Fifty years of changing minds & structures:
Unsworth, Tim
FIFTY YEARS OF CHANGING MINDS & STRUCTURES A PROFILE OF CHICAGO'S DAN CANTWELL TIM UNSWORTH Lost nights, Dan Cantwell has his dinner at the kitchen table in the late Victorian rectory of Old St....
...During his half-century of preaching and teaching, he never adopted the warrior role...
...Then, it all fell apart and, in CantwelFs words, "We await new light...
...It was a time when piety was preferred to social action...
...He referred often to the now nearly vanished Mystical Body of Christ, a favorite theme of Pius XII, and reminded his listeners that even the cautious, regal pope said "there can be no such thing as slothful tranquillity...
...They end up shouting in an empty hall or tied to a stake...
...their anger and their egos crowd their thinking...
...he urged the students to develop a sense of the worldwide mission of the church...
...In the summer of 1944, Cardinal Samuel A. Stritch, in one of the worst decisions of his career, removed Hillenbrand from his job as rector and assigned him to a suburban parish...
...By 1966, both men were named pastors, Cantwell to Saint Clotilde's, a black parish on Chicago's South Side...
...Before he experienced John XXIII, he was influenced strongly by Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings he still cites extensively...
...The correct tactics and methods were not always clear...
...He spoke in union halls, universities, and churches of other faiths at a time when unions enjoyed only selective church support and ecumenism was just a nervous dream...
...The sanctuary is a sacred place, but so is every factory, every workshop, every bus station, every cradle, every bed...a living wage is every person's birthright, but so are music, literature, beauty...
...The remark was pure Cantwell...
...My own thrust was not in the social movement as such but to free up the laity to spread the kingdom of God," he said in a recent interview...
...While seeming to be reactionary, the church lumbers in the right direction almost in spite of itself...
...Did it take fifty years to achieve all this...
...His generation of seminarians would influence American Catholics everywhere...
...God is not unhappy with modernity, not unhappy that we have put a man on the moon, that we can no longer tolerate patriarchy in the church or in married life, that we are no longer comfortable with celibacy as the way to God...
...The next two decades were filled with efforts to change minds and structures...
...In his lifetime, it has evolved from a largely ethnic, missionary church with a theological emphasis on piety and a muted voice on social issues...
...Cantwell had an ability to say things in capsulated ways that engaged or enraged...
...Superb in the front of the church, he never learned how to work the vestibule...
...But Dan Cantwell has found a new generation of people to hear his prophetic thoughts...
...Monsignor Hillenbrand changed the thrust and tone of seminary education in America...
...I am more and more convinced that the secular is sacred, that the service of the non-ordained is every bit as important to God as the service of the ordained...
...Groping, not pontificating, is the church I know and love," Cantwell said in a 1987 talk...
...Young, walk-in worshipers- many don't know his name-often ask who the old priest is...
...Four decades ago, these were deep theological questions in many Catholic schools...
...He was replaced by a traditionalist and the emphasis in the seminary returned to preparing kids for First Communion...
...Talk like that got him clobbered in the Chicago City Council by landlords and real estate moguls who owned city aldermen...
...During his final years at the major seminary, Cantwell became a "Hillenbrand man," a disciple of this prophetic but often crusty man who irritated almost as many as he inspired...
...to foster anti-Semitism, to keep Jews in theirplace," he wrote forty years ago...
...He-or she-is still at work creating it...
...Dear God," he said...
...Hillenbrand's style and teachings did not sit well with some of the other priests on the faculty or in the chancery or with the wealthy residents in the suburbs near the seminary...
...And the laity have done that...
...Monsignor Daniel M. Cantwell's life has bracketed the most explosive period in the American church...
...You have a treasure here," the TV reporter said...
...The hope I have for the future of the church is that people will realize this is God's world...
...Church movements are never smooth long-distance runs or flashy sprints...
...n whom I have known...
...It was during this period that he became involved with the Catholic Labor Alliance (later The Catholic Council on Working Life), Friendship House, and the Catholic Interracial Council...
...Dan Cantwell combined the necessary balance of prophecy and volume control that permitted him to be heard...
...As a result, he remains one of the most respected priests in the nation...
...But a great deal of Hillenbrand gospel had taken root...
...Cantwell's soft-spoken but challenging words energized a generation of laity whose education and work experience had nudged them out of pious tranquillity...
...Liturgy is the service of God, but so is the struggle for social justice," he wrote...
...In 1931, Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno was released while Cantwell was a junior at Quigley, the archdiocesan seminary in downtown Chicago...
...but, years later, the council named him "Chicagoan of the Year...
...Five years later, the man who was to have an enormous influence on his life, Reynold Hillenbrand, was appointed rector of the major seminary of St...
...He described the clergy-laity link as "partners in the vineyard...
...Hillenbrand had no time for the small change of priestly interaction...
...His pastor was bewildered when he asked to attend a labor conference-What would a priest be doing talking about unions...
...Patrick's...
...His insistence that prayer was not a substitute for action to make the world a fit place in which to live made swivel chair leather burn and some clerical collars tighten...
...After only a year of parish work, Cantwell was sent with labor priest George Higgins and William McManus, later bishop of South Bend-Fort Wayne, for two years of graduate studies at Catholic University in Washington...
...Prophets remain a permanently endangered species...
...Dan Cantwell loved it...
...But he gave Dan permission "provided it didn't interfere with parish duties...
...he asked in a 1946 Commonweal article...
...With John Cardinal Cody's arrival in Chicago, things began to change...
...Now officially retired, Cantwell is "senior associate pastor" at Old St...
...It was an effort fifty years ago...
...It seems utterly preposterous now that we had to take that approach, but that's the way it was...
...A local TV station came to do a story on the parish and ended up interviewing Cantwell for forty-five minutes...
...To be a Negro in America is to be a man six and one-half feet tall living all his life in rooms five feet high," Cantwell preached well before Selma and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Mary of the Lake...
...It was always easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission," he said...
...My Christian understanding of life has been formed and enriched by wonderful lay women and men whom I have known...
...Cantwell was among his most loyal pupils...
...In April, the Chicago church celebrated the anniversary of Monsignor Dan Cantwell's fifty years as a priest...
...Socially-minded priests like John J. Egan and Cantwell found budgets cut and support staff vanishing...
...He moved to the Catholic Worker's Peter Maurin House and lived with Chicago's forgotten flotsam and jetsam...
...He served there for fifteen years, writing less but speaking more, especially from the many pulpits of Chicago to congregations that were just discovering him...
...In 1981, he moved to West Virginia to be chaplain at the Vineyard, a self-supporting facility for retarded adults...
...The church was packed with friends who could look back and new friends whom Dan had taught to look forward...
...Following ordination in 1939, Dan Cantwell was assigned to a new parish on Chicago's South Side...
...In 1947, the seminary faculty was taken over by the Jesuits and, after a brief stint in a parish, Cantwell was assigned as full-time chaplain to the lay groups with whom he had been working...
...If he went to a wake, it was to pray for the dead, not to embalm the deceased in the gargle or to spend the evening wallowing in clerical gossip...
...Many speak too loud...
...Dan Cantwell always manages to address both mind and heart...
...He modified the rigid and often mindless discipline of seminary life...
...They are sack races...
...The parish dog Goldie, an overweight retriever, is often his only companion...
...Would she chew gum in public...
...It's been a great life...
...It is much more important that we ask 'Would she sign a restrictive covenant?' or 'Would she refuse to join a labor union...
...I find it hard to believe" he said, "that God takes comfort in our loneliness...
...What Cantwell and his largely lay colleagues accomplished is now so commonplace that it can only be appreciated within the context of the times...
...Race hatred thrives in any society in which one race is deprived of power," he said when even committed Christians were still content with separate but equal justice...
...It's been a great life...
...With one painfully touching observation, he capsulized his views on celibacy, about which he has been speaking and writing since the early 1970s...
...I am more sure Jesus has touched and embraced all of human life, that the Incarnation is reality, not just dogma...
...The teachings on labor of Leo XIII were just gaining attention when Cantwell was bom in 1914...
...Patrick's Church at the outer edge of Chicago's Loop...
...After three years, he returned to Chicago at the invitation of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and of Jack Wall, the young pastor of Old Pat's, to whom Dan had given a home during his seminary years while Wall was still trying to decide his vocation...
...Cantwell is cultivating new disciples...
...In time, things would be accepted and then they (church authority) would take control...
...Most of Dan Cantwell's talks were not given in seminary classrooms orparish halls...
...Cantwell's writings, including Commonweal essays on Chicago's racial strife when the journal cost only fifteen cents, continued to help most of his readers to become more human...
...The reception-in a nearby union hall-was a model of what a Catholic community can be...
...Again, Dan Cantwell used his gift of the embracing example that had a consciousness-raising ripple effect on head and heart...
...He was always careful to cite authoritative sources, especially Pius XII, who reigned for the first twenty years of Cantwell's priesthood...
...The other parish priests are usually about their pastoral business, bringing Chicago's oldest parish back to life with an energy and imagination that occasionally leaves the nearly seventy-five-year-old Cantwell bemused...
...My ministry has, like all of human life, been replete with ambiguity," he reflected...
...Only rarely did anyone ask for his head on a plate...
...His comment contained both intellectual and emotional components...
...he stressed the importance of liturgy and of the involvement of the laity in the life of the church...
...Would our Blessed Mother smoke...
...Priests and bishops are called to do Christ's work, but so are lay men and lay women...
...We often worked in isolation...
...His studies were followed by five years of teaching at the major seminary, mostly in sociology and the theological basis for liturgy...
...The "immigrant model," as it has been called, was extremely effective until a few years after Vatican II...
...Too many Catholics still do their part to maintain lily-white churches...
...he insisted that the seminarians study the social encyclicals...
...He called racism a cancer that could destroy religion...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 12
