
...the church said that because of certain defined actions and behavior they were indeed Catholic...
...If these people were not separated from the institutional, fraternal church they were separated from the source in Christ...
...Why do you want the baby baptized?'' ''My family always has the babies baptized...
...The truth is that the Catholic church in America has sheltered religiously alienated people for years...
...When a couple comes to arrange for marriage, a priest conducts the initial interview...
...I consulted further with Dave and Debbie and told them I would make a decision...
...Catechesis is the primary way in which the church perpetuates itself...
...The leaders of the church are attempting to gallop the horses when the cart has broken down...
...One cannot miss that when Father O'Rourke speaks of it, he instinctively thinks of the institutional visage, especially as it manifests itself in terms of leaders and hierarchy...
...11] was one of both interest and amazement-interest, because I too have been conscious of certain tendencies developing within the American church, but amazement because I was impressed to find out that perspective is everything...
...I am sure that some people have left because change was sudden and for which they were unprepared...
...These occasions used to be an opportunity for good pastors to seek out the lost sheep and welcome them back...
...While many revolutionaries view themselves as prophets who are doomed to a lonely fight, too often this is based on the supposition that the typical parishioner does not have a sophisticated world-view and is, therefore, beyond the reach of communication...
...One might conclude that the new leadership either does not understand our way of life or else does not respect it...
...We hope not...
...they arrive for the wedding the day before, and there is no way they can get in these conferences...
...In these perilous times, we need leaders who can lead, and that involves (a) knowing one's constituency and (b) working from their frame of reference...
...It is a friendly meeting in which each listens to the other to arrive at a meeting of minds about mutual expectations...
...Dave and Debbie, age 18 and 19, asked me to marry them...
...The difference between the people Father O'Rourke describes and those nominal Catholics in the American church of thirty years ago is that the church was once content to recognize these people as dues-paying members...
...Traditionally, the Catholic church has been an all-inclusive church...
...We also find ourselves to be members not just of the church but of a variety of different social groups which also lay claim to our allegiances...
...As far as the first point is concerned, there appears to be a substantive change in the church's leadership, but only if one is a member of the professional church...
...11]: ". . . alienation does not come from disagreements on moral or political issues between the leaders and people of the church...
...To the Editors: David K. O'Rourke writes [Revolution and Alienation in the American Church," Feb...
...It is indeed a case of defining Catholic, and as it becomes less a definition of Catholic and more one of Christian, the church needs to get busy in enlightening her people...
...He sees the new leaders coming only from the National Bishops' Conference, senates of priests, the leadership organizations of women and men religious...
...On Christmas Day I told them that I would be happy to marry them...
...are we now to become an exclusive sect...
...And we must not allow those without a relationship with the Lord to be suddenly without a home as well...
...It is not a question of a church of the elite...
...I explained that we blessed throats at all the Masses on St...
...While the church has moved away from legalism, there are priests, young and old, who will be legalists from ordination to death...
...Thus the church that he has in view, the one that is on its way ' 'to becoming a peace church," the one that has changed its priorities, the one that is bent on restricting the sacraments, this church is obviously a clerical church, the church of the new leaders...
...Have they considered how impossible it can be for young people to have this "conversion" opportunity, when they struggle through years of unrelenting, rigorous studies, often on loans and on a subsistence level...
...nor do we have a supportive community or institutions behind us that would give us the chance to focus our energies on one single project or endeavor...
...Or if they work two full jobs for years, just to make ends meet...
...We hope more pastors find better ways to bridge and "tolerate the gulf between Christian ideal and human achievement," even if it means cutting short a social justice meeting now and then...
...She must proclaim the Gospel of repentance and faith...
...I did not push membership in our parish with her...
...Chuck Mol-nar is president of Local 2635...
...We no longer administer sacraments like bureaucrats or check-out girls...
...With the advent of trained lay theologians this at last should become a possibility...
Vol. 110 • April 1983 • No. 8
