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Parish ministry
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
How to make justice
a parish affair
Kevin Clarke
The U.S. Catholic bishops have issued a new statement asking that everyone in the parish—not just some select little social-justice group—do their part to take on the call to social responsibility. Here's how your parish can plug into the action.
SURE, SHE'S HEARD OF IT, one director of a parish social outreach office says about the "Communities of Salt and Light" statement from the U.S. bishops. We'll call her "Sarah" (a good name for someone who sometimes feels she's being asked to do the impossible). Sarah has not only heard of the document, she's pretty excited about its message of integrating the social mission of the church into the wider life of a parish. The only problem is she's not too sure how to go about getting the rest of her parish as excited.
She's seen them excited before. It didn't last long. A few years back, this particular parish, which shall remain nameless to protect the dissident, realized that the church's social mission—its responsibility to reach out and see to the needs of the wider community—required that they organize some resources and cash and then start up an outreach office, hiring Sarah and two part-time workers to run the show.
To this hour that office provides a variety of community services, including legal aid to immigrants and clothing, food, and furniture to those who need them.
That's the good news; the bad news, Sarah says, is that now most of her fellow parishioners sort of figure they can lie back on their laurels and her hard work.
"The volunteers are not as plentiful as they could be," she says.
"I think [the parish] tends to think they've sort of delegated the responsibility to us. . . . A lot of people will just throw money at a problem.
"I can get the parish council and the finance committee to support projects, but I can't get people to come out and provide the time. They thought it was nice and then they just put it aside."
THAT'S JUST NOT THE WAY AMERICA'S Catholic bishops see real parish life being realized. They think U.S. parishes need to reflect a stronger sense of social mission in every aspect of parish life—liturgy, education, service, and advocacy. That's the message they hope to get out to parishes through their "Communities of Salt and Light" statement.
The United States Catholic Conference, the public-policy arm of the U.S. bishops, is backing up "Salt and Light" with a manual intended to help turn that statement into a daily reality. But it probably won't come as a shock to a lot of people to hear that many parish social-justice coordinators don't expect to see that process happening particularly quickly. These same folk, however, are embracing the bishops' statement as part of a long campaign of persuasion and conversion of their fellow parishioners.
Other parishes may not be jumping on the Salt and Light process, even though their leaders are aware of it, because, frankly, there's too much going on as it is.
WERNER KOELLNER AT ST. STEPHEN'S PARISH in Walnut Creek, California finds himself in a position probably shared by a lot of social-concerns committee members.
"Our pastor's very much interested in furthering our interest and understanding of social concerns, but perhaps two thirds of our parish are slightly older people who are not as open to change as some of the younger ones.
"On the other hand, the younger ones have not been drawn enough into the life of the parish, into the spirit . . . We have this funny gap."
"Salt and Light" and its accompanying USCC manual could provide Koellner with one way to fill that funny gap. But his parish has just begun a diocesan-wide RENEW program and adding one more parish overhaul effort to his plate just seems a little too much. Though he's extremely interested in "Salt and Light" and its potential to influence attitudes at St. Stephen's, "We haven't had a chance to talk seriously about 'Salt and Light,'" he says.
(Not to worry, says the USCC's Sister Joan Hart. By no means was the USCC manual meant to be the end all and be all in parish rejuvenation. Hart thinks Salt and Light in fact can make a natural accompaniment to efforts like RENEW, serving as a focal point for some of the workshop sessions that the RENEW process includes.)
FOR PARISH LEADERS WHO PREFER A FORMAL approach to an effort like "Salt and Light"—that is, one that includes traditional stuff like classrooms, erasers, and homework—a variety of programs are cropping up across the country. These efforts are meant to arm parish leaders with all the information, strategies, and debating points they're going to need to make sense of "Salt and Light" to their fellow parishioners.
Basic training on training basics
ONE OF THE MORE COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAMS has been put together in the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware. There, Catholic Charities' Peggy Prevoznik Heins has developed a leadership-training program for the diocese and has put together a manual that describes the process. Her program is a unique co-mingling of worship and study that in a way reflects "Salt and Light's" emphasis on grounding all social-justice work in scripture and worship.
Prevoznik Heins has three basic goals. By the end of the training, each participant should (1) "be able to articulate their baptismal call to social justice," an ability that will come in handy when they have to go home to explain things in the church basement; (2) have a firm understanding of the church's social teaching, and (3) have spent some time on "skill development . . . breaking down a problem to a winnable issue, setting goals, brainstorming strategies to achieve your goals, how to do social analysis." And certainly not least among important parish-based skills is "learning how to listen to each other."
Experience has Prevoznik Heins convinced that something really lacking among many social-justice types—usually armed with no more than some information and a trunkload of good intentions—is practical training in community-organizing skills: how to talk to each other, how to brainstorm, how even to handle something as apparently facile as efficiently running a meeting. Too many times such skills are taken for granted until they are discovered lacking long after the damage has been done to feelings and organizing potential.
To do the work of translating "knowledge into action, skill development is crucial," Prevoznik Heins says.
"I think talking about 'Salt and Light' is one thing. I mean, it's necessary; but if you don't get some skills to put 'Salt and Light' into practice, you're not doing much good."
SPENDING SOME TIME IN TRAINING, she thinks, is the beginning of doing some good. Diocesan social ministry directors across the country apparently agree. Asked what would top their wish lists for improving the way parishes try to fulfill the church's social mission, they repeatedly cite training and organizing-skills development.
That need dovetails nicely into one "Salt and Light" goal: integrating scripture and worship with social concerns.
"What I find," says Prevoznik Heins, "is that people are really hungry for the gospel message, hungry for scripture reflection . . . . people are hungry for the pure and radical message of the gospel—who God is and what we are called to do."
BUT THE GOSPEL IS MORE THAN JUST a source for spiritual inspiration for the sessions that Prevoznik Heins runs, it also functions as a worthy handbook on community organizing.
"People worry about recruitment and want to know what to do about it all the time. They always come up with bulletin announcements to recruit people and they're always frustrated when it doesn't work.
"Well, how did Jesus do recruitment?" Prevoznik Heins asks. "One to one" is the tactic her trainees discover in scripture.
While it might be ideal if all parish leaders had the chance to enroll in a program like the one Prevoznik Heins offers, it's also true that some folks seem capable of picking up their organizing skills on the fly.
A TEXAS PARISH SOCIAL MINISTRY DIRECTOR has found that one way to expose her parishioners to social issues and direct service is to connect specific groups with civic needs that in some way or other complement each other. For instance, her Austin parish's adult-singles community has agreed to sponsor and staff a mentoring program with students at a nearby youth center.
Keeping things concrete is perhaps the major strategy Nonnie Andre has learned in the years she has devoted to the social-justice committee at Corpus Christi Parish in Roseville, Minnesota. It's easy to get a sense of the "concreteness" of Andre's attitude when she sort of spontaneously erupts with comments like: "What the hell else is [scripture] calling us to do?" by way of explaining her longtime devotion to the work.
She brings that common-sense mentality to attempts to make social mission a more natural and accepted presence to her parish community. Foremost among her strategies is to keep social issues like homelessness and unemployment—and the church's positions on them—always before the eyes of her people. Andre says it's impossible for people at her church to enter for Mass without "tripping over some kind of poster" with a scriptural message about taking care of the poor, feeding the hungry, or one that somehow illuminates an issue of current concern.
She also keeps her messages short and sweet. Andre's committee's bulletin inserts include no more than three points about a particular issue along with three recommended actions.
"That's just common sense," she says. "That's the way of life today. With three items, they might actually read it and do something. But if you give them 25, it gets overwhelming and [your appeal notice] gets trashed.
"Trying to educate—that's what we work hardest on . . . At voting time, we do a kind of blitz on Christian citizenship (one of "Salt and Light's" key points), but we don't say, 'This is how you should vote.' We say, 'These are the issues that [the church leadership] is concerned with."
Searching for words
AVOIDING SOME OF THE TRICKY LINGO ONLY folks at social-justice meetings seem to understand and constantly appealing to the potent statements on economic and justice issues that members of church leadership have already made has worked best for Andre's group—especially with parishioners who may be more conservative thinkers on social issues.
And if all else fails, Andre reaches for a really higher authority and pulls out a Bible. Why should anyone take her committee's word on anything, she asks, when she can find a biblical passage that captures the moral nuances of virtually any current social problem?
"It's easy for them to dismiss us as 'that radical fringe,' so we never make a point that's purely political or ideological, you make [your positions] through a reliance on church teaching and you repeat and repeat and repeat . . . There aren't any tricks to it. What it is is consistency and constancy."
ANDRE AND HER FELLOW COMMITTEE MEMBERS make use of every avenue of communication open to them: bulletin announcements and inserts, scripture readings, prayer offerings, and, most important, homilies. The good relationship her committee enjoys with Corpus Christi's pastor allows them to have a good level of influence over the nature and content of weekly homilies.
"If people leave Saturday or Sunday Mass without knowing something about [peace and justice issues] than they must have been sleeping," she says.
The importance of good connections
WHAT IS ESPECIALLY HELPFUL TO PEOPLE like Andre is the kind of support they can tap into at their local diocesan office. This year the St. Paul/Minneapolis archdiocese began an ambitious program of education and advocacy focused on the future economic well-being of the Twin Cities area.
Called "Metro Futures," the program represents a diocesan preemptive strike on the economic disparities that have been developing in the metropolitan area in terms of income, job locations, transportation resources, and the movement of people and wealth from the Twin Cities' urban center to the surrounding suburbs. This diocesan call to action came complete with a folder full of resources and recommendations for liturgies, strategizing, and community events.
Andre's committee seized on the package to plan a series of Masses that tied the issues raised by Metro Futures into the music, homilies, and prayer petitions of Corpus Christi services. Statistical information and suggested actions were handed out as flyers and inserted into the parish bulletins. Local politicians were invited to speak on the area's economic future during special parish meetings.
HOW WAS ANDRE'S GROUP able to pull all that off?
It wasn't easy. Their ability to interconnect so many different elements of parish life didn't happen overnight. She says "a very active social-justice committee" labored for years in a sometimes frustrating campaign to get the community working together better. The effort—and the patience it required—paid off.
"We did some real work this year," Andre says, adding, "and not just our little social-justice group.
"We [learned to] work more closely with our liturgy committee. We've asked the liturgist to attend our meetings, and a representative from ours attends theirs. They know what we're doing, and we know what they're doing."
A SPIN-OFF OF ALL THE WORK CORPUS CHRISTI put into Metro Futures was the creation of a Legislative Action Group. That's the kind of program several diocesan social-ministry directors noted as an especially effective tool to draw volunteer parishioners into social issues while having a real impact on the legislative process.
Paul Woolley, the director of social-justice resources for Catholic Charities in Oakland, says his diocese has even been able to link a group of parishes into a larger legislative "phone tree."
In a typical network, parishioners commit to following their local legislator's calendars. They spring into action when a bill that would have an impact on a social concern like hunger, tax reform, homelessness, or child nutrition becomes pending, phoning, writing, faxing, or these days even E-mailing legislators to let them know where the church stands on specific legislation.
Woolley suggests that parish leaders keep in mind that most dioceses have staff and other resources at their disposal to help parishes set up such phone trees or for any other service project they might be contemplating.
'SALT AND LIGHT" HAS REMINDED WOOLLEY that part of his role simply is to remain a consistent source of support to his parish contacts: "To help them stay in the fight . . . and give them skills and help them legitimate what they're doing [so] they stay together; so they don't fall apart."
He knows that none of this work is easy and that it all requires great patience.
"They're volunteers," says Woolley of the people he works with. "They meet once a month . . . We do very small things," he adds. Very small things that, parish to parish, can add up to quite a lot.
NEED SOME SIGNS of hope to keep you going?
Remember our friend Sarah, that social outreach director who was complaining about her uncooperative fellow parishioners? Well, even she had to allow that things are not all bad out there.
After describing a few of the programs she runs, she says, "I'm having a hard time finding volunteers, but I'm gratified that somehow they always turn out when I really do need them . . . and they always turn out to be just enough."
And despite the "radical" message Nonnie Andre and her cohorts keep sneaking into liturgies, a Corpus Christi poll indicate that parishioners there are "very happy" with their masses.
As the irrepressible Nonnie Andre puts it, "Something good must be happening, wouldn't you say?"
Next time: lessons learned from the "Salt and Light" process and a prognosis for the future.© 1997 by Claretian Publications
- To order the bishops' "Communities of Salt and Light" document ($1.95) or the USCC's Communities of Salt and Light Parish Resource Manual ($5.95), call the United States Catholic Conference at 1-800-235-USCC.
- To order Peggy Prevoznik Heins' "Salt and Light" training manual (165 pages, including appendices), call her at 302-655-9624 or write to her at: Office of Parish Social Ministry, Catholic Charities, P.O. Box 2610, Wilmington, DE 19805. The manual costs $20 and comes with a free facilitator guide.
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