Challenges facing U S Catholics:
Kane, Peggy Rosenthal, Kenneth L Woodward, Abigail McCarthy, William K Reilly, John J O'Connor, Andr
CHALLENGES FACING U.S. CATHOLICS THE NEXT TEN YEARS peggy rosenthal kenneth l woodward Abigail McCarthy " WILLIAM K.JREILLY "JOHN J. O'CONNOR ANDREW M. GREELEY GEORGE WEIGEL SUSAN...
...Another great challenge resides here...
...Give us the word of God, and it will renew our families...
...We can hardly do much for "the betterment, the happiness, and the peace of the American people" if they duck for cover when we come...
...We've stood on the plank to pontificate from it...
...H As American Catholics, we carry for our country H a tradition of two thousand years of trying (not always succeeding, but at least trying) to hear the Holy Spirit and pass on its wisdom...
...In a generation's time, we have seen thousands of Catholic schools closed (the two I attended are now parking lots), convents converted to other purposes, seminary estates sold off to realty developers, hospitals turned over to community boards, publications disappear, even some colleges...
...Delivering the poor in the aftershocks of the Reagan-Bushquake will demand the full power of the two-thousand years of experience in the works of mercy...
...Mindful of that definition I believe that the greatest challenge to the Roman Catholic church in the new decade is to gather, once again-or perhaps truly for the first time-a eucharistic community imbued with a sense of the sacred and transcendent, alive to the continuing presence of Jesus, and thus united in a desire to worship God and love our neighbors as he taught...
...Well, as we said in Baltimore during the pennant race this year, why not...
...Friendship, sex, education, work, creativity, family-these experiences that the young say they want don't just happen...
...The words of the third Eucharistic Prayer addressing the all-holy put it that way, "From age to age you gather a people to yourself so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name...
...I have often suggested that access to the creative self ought to be made a condition for ordination (poetry, short stories, art, music, photography, whatever) because the priest who does not have access to this dimension of the self will not be an effective preacher and teacher...
...The deconstructionist impulse that has marked the American Catholic intellectual and activist elite for the past generation has to be rejected...
...Question: Will their numbers be such as to need as many churches as in the past...
...Their memories help to overcome our private disaffections...
...I believe the church would do well to ponder its rich tradition of ethical stewardship of nature, to study and discuss it, to render it relevant to a world in need of a powerful reformulation of the stewardship idea...
...Eventually, some twenty major categories of concerns emerged, and these, with their subcategories, became the stuff of the archdiocesan synod...
...They bring a presence, in other words, but along with it nonconforming ideas, and not a whole lot of participation...
...And more than the abortion issue will be affected by how we choose here...
...Politicians do, why not priests...
...The situation stabilized...
...Having chosen white flight, we offer small, if any, comfort...
...I offer my congratulations on this event...
...Someone has got to show them that adulthood requires character and commitment...
...Will the official church accommodate believers who are free-spirited rather than orthodox...
...Presently she is the campus minister at Our Lady of Victory Academy in Dobbs Ferry, New York...
...I believe my people know what they are talking about...
...Francis, who saw beauty in nature unaltered...
...Mine, for instance, derive from a big-brother celibate clergy pronouncing on matters of sex and gender...
...For those who choose the work of education in the 1990s, cozy circumstances must be left behind...
...If the Gospel message and the life of Christ are the core of our catholicity, we are not afraid of questions about women and men being one in church and society, ministering and administering as equal, mature, adult friends and partners-challenging and eradicating structures and beliefs about patriarchy in church and society...
...There is a certain sense that so much has changed that there is nothing stable left, and that it is difficult to find a Catholic identity...
...the few less-doctrinaire Catholics don't alter our main menacing image...
...We have a lot to offer our fellow citizens in the next decade, but our belligerence on this issue has made them, understandably, wary of us...
...But Catholics have little room to be smug...
...So many were teachers...
...The biggest drop was in the fifteen-to-nineteen age bracket-the bracket in which the future of the community lies...
...On the eve of the new decade the temptation to cast off mother church's best-beloved, the poor, is couched in verbal constructs claiming realism: "the permanent underclass," "gentrification," "triage...
...We've threatened our elected officials that if they don't make it their political plank we'll pull their constituent support out from under them...
...The life-affirming qualities of the church are perfectly attuned to help prevent any further disruption of those delicate systems that make life on earth possible for us and for all those who follow...
...I mean our predominant collective behavior...
...but we also need to let them look at us as we really are...
...Today, we are living in a kind of pivot: what Jeffrey Stout has called the harvest time of modernity and the seed time for whatever-it-is that will follow modernity...
...The bad guys in her ranks have the biggest mouths...
...the memory of her good and faithful people working to deliver her Holy Spirit in history...
...More urgent, I believe, is the issue of what exactly we shall identify as the tradition of our faith and what exactly we shall hand on to the generation that is coming after us to take our place...
...American Catholics must not bite the apple of such academic and pagan seductions...
...Commonweal has served the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge with endurance and fidelity...
...It springs from very few of us automatically...
...Catholics who are simultaneously members of the U.S...
...If Richard M. Daley, for example, can by training, effort, and practice become a skillful public performer, why can't a priest do the same thing...
...Will the archbishop of Boston, for example, dare assign a black pastor to South Boston...
...Either they respond with a sense of panic and resist ecumenical activities and tolerant attitudes as destructive of faith and commitment, or they respond with enthusiasm and assume all truth claims to be irrelevant because religious beliefs and commitments are simply a matter of taste or upbringing...
...I listened...
...A unique rather than the biggest challenge to "American" Catholics is to be "less American" and more Catholic or, to put it another way, to transcend one's nationality to be truly catholic-to be universal...
...In our zeal to remove the speck from our prochoice sister's eye, we've done some strange things with the plank in our own...
...Neither does CCD...
...I wouldn't bet on it...
...Each lived, in sum, a creative tension between universality and particularity, by incarnating the classic Catholic tradition in a distinctively American way...
...His latest book is American Catholicism: And Now Where...
...The issue of the nineties, in terms of Catholic belief and practice, is not "How little can I believe (or do) and still remain a 'good Catholic...
...Lest this sound a bit mystical, let me suggest a positive goal that I think reflects our Catholic conviction that life is a good gift...
...For most Catholics the church is their parish...
...How difficult to articulate the "biggest" challenge...
...I therefore suspect that the challenges faced here are fairly reflective of those in the church throughout the country...
...Apropos vocations, no one sees current trends being reversed anytime soon, so it is likely that we will see increasing numbers of foreign priests running American Catholic parishes-including priests from Africa, where vocation rates are said to be especially high...
...If young Catholics do not find a source of unity and strength which will enable them to love and serve their neighbors in the community of faith, where will they find it...
...The ancient challenge of Christian fidelity is shaped by the distinctive characteristics of an age...
...The only thing wrong with this challenge is that neither Rome nor the bishops can be blamed for failure to meet it...
...And the obsession we have had with questions of "authority in the church" must give way to a new quest for what is authoritative in our lives: authoritative in terms of the Gospel, and authoritative in terms of the living tradition of the church...
...What further retrenchments will be necessary...
...rich and poor...
...They may be concerned about it and resist all changes indiscriminately and tend to lose their sense of direction...
...With the word of God, we can meet every challenge...
...George Weigel The greatest challenge facing American Catholics over the next decade is the same great challenge that has confronted Christians for two millennia: the challenge of fidelity to the Gospel, the celebration of the Eucharist, and the exercise of charity within and without our ecclesial community...
...It seems to me that there are several reasons for our arrival at this critical juncture...
...Certainly not in the contemporary culture of mindless hedonism which seems to breed an alarming callousness in that age group and the one following it...
...And it seems equally clear that loss of the heritage can only be prevented by a far deeper understanding and appreciation than is now being offered...
...Monica K. Hellwig From my vantage point the greatest challenge to American Catholics in the next ten years will be linked only in tenuous and indirect ways to questions of institutional structure and of claims to authority...
...The stereotype of New York is "sin city," Times Square, Harlem, the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, "Skyscrappers" (as Pope John Paul II called them), turbulence, Wall Street, show biz, money...
...The laity must demand good preaching...
...What I'm getting at is that we do have a choice...
...Andrew M. Greeley W ithout wanting to discount the importance of other issues (especially equal rights for women, including ordination), I propose as the biggest challenge the improvement of the quality of preaching...
...When it was all over, there wasn't a shadow of a doubt about the "felt needs" of the Archdiocese of New York...
...Theresa Kane, R.S.M., is past president of the Sisters of Mercy and past president of Leadership Conference of Women Religious...
...As Rembert Weakland has observed, "we lost one whole generation...
...I write American in quotes because my travels beyond the borders of the U.S...
...In America we can remember-we need to remember-Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Oscar Romero, and, too, the choirs-upon-choirs of anonymous names and voices who have lived their baptism in grace and courage...
...One can learn how to make an adequate presentation of self in a public situation...
...challenges with little in history on which to draw...
...They get the head- lines...
...Let us hear the word of God honestly preached, clearly taught in our Catholic classrooms, our catechetical courses...
...I have chosen, however, not to read misogyny as a dominant theme of American Catholicism...
...The works of mercy can only be enacted, in any decade, "at a personal sacrifice," [which] "was considered by the first Christians as the right thing to do," in the words of Peter Maurin...
...CATHOLICS THE NEXT TEN YEARS peggy rosenthal kenneth l woodward Abigail McCarthy " WILLIAM K.JREILLY "JOHN J. O'CONNOR ANDREW M. GREELEY GEORGE WEIGEL SUSAN CAHILL MONIKA K. HELLWIG JOHNDEEDY THERESA KANE Peggy Rosenthal The next ten years will bring us to the eve of the year two thousand...
...Theresa Kane I am pleased to converge with others on the occasion of Commonweal's sixty-fifth anniversary...
...But if the new generations are returning, they're undoubtedly doing so on their own terms-which is a mixed blessing for traditionalists and the practice they represent...
...Struck with awe, like Mary, at the great things the Lord has done for us, we ache with joy at doing great things for others...
...Our challenge now is to change the terms of the debate-that is, turn them away from hostility toward reconciliation...
...A straight line can be drawn from St...
...Its two major components can be learned through practice...
...We should begin to know over ten years' time...
...Two would be disastrous...
...So, when I speak of my citizenry or my country, I think U.S.A...
...Preparation for the synod began in 1984 with the distribution of more than two million detailed questionnaires designed to discern "felt needs...
...citizens of different nations...
...The creative self lurks in everyone...
...This has kept us from seizing "the Catholic moment" which Lutheran Pastor Richard John Neuhaus has proclaimed...
...It said: give us the word of God clearly, straightforwardly, unambiguously, and we will use it to address every other need...
...It cuts across all the divisions I can think of, clergy-laity, first-third world, Rome-local church, parish-diocese, institutional-personal, not to mention the generations...
...There is, of course, the rapid pace and far-reaching character of the post-Vatican II changes in liturgy, catechesis, and church life...
...In this society, at any rate, I see the young captured by a vapid, boring, commercialized youth culture and not interested in becoming adults...
...the education and formation of the church (that we receive the knowledge of the truth for which we hunger and the spiritual formation for which we thirst...
...Susan Cahill is the author of the novel, Earth Angels (Harper & Row), and editor of the three-volume series, Women & Fiction (New American Library), and Among Sisters: Short Stories by Women Writers (New American Library...
...Are there appropriate American models for this process of recovering and extending our Catholic identity...
...This is a challenge, it seems to me, on which serious Catholics of all ideological bents can agree...
...The phrase, "living tradition," gets us to the matter of extension...
...There's no reason why we can't move to an all-embracing view, though...
...To grow up Catholic, you first have to grow up...
...For example the diocese of Baltimore, our mother diocese, which counts around 438,000 church members-or nominal Catholics-has reported that attendance at Sunday Mass is down 10 percent in four years from 184,106 in 1984 to 166,297 in 1988...
...Such a consciousness is not without pain and struggle, but it enables us to be more humane-more civilized-one to the other, and in so doing, to become more God-like, more divine-the central object of religion and of Catholicism...
...I only know that we must...
...Our goal could be a society so life-affirming that, no matter what the law was, abortion, except in rare and tragic cases, wouldn 't be something Americans would even consider choosing...
...Would white parishioners accept a black pastor in places like "Southie...
...It is a circumstance sure to put Catholic racial attitudes to a test, and we'll quickly learn as a church the depth of our professions about equality...
...To be truly Catholic-to be universal-is to have a profound religious conviction that we are obliged by our catholicity to have a hunger and thirst for justice-a passion for political, economic, and religious justice-not only for citizens of the U.S.A...
...Either we are that people or we are merely an association held together by a decaying organization and dwindling hereditary and historical ties...
...I can only speculate, but I would say yes for two reasons: the first is based on my discussions with many bishops, my travels, and on what I read in the newspapers and see on television...
...Without worship we find no unity...
...We need to look at their fears, yes...
...community and country need to know, reverence, and transmit our cherished traditions of political liberty while never minimizing or sacrificing the deepest aspirations for economic liberty as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your poor, your downtrodden...
...This tradition goes back at least as far as St...
...To make of the earth a homeland rather than an exile," to quote Michael Harrington, has always been the processive work of the church compassionate...
...But what consolation is it that one problem is eased by another just as serious...
...Here they are in simplified form: the people of the church (that we become truly one as the Body of Christ, one people, with every member perceived as vital...
...Whatever the dedication of permanent deacons and lay ministers, as a sacramental church Catholicism cannot get along without priests...
...It is inevitable that we think of the universal church in terms of its manifestation closest to us-in this case, the church in our country...
...New York Times, October 13,1989...
...But there is one issue which undoubtedly will be important to Catholics, indeed, to all Americans: protection of the natural systems that sustain life on this planet...
...John Deedy is a former managing editor of Commonweal...
...In the 1990s every church worthy of the name should be an arm or a collective healing hand within the already functioning but small-scale Partnership for the Homeless: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, instructing the ignorant...
...the social mission of the church (that we commit ourselves to the poorest of the poor-the materially hungry, the spiritually starved...
...That requires work too, reading, writing, and practice...
...Kenneth L, Woodward The most important challenge facing the church in the 1990s is the same challenge it failed to meet in the 1980s and 1970s: passing on the faith and traditions of the church to the next generation...
...Kenneth L. Woodward is a senior writer for Newsweek...
...But memory is a great reviver: "We are our memories," wrote Borges...
...We know from studies that our mainline Protestant brethren have utterly failed to pass on the faith...
...I do not hear such disaffecting pronouncements as responses to the Gospel...
...to be global...
...Caribbean...
...but for peoples of other nations and other religions also...
...Anecdotally one knows that in a group of laity, one merely need raise the question of the quality of preaching and the subject dominates the rest of the evening's conversation...
...A universal complaint I hear from serious Catholic parents is that they send their children to Catholic universities only to find that "nothing took...
...Would the same needs be felt by Catholics throughout the United States...
...I wouldn't hesitate to call them "challenges" faced by the Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York during the next decade...
...But currently, I'm afraid, our public behavior on abortion bears the blame...
...I honestly don't know many places in the United States not mirrored in some way in the Archdiocese of New York...
...Some of them I hear as expressions of misogyny...
...To be Catholic is to claim the Gospel and the life of Jesus as our primary inspiration...
...So far I've been wrong every time...
...We're seen as cold, insensitive dogmatists...
...I'm referring to the Catholic campaign against abortion in this country...
...Our witness in the public high schools of New York City, for instance, is dim...
...Larger question: Will one of the largest and richest churches in Roman Catholicism be reduced to the necessary strategy of a missionary church, importing priests to minister to its congregations...
...We can only retrieve that moment if we can find our deep and fundamental unity-first in the Eucharist and then in the demands of love which flow from it...
...We're talking about two things here: vocations and religious practice...
...instead, we must continue to construct the church's identity and history...
...without it, we are a dead body that only calls itself Catholic...
...What about the majority...
...Already the term "priestless Sundays" has entered the American Catholic lexicon, and we read of parishes being consolidated, and of rotating pastoral ministries...
...Questions without answers, right now...
...John J. O'Connor John J. O'Connor M y comments on challenges to Catholics in the decade ahead would be far more spec-ulative had the Archdiocese of New York not recently come through an extraordinary synod...
...Noting the reaction of the young in the audience at the recent Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, which revolves around the theme of justice and God's judgment in an amoral world, Rabbi Eugene Borowitz asks: "Are they-more than a generation removed from the film's central figures and trained at 'winning is the only thing'-too tough-minded, too cynical to expect justice or worry about its absence...
...Catholics we need to be deeply imbued with the Gospel of Jesus-its message and spirit need to be central in our everyday lives and its words need to nourish us at worship and prayer...
...Deconstructionists who dismiss Paul, Augustine, and the Cappadocian Fathers as impossibly sexist, and restorationists who identify "tradition" with practices about as ancient as our great-grandmothers, have both done a lot of damage to a sense of Catholic identity...
...Each of these men understood that the universality of Catholic truth took on a particularly dynamic expression when mediated through the distinctive experience of being American...
...Rev...
...Research evidence shows that the quality of Sunday preaching is the strongest predictor of strength of affiliation with the church, after the religious behavior of the spouse...
...That involves a greater grasp of history, the symbols, the classic texts, the images and stories, and the affective dimensions of the heritage...
...It is in eucharistic community that our Catholic identity lies...
...How silly to have set ourselves against "choice...
...I understand the women who hear a different emphasis and have, in conscience, split...
...Maybe it still is...
...and my interaction with citizens of other countries is helping me to realize that we as a country and a people claim and proclaim "American" when in reality the total Western Hemisphere-the two continents-are all part of America...
...They must be recognized, anticipated, worked for, prized...
...Presently she is the campus minister at Our Lady of Victory Academy in Dobbs Ferry, New York.f Women Religious...
...A hint: whatever else may be on the horizon, it won't be the "end of history," Washington's recent Hegelian fever notwithstanding...
...We could put our lobbying energy into, say, social policies that would encourage adoption (instead of penalizing families financially as is now the case) and would make sure money and social services were available for any woman who might have chosen abortion because she couldn't manage to raise a child on her own...
...Judging a community of the spirit in terms of numbers seems crass but numbers are all we have...
...members of diverse religious beliefs...
...It's a matter of moving our whole communal vision to that deeper ground where in fact, and in faith, we believe all people are already reconciled: the ground that gives us, day after day, the Bread of Life that nourishes and renews us in love...
...It seems to me that the greatest challenge to American Catholics in the next ten years is whether we can put ordinary Catholic believers in touch with all these aspects of their heritage in ways that will make the fullness of the heritage their own...
...Susan Cahill H oly mother church has been taking it on the chin these years...
...A nice way for American Catholics to celebrate Commonweal's sixty-fifth anniversary would be to try to let ourselves be a conduit for that influence through the years until Commonweal's seventy-fifth and the Christian era's (gulp) two-thousandth...
...Instead of continuing our aggressive lobbying to make abortion illegal, tearing our state legislatures apart and adding to the unbearably ugly name-calling on statehouse steps, we could change our legislative aim...
...We haven't reached the point of panic which for some existed when priests and sisters were leaving in droves, schools were shutting one after another, and the whole ball of wax seemed to be coming undone...
...George Weigel is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, and the author, most recently, o/Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (Paulist Press...
...I hope we do have a full decade to communicate that word...
...Cardinal John J. O'Connor is the archbishop of New York...
...Will many be boarded up for lack of priests and because of fewer worshippers...
...It is clear that such attitudes of undiscerning acceptance or undiscerning resistance to changes can bring about the gradual loss of the great heritage that is ours to pass on, both for the sake of those who will make up the Catholic community of the future and for the sake of those other Christians and those of other religions for whom the Catholic tradition offers a certain complementarity...
...We are a people overpowered by God's love...
...My parish church, for one, is still one of grandparents and grandchildren...
...We've used the plank to build barricades around abortion clinics...
...I believe my major challenge is precisely to give them the word of God, beginning with the word that every single one of us is an indispensable member of the Body of Christ-each desperately needed by the other, each loved profoundly by the Christ who died for us...
...John Deedy It's strange from one who doesn't particularly account himself an institutional type, yet I'd say the biggest challenge in the next decade to the American church, and therefore Catholics themselves, is maintaining an effective institutional presence...
...once it was the pill...
...and elsewhere...
...Disaffection, after all, is no sin, no lie...
...I imagine it in the 1990s where it happened first, in a city, among the outcast poor and their children...
...If canon law is rewritten in the spirit of the Gospel message and not as a reproduction of European, Roman social laws, we will begin to disarm personally, socially, and institutionally-thus fulfilling the Gospel message, "see these Christians, how they love one another...
...Teachers who have been baptized into a consciousness of all children as the children of God must sacrifice the securities of small classes, parking lots, and segregated suburban student bodies to serve the children of the urban poor as imaginatively as good-spirited parents and teachers nurture their own children...
...One must wonder if it's the parish churches' turn next...
...No doubt there are historic reasons for this perception of American Catholics...
...The issue, in the pivot, is "How much of this rich tradition of Catholic faith have I made my own, in my mind, my heart, and my behavior...
...Their main contact with the parish is the weekend liturgy and the principal exchange between priest and people is the homily...
...It was virtually a cry of anguish...
...I shudder to think of all the hype the world is bound to bear during this decade...
...Plenum...
...Individually and institutionally, we give generously to the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless...yet we're not perceived by the rest of society as a loving and compassionate people...
...Not to put too fine an edge on the subject, the laity have the right in strict, commutative justice to have the Gospel preached to them with skill...
...Without unity we cannot leaven the loaf or salt the earth...
...Painful as it is, we need to make something like a communal confession...
...The synod itself was composed of 243 people: lay, clergy, single, married, young, middle-aged, old, poor, wealthy, black, brown, yellow, white, sighted, unsighted, able and disabled...
...it will compel us to rethink and redirect our nation's priorities...
...The question at hand, however, has not to do with the psychosexual context of an aging clerical subculture but rather with the continuing challenge of the Incarnation...
...William K. Reilly I am not sure I know the biggest challenge to American Catholics in the next ten years...
...it includes the homeless and helpless, the drug-ridden and poverty-stricken, the wealthy, and every conceivable state in between...
...Such a perspective transcends nationalism which can become a form of religion...
...Educating poor urban children, teaching them the implications of their humanity, is one of the most challenging projects for Christian workers of the 1990s...
...The pews will never be so full again, after today's senior generations of faithful churchgoers have gone to their reward...
...In the next decade the challenge is to continue the birthing process, to sustain a corporal and spiritual midwifery that is as fierce a current in the Catholic tradition as are the betrayals, the stillbirths...
...As I have been able to observe what is going on, there is a small minority of Catholics who are both intellectually curious about their tradition and wholeheartedly committed to it, but there is a large majority who are vaguely holding on and waiting for something more to happen which will make sense of their own fidelity...
...Francis to the American ideal of wilderness...
...The word of God tells us that unless we reverence every human person, we will ultimately destroy ourselves with contempt...
...The implication seems to be that there are tens of thousands of such people...
...I believe a pastoral is needed on nature and stewardship, on our ethical obligations to the earth...
...Role models, the saints and prophets in the church's ranks, abound...
...Give us the sacramental word of God in the confessional, in the Eucharist...
...Each knew that Rome had much to teach America, and that America had things to teach its elder sister on the Tiber...
...As U.S...
...Some American Catholics, women in par-ticular, have a tough time not chickening out...
...Her saints have done it down the centuries...
...Time, which some say is money, must be sacrificed...
...Yet homiletic training is a minor element in most seminary education and improving the quality of preaching is a minor concern, it would seem, of most priests...
...I am convinced that our world is coming to a new consciousness about nonviolence, peace, and feminism-the antithesis to sexism and patriarchy...
...At the moment their target is condoms within the AIDS-education curriculum...
...But there will be people occupying them...
...Our "enduring principles," as the 1924 editorial put it, already provide a broader and deeper basis for reconciliation than our rhetoric on this issue has let us see...
...But the real question is what is to take the place of the rejected patterns of blind adherence...
...And in this time of in-between, I believe we are called to the recovery and extension of a distinctive Catholic identity: the fundamental prerequisite to evangelization and service...
...There's something much deeper at stake than "rights...
...Quaint as that might sound, I think it holds true...
...the prayer of the church (that we become a holy people, particularly through the sacramental life of the church...
...Monika K. Hellwig is professor of theology at Georgetown University and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America...
...We haven't yet seen how to hold and express deep convictions about the sanctity of life while still embracing the sanctity, the precious holiness of the life of the person who feels threatened by us...
...Will this church, handicapped by a shortage of priests, be able to carry on effectively with its more detached membership...
...Rome and the bishop (who's probably not much of a preacher either) are irrelevant...
...Repairing the damage will mean-and this is a crucial part of the "extension" of Catholic identity-a renewed commitment to ecumenism, but an ecumenism focused less on institutional issues and more on the recovery and development of the classic Christian tradition as expressed in the oikumene of the first seven councils...
...But waiting in joyful hope doesn't mean just waiting around...
...Without a strong sense of our own identity, based on what is really central to Catholic tradition, ecumenism and tolerance may have a disorienting effect...
...I myself find the identity by looking along a historical axis for continuity and consistency in the midst of change, but it seems to me that we have not provided ordinary Catholics, unspecialized in theology or church history, the resources with which they might make such discoveries of continuity for themselves...
...A new consciousness about ourselves, our planet, and our relationships with each other which transcends nationalism, racism, classism, and sexism compels us to become one world with God, with liberty and justice for all-women and men...
...They wear their religion like a loose sweat shirt...
...The answer is that preaching is an acquirable skill...
...Their services will be less in demand, apart from certain rites of Catholic passage, like First Communion, marriage, burial (baptism already having been widely taken over by permanent deacons...
...How we do that I do not know...
...when I sing the song, "America," or use the term, America, I sing, pray, and think Americas-all the peoples of America-North, South, Central, and the COMING GREAT BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS...
...Effective preachers, however, can be made with effort and practice...
...Andrew M. Greeley is on the staff of the National Opinion Research Center and a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona...
...we need to think in terms of a world community of five to six billion people and about 179 nations...
...This will mean extending the ecumenical conversation to include renascent evangelical Protestantism, while intensifying the dialogue with those mainline theologians (such as George Lindbeck, Thomas Oden, Robert Jenson) who are consciously crafting a "postmodern" Christian dogmatics...
...Years ago an archbishop of Philadelphia advised against being overly alarmed about the drift of young Catholics from conventional religious practice, saying they'd be back once they were settled into marriage and the raising of families...
...He is the author of Religious Change in America (Harvard University Press) and Saint Valentine's Night (Warner...
...For two years, weekly discussions were held in a cross section of parishes concerning the findings of the questionnaires and the applicability of the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council to such findings...
...the second is the nature of New York itself...
...Nothing can do so much for the betterment, the happiness, and the peace of the American people," said Commonweal's first editorial in 1924, "as the influence of the enduring and tested principles of Catholic Christianity...
...For those who experienced them, Catholic schools once worked well in passing on the faith...
...They did so primarily by providing in successive stages an environment in which the call to discipleship was connected, often unconsciously but just as effectively, to the various stages of adolescence...
...Catholic deconstructionists and Catholic "restorationists" alike have missed the crucial truth in Jaroslav Pelikan's definition of "tradition" as the living faith of those who have gone before...
...As of this moment, though, we've got a logjam in the flow, a clog that's keeping the wisdom and love of the Holy Spirit from getting through to us...
...But today, as then, parochial (inappropriate word) schooling is available to only a minority...
...The archdiocese stretches for some 165 miles, from ocean to mountains, from cobblestones to vineyards and cornfields, horse farms and rivers and lakes, cities and towns...
...Abigail McCarthy A church is a community of believers...
...On the other hand, if cultural Catholicism is the mode of the new generations, will it be necessary to have as many priests as before...
...With the word of God, we can be serious about poverty and racism, about homelessness and drugs and abortion, about discrimination of every kind...
...What strikes me most about the young Catholics I meet between fifteen and thirty is not only how little they know about their faith but also how much they fail to recognize that, among other things, Christianity offers a critique of their own society and culture...
...I suggest we find them in three of the great figures of our history: John Carroll, Isaac Hecker, and James Gibbons...
...The sad reality is that in the United States they are not being produced in anywhere near the numbers needed to care for a community that in nominal figures is 55 million and growing...
...Poor children, mostly minorities, are dying from neglect and prejudice and unkindness in the classrooms of America's big-city public schools...
...The Catholic community at-large is breaking away from dogged adherence to formulae of belief and rules of conduct which were accepted uncritically as though understanding were not involved in the matter...
...Abigail McCarthy is a regular columnist and long-time contributor to Commonweal...
...the clergy must provide it...
...Remembering helps to refocus vision: the vision of a processive, nurturing mother church generating the works of mercy...
...Right now at least one religious sociologist is heralding their return, although I don't see it...
...But somehow, parents, teachers, parish workers, clergy, and hierarchy have got to get the message across to young people that to be a Catholic is to be different, certainly different from what the media and malls of the youth culture tell them to be...
...We haven't been loving enough with those who disagree with us...
...For it's likely they're returning with the looser concern about dogma and the detachment from church structure that have characterized them to date...
...everybody else talked...
...In response to this argument (which even the most liberal of clerics resent, or so it seems), I often hear it said, "What about the really good priest that everyone loves, but who can't preach very well...
...Will it allow itself to be reshaped in any significant way by believers formed by symbols rather than a catechetical knowledge of faith...
...Like the normal human beings we are, we've let our slogans get the better of us, let them blind us to the beauty in which we really believe...
...We must face the fact that polarization, divisiveness, and an obsession with our differences have plagued the Catholic community since Vatican II...
...The one challenge that emerged from our synod reflections as both overriding and undergirding all others, however, was expressed as a constant plea: "Give us the word of God...
...What they tend to see is discontinuity...
...No less knotty is the issue of observance...
...Which is another way of saying that we cannot meet any other challenge of our day until we truly come to believe in the worth and dignity and sacredness of every human person...
...Yet most American Catholics give their priests very poor grades on what they consider to be priests' most important role...
...One can also learn creative writing, which is what a homily is...
...Would turning to Carroll, Hecker, and Gibbons involve a kind of neo-Americanism...
...The bishops of the United States have given us pastorals on the economy and on nuclear arms...
...These are just a couple of concrete suggestions...
...And if that insipid sounding "respect" is all we have for life, then God help us...
...The stereotype is not the reality of New York City, and New York City is not the Archdiocese of New York...
...William K. Reilly is administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency...
...A "universal catechism" won't do it...
...Peggy Rosenthal is the author of Words and Values: Some Leading Words and Where They Lead Us (Oxford University Press...
...The priest who fails to do so has no right to take his salary and, I would think, is bound injustice to restitution...
...A woman I know summed up the lay reaction perfectly, "Each time a new priest comes to the parish I say to myself that this is the one who will be able to preach a good homily...
...Ecumenism and an increased tolerance may be working in the same direction...
...And here, despite the fact that the number of Catholics is rising because of immigration and conversion, the community centered on the Eucharist seems to be dissolving...
...The aftershocks of twelve years of government-blessed greed are going to demand rescues-without-measure...
...the family and the church (that family life be radically renewed with the help of the community of the church...
...Here also, I notice, there are two typical reactions from those who do not have a really deep, personally assimilated grounding in the tradition...
...Such a consciousness is beginning to pervade Catholics in the U.S...
...By "recovery," I mean a Catholic identity rooted in the classic Christological and Trinitarian understandings of the first seven ecumenical councils...
...In some contexts, the lack of disaffection means brain death...
...Curiously those who are most prone to denounce injustice in the far reaches of the world are not at all concerned about the injustice of bad preaching...
...Great preachers may well be born not made...
...Still, we are at another moment of truth...
...Teachers who have been confirmed into adult Christian courage must take some responsibility for resisting the spiritual maiming, the bullying, of the dark-skinned and non-English-speaking public schoolchildren by oppressive and corrupt, predominantly white, school systems...
...What we haven't yet done-and I think this is the decade's biggest challenge for us-is to take the plank from our eye and build a bridge to the people we've been intimidating...
...The Gospel values of nonviolence, disarmament, friendship, service, and equality propel us to challenge the militarization of our nation and our planet...
...Like generations before us, our vocation is to "wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord...
...Without worship we are distanced from God, the author of justice...
...In debate, we've hit our opponents over the head with it...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
