SATURDAY, JUNE 21
Another kind of “Ten Commandments” and global Catholicism
Father Ron Rolheiser, David Allen offer insight, challenge to Paulist community
VIEW A PHOTO ALBUM FROM THE SATURDAY SESSIONS
by Christopher Gaul
special to paulist.org
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Still buzzing from the challenges offered by the two Friday morning speakers, the Paulist Fathers, associates, collaborators and friends were treated the next day to two presentations that were quite different: one stunning, the other demanding.
Father Ronald Rolheiser, O.M.I., syndicated columnist for Catholic News Service and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Tex. called upon the Paulists to embrace “Ten Commandments for the Long Haul.”
Father Rolheiser encouraged the Paulists to keep in mind certain principles as they set their ecclesial and ministerial “gauges” to engage the culture and the church today.
He presented them as a form of “Ten Commandments,” of which the following is an abridged version.
1. “Be beyond ideology, be both post-liberal and post-conservative: Have an unlisted ideological number! Refuse to let yourself be pre-defined by any ideology of the left or the right.
2. “Strive to incarnate both the kenotic and the triumphant Christ: Don’t be afraid to be nothing and don’t be afraid to be everything!
3. “Be for the marginalized, without being marginalized yourselves: Walk a thin tightrope! Take your stand with the marginalized, even as you yourselves, as a community, remain mainstream, respected for your sanity, balance, and capacity to relate warmly and deeply to every kind of person and group. Be known for your radical stance for the poor even as you remain renowned for your wide sanity.
4. “Be leaders without being elitist: Be led by the artist, but listen to the street!
5. “Be iconoclastic and pious at the same time: Don’t be afraid to smash idols and don’t be afraid to bow in reverence! Help smash the false gods that need to be smashed, even as you are unafraid to kneel often in reverence.
6. “Be equally committed to social justice and to intimacy with Jesus: Be open to leading both the peace march and the rosary!
7. “Be thoroughly in the world, even as you are rooted elsewhere: Live in a tortured complexity! Love the world, love its pagan beauties, and let it take your breath away, even as you root your heart in something deeper so that the realities of faith also take your breath away. Carry the tension between having a hopeless love for the world and a hopeless love for things beyond it.
8. “Ponder, in the biblical sense, by being the carriers of tension inside the community: Eat the tension around you! Mary, the prototype of discipleship, pondered, not by thinking deep contemplative thoughts, but by holding, carrying, and transforming tension so as not to give it back in kind.
9. “Help incarnate a deeper maturity: Go into dark places, but don’t sin! Stand up for the God-given freedoms we enjoy in our culture, even as you model and show others how that freedom can be carried in a way that never abuses it. Like Jesus, who went into the singles-bars of his time (except he didn’t sin), walk in great freedom, go into dark places, but go there, not to assert human autonomy, but to take God’s light there.
10. “Make love to the song! Forget about yourself and your audience! A bad singer on stage makes love to himself; a more mature singer makes love to his audience; a fully mature singer makes love to the song. Ministry is the same. Forget about yourself, your image, your need to prove yourself, and eventually forget about your audience too so that you and your song are not about yourself or your people, but about God.”
Wrapping up the convocation’s four keynote presentations, John L. Allen Jr., senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and Vatican analyst for CNN and NPR, presented an eye-opening, even eye-popping account of the Roman Catholic Church’s “explosive growth” and the challenges it presents to the church and the Paulists.
In a in a riveting Power Point presentation, Mr. Allen revealed that at the end of the 20th century there were 1.1 billion Roman Catholics in the world, with 308 million of them in North America and Europe, but fully 720 million in the “Global South” of Africa and South America. That today, two of every three Catholics live in the Global South and that by 2025 three of four Catholics will reside in Africa, South America and Asia, and not in those countries Catholics have historically occupied.
The statistics represent, Mr. Allen asserted, the “most dramatic and profound demographic transformation in the Roman Catholic Church’s history.”
He called this transformation “equivalent in importance and impact to that moment in the First Century when St. Paul left the communities of Asia Minor and moved into the Asian world, thereby transforming Christianity from a second Palestinian Judaism into a world-wide religious movement in the Greco Roman context.”
We are, Mr. Allen said, “waking up to a new world in which Catholicism is no longer a European and North American phenomenon.”
Unlike the sometimes myopic view of U.S. Catholics, the universal Catholic story “is not one of decline, attrition and apathy but one of explosive growth, and the primary pastoral challenge is managing that growth,” he said.
Mr. Allen said that one “very important” role the Paulists can play today is to help Catholics better perceive the global dimensions of the faith while making an important contribution to ecumenism in the face of the dramatically burgeoning growth of charismatic and Pentecostal movements, especially in Central and South America.
“Pentecostalism is not only the most rapidly growing form of Christianity in the world but the most rapidly growing form of religiosity,” Mr. Allen noted.
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