VIEW A PHOTO ALBUM FROM THE FRIDAY SESSIONS

by Christopher Gaul
special to paulist.org

PHOTO ALBUM

Launch photo album from the Friday sessions

The convocation was jump-started Friday morning, June 20, with stimulating and challenging presentations from two celebrated speakers, David J. O’Brien, biographer of Paulist founder Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, and D. Scott Appleby, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

As Dr. O’Brien noted, the anniversary celebration was so important “because the Paulist heritage is at the very center of American Catholic history,” while Dr. Appleby pursued the theme of a search for both a usable past and “a glorious future” for the Paulists.

In tracing the history of Father Hecker and the early Paulist Fathers as they struggled with the condemnation by Rome of Father Hecker’s so-called “Americanism,” Dr. O’Brien reminded today’s Paulists, priests and laity, that Father Hecker’s “way of being Catholic in America arose from his understanding that freedom required a new strategy, aimed at winning personal conviction and offering the world credible, persuasive Catholic ways of thinking about the great issues of the day.”

Catholicism to Father Hecker was “about everybody and everything,” Dr. O’Brien said, “not a subculture but an instrument of the Holy Spirit to bring about the unity of the human family with God, and one another.”

And then he turned to more contemporary times. Criticizing, among other things, what he called the “remarkably passive reaction of most Catholic elites, clerical, religious and lay” to the sexual abuse crisis and the “equally remarkable” absence of organized support for Catholic social teaching, Dr. O’Brien challenged today’s Paulists to help bring about a re-birth of “Americanist” ideas in the tradition of their founder.

It is, he said, “that what happens in the world around the church really matters, that history is and should be a matter of shared responsibility, that knowledge, freedom, economic security and political participation are genuine goods, and that the spirit of God is always at work in the human heart, in the church, and in history.”

He encouraged the Paulist family to recapture a touch of Father Hecker’s faith in America and Americans, quoting one of the founder’s more memorable calls to action:

“Nowhere is there a promise of a brighter future for the church than in our own country. … For religion is never so beautiful as when in connection with knowledge and freedom. Let us, therefore, arise and open our eyes to the bright future that is before us.”

Dr. Appleby’s challenge to the Paulists, both priests and laity, underscored the “superb” job they do as a collaborative clergy-lay ministry, but asked, “So what is the problem?”

“If the Paulists are doing what the church should be doing – offering reconciliation, healing and the possibility of forgiveness and the act of receiving forgiveness,” he said, “it is also true that the church at large is not perceived as first and foremost an agent of reconciliation; lamentably, it is frequently these days a sign of division, scandal, low morale, (and) ‘decline.’”

For a missionary society “of relatively modest size and means,” Dr. Appleby asserted that the Paulists need “to extend your influence even more deeply and broadly in church society.”

It is, he acknowledged, “not an easy thing to accomplish,” but having a Servant of God on the road to canonization as the founder, “certainly should bring natural as well as supernatural assistance.”

In any case, Dr. Appleby said, the challenge is succinctly articulated by a staff member of the Paulist Center in Boston who, on the Paulist website video, comments:

“If we could only find a way to replicate (the Paulist ministry), it could be a powerful force for our church and society.”

That challenge needs to be met not only by the diminishing number of ageing Paulist Fathers but by their growing number of Paulist lay associates and collaborators, Dr. Appleby insisted.

Noting that the Paulist laity is already “helping you run the ship,” he said he assumes “that you trust these lay people with your wonderful legacy because you have identified and recruited loyal, faithful, competent Catholics who have internalized your mission and charism, who are no threat to priestly ministry and whom you treat as full peers.”

The Paulist Fathers know that their lay companions in mission possess “not only faith and dedication commensurate to your own, but skills and expertise which you do not possess, through no fault of your own.”

“Hey guys,” Dr. Appleby smilingly told the Paulist Fathers present, “they can’t forgive sins or consecrate the Eucharist, but they can do a lot else.”