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How parishes create
common ground for the common goodBob Zyskowski
The wealthy community of Boca Raton, Florida is as good place as any to witness the growing gap between the rich and poor in the United States. "It's hard to find the poor in Boca if you're not looking for them," Al Ragona says.
"But if you look back 200, 400 feet from the road off highway 441, the camps are there.
"One place, In the Pines, is considered the Cadillac of migrant labor camps. . . . But I assure you, you wouldn't want to live there.
"You talk to some Caucasians here," Ragona says, "and they'll tell you that they don't like migrants because they live in filth and they don't speak English."
These are ugly and easy stereotypes, often unspoken and difficult to undermine. But a growing number of Catholic parishes across the country are discovering that working together for a common good is one way to begin a process of tearing down prejudices like these while creating a foundation for constructive interaction across long-standing racial and economic barriers. It is a story that is being repeated in communities throughout the country.
In Kansas City, Missouri, Catholics from a middle-class white parish work with members of a low- income, African American parish to gather petitions about media violence and keep an eye on how local programmers portray blacks and Latinos.
In Ohio, a parish in suburban Kirtland forms a partnership with an inner-city Cleveland parish, and together they set up a job-placement office.
In Minnesota, a legislative network of people in Catholic parishes from all economic levels wins $18 million in state funding to develop child care for single mothers who want to work.
In Arizona, a program called "the Values Challenge" is helping break down the image of the "undeserving poor" in a traditionally conservative western state.
In each of these situations a four-part formula begins the process of tearing down racial and societal barriers, bringing Catholics of different races and classes together to work toward systemic change for the sake of the common good.
That formula includes:
—Prayer
—Education in Catholic social teaching
—Direct contact between people of different cultures and social strata
—Reflection
Growing community
Visiting with farmworkers in the migrant labor camps along Route 441 in south Florida made Al Ragona realize how much middle-class Catholics like himself have in common with these people struggling in America's underclass.
Ragona, a 52-year-old mechanic, says he learned something valuable each of the four or five times he and other members of St. Jude Parish in Boca Raton have gone through an "immersion retreat" as part of the Middle Income Process (MIP), a Campaign for Human Development program offered in Ragona's community through the Diocese of Palm Beach.
"What happens is that the people on the retreat break into groups of four or so and go into the homes of migrant workers. You visit with them. You ask them where they've come from, how they're doing. You ask them what they want for themselves and for their families.
"You listen to all they've been through, all the suffering in their lives," Ragona says, adding, "I'll tell you, I've been in awe of how they've survived.
"When you listen to what they want for their families, you find out they want the same things [middle-class people] do. They have the same dreams for their children that we do for our children and our grandchildren." Finally putting a name and a face on poverty, Ragona and his fellow parishioners felt they had to do something about it.
After a three-day immersion retreat, the MIP group at Ragona's parish set up a literacy program, teaching English language skills to some 50 adults two nights a week at two different sites. All the teachers are volunteers.
And having seen the deplorable housing conditions by going into the homes of migrants to talk with them, St. Jude's MIP group formed a coalition to help migrants improve their housing.
Once farmworker families find the homes they want to buy, a coalition volunteer walks them through the purchasing steps. The coalition also offers a loan fund for down payments and closing costs if families need a little financial help to be able to move out of the labor camps.
"After they're in the house, we help them keep it up, and we help them budget their money so they'll be able to pay the mortgage," Ragona says. "We help them clear their credit, too. We want them to be able to live as equals in our society."
Despite the success of this MIP, Ragona acknowledges that only about 10 to 15 percent of St. Jude parishioners are willing to involve themselves with the poor. That's a percentage that folks in other parishes will likely find familiar.
Common ground is being gained, but the going can be slow.
Kathy Tomlin coordinates the Voice for Justice Network. The program links 2,500 people in 50 parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. She agrees that often "results are long in coming"—and not just among parishioners.
"It took three years for [Governor Arne Carlson] to see that child care is important to single moms."
One of the forces that changed the governor's mind was a letter-writing campaign organized by the Voices for Justice Network to prove that state-subsidized, sliding-fee child care had popular support.
Dick and Thelma Yurek live in the well-off Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka. As members of the Voices for Justice Network, they write letters to legislators and promote the network at their parish, Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Changing the public-aid system in their state is one of their chief goals. The Yureks fear that the current system too often holds back even those who are struggling hard to get off welfare.
They say a combination of events convinced them that the current system had to go. Their attitudes changed initially after volunteering at a Minneapolis drop- in center—an experience that brought them face to face with the poor. "Out here in the suburbs there's the tendency to take an 'us and them' attitude, as if there were two separate worlds," Thelma says. "A lot of 'them' are just like 'us.' Once you start talking with people, you discover they are God's children, too."
"And they're our children," Dick adds.
But their conversion became complete after a more personal confrontation with the welfare system. Divorced and with two children, the Yureks' own daughter found herself deadlocked in a welfare system that was uncaring, unsympathetic, and unhelpful. She also discovered how unsympathetic fellow Catholics were—resentful of poor people being "given" what "we had to work for." "I tell people that's what the Voices for Justice Network is all about," Thelma says, "to change the system and help people get out of the bad situations they're in—not to keep padding the welfare system, but to change it."
Solid partnerships
The Cleveland diocese is a prime example of how population shifts and white flight from the cities have affected America's urban communities. Not too long ago, some 900,000 people lived in Cleveland while 450,000 lived in the suburban counties of the diocese. Now the numbers are just the opposite.
Similar demographics hold for other metropolitan areas. As wealthier—primarily white—people move to the suburbs, cities are left with a concentration of poverty and minority groups.
The Cleveland diocese found itself strapped to meet the needs of burgeoning populations in outlying areas while trying to maintain parishes in poorer sections of the city. Diocesan leaders were also concerned that the gap between rich and poor was widening and isolating people in both communities.
Through a process that included wide consultation with the people of the diocese, Bishop Anthony Pilla developed a pastoral letter, "The Church in the City," aimed at addressing some of these issues. Pilla also appointed a task force to implement the ideas contained in the letter.
Among the letter's recommendations is the establishment of partnerships between parishes. "Not so much out of the sense that people in the suburbs will come in and 'save' the people in the city," says Notre Dame Sister Rita Mary Harwood, who directs the task force, "but out of a spirit of mutuality and great respect, with an understanding that all have something to gain from the partnership."
Father Norm Smith, pastor of Divine Word Parish in suburban Kirtland, Ohio, points to a number of success stories in the partnership between his parish and St. Philip Neri, a primarily African American parish in Cleveland. The parish councils and parish staffs of the two churches now hold joint meetings. The parishes also hold retreats and missions together and exchange ministers of the altar.
"We're trying to create the forum for people to be together. If they can do that, they can create their own ministry to one another," Smith says.
In conversations between members of the two parishes, the need for jobs in the inner city surfaced. A Divine Word parishioner donated $7,500 to open a job placement office in the St. Philip Neri neighborhood, and other parishioners volunteered to serve as consultants.
Jan Geho, parish-council president at Divine Word, finds satisfaction in supporting another community that needs financial help. But she says Kirtland Catholics have benefited, too, from the partnership—socializing, worshiping, and working with the Catholics from St. Philip Neri. "Just getting to know different types of people and experience the different economic situations they encounter gives us a better understanding of their lives," Geho says.
Smith says the biggest gift poor people offer the wealthy may be that they "bring us an awareness of the reality of their lives."
"Their poverty speaks a lot to our materialism and our consumerism," Smith says. The parish partnership is breaking down barriers, and it works because it is based in the common faith that unites rich and poor and black and white.
"It's a natural evangelization process," Smith says. "It's conversion. It's low-key, not forcing anything down anybody's throat."
Two-way streets
In other parts of the country, too, more and more people are realizing that a parish partnership is not a one- way street.
Dennis Donovan, principal of St. Bernard Grade School in the lower-middle class North End neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota, says the staff at St. Peter Parish in suburban Forest Lake was eager to copy some of St. Bernard's programs.
In exchange for a regular financial contribution that amounts to $10,000 to $15,000 a year, a St. Bernard teacher runs a workshop on a new teaching technique, the whole-language system, for teachers at St. Peter School, and Donovan trains the parish social- justice group in community organizing.
The experience that poorer parishes have in community- based organizing and the successes they have achieved are what draws a group of collar-community parishes to join forces with inner-city congregations in Minneapolis.
Tom St. Aubin, an insurance agent in suburban Richfield, says the group his parish belonged to, the Suburban Ecumenical Alliance of Congregations (SEAC), signed on with the Joint Ministry Project (JMP) in inner-city Minneapolis because JMP "has valuable experience in dealing with the same things we're dealing with.
"The problems of crime and poverty that we used to think about as city problems have become our problems in the first-ring suburbs," St. Aubin says.
And right now, the people who have helped build the inner-city coalition in Minneapolis can share six years of trial and error in bringing about systemic change, says Bernadette Nicol, a retired dentist who has lived and worked her whole life in the low-income Camden neighborhood of Minneapolis. "JMP has the experience in addressing social issues in a public forum," Nicol says.
The new, larger, more powerful Interfaith Action Organization that is being formed by the merger of the inner-city and suburban coalitions will "create a louder voice to be heard for social justice," St. Aubin says. "It's an opportunity to practice what we preach about working with people of other faiths, other cultures, and other colors."
On the agenda for the Catholic churches that are part of this new coalition and for parishes throughout the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is a major effort to have their values influence civic planning for the future of the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Deanery meetings, sessions with parish clusters, and presentations at individual parishes have been going on for two years now to involve suburban Catholics in the public-policy decisions that cross community boundaries. The program, "Common Good, Common Ground," has brought the moral dimension into the public forum while demonstrating the interconnected-ness of city and suburban economic life. At these sessions, suburban Catholic voters are talking about issues with their neighbors, parish leaders, local government officials, and even state legislators.
The sessions work this way: A team from the archdiocesan Catholic Charities' Office for Social Justice brings its slide show of charts and graphs that point out the concentrations of poverty in central-city neighborhoods in both St. Paul and Minneapolis and how that poverty has moved out into the first-ring suburbs over the past 10 years.
The presentations describe how job growth has declined in the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis while it has grown dramatically in the suburbs. Maps of the metropolitan area show how median incomes have actually risen 3 percent in the cities while declining 2 or 3 percent in the first-ring suburbs and rising a whopping 15 percent or more in the outer-ring suburbs of the Twin Cities.
Another slide shows how property taxes for city homeowners have risen even though the values of their homes decreased while outer-ring suburbs have been able to hold taxes stable because of new business growth.
But the sewer-subsidy slide is the clincher.
It brings suburbanites to the "aha" point, as Kathy Tomlin puts it, on the issues of tax inequities and public policies that favor those who would appear to need the help the least.
Although the cost of running sewer lines out to the far reaches of the metropolitan area is greater than sewer maintenance costs in established neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, people in the city pay the same rate of sewer tax as people in the suburbs. The slide demonstrates how central-city residents actually subsidize flight to the suburbs with the money they pay in sewer taxes.
Small-group discussions follow the shows, where participants talk about how their communities are affected by issues such as crime, housing, education, transportation, and tax levies—and how they might go about working to solve the problems.
Tomlin thinks the Voices for Justice Network can be one way Catholics can have a voice in metro decision making. But for Ron Krietemeyer, director of the archdiocesan Office for Social Justice, the effort also is a practical lesson in Catholic social teaching and the call for Catholics to get involved in community issues.
Has the effort produced any fruit?
As parish social-justice committees return home with the issues and information they've gathered, public pressure has been building for a number of items in a package of legislative initiatives called the Metro Stability Act that will be before the Minnesota State Legislature in 1996. That pressure has already forced the Metropolitan Council to appoint a task force to address sewer-tax-rate equity.
The Metropolitan Council also has started negotiating future development in suburban areas with those communities willing to include affordable housing. Twenty suburbs have already signed on as partners in the council's "livable communities" program, an effort to dissolve the concentration of poverty in the core cities and bring workers closer to the areas where new job growth is occurring.
Dialing for dialogue
When a black member of the New Orleans city council saw racism in the famous Mardi Gras, Toby Charbonnet didn't speculate if that's how all African Americans saw it.
Charbonnet, who is white, picked up the phone.
"I called Mary Harris over at Blessed Sacrament and I said, 'Mary, what do you think about this?'" Charbonnet recalls.
That Harris, who is black, would even be talking with Charbonnet would have been improbable four years ago. That's when Blessed Sacrament, a primarily African American parish, formed a partnership with white and wealthy Holy Name of Jesus, the big church up on the avenue some 20 blocks away.
Holy Name "used to just give money" to Blessed Sacrament when the two New Orleans churches were involved in an earlier "twinning" arrangement. But thanks to the parish-partnership program developed by the Archdiocese of New Orleans' Associated Catholic Charities, much more is happening.
Catholics like Mary Harris and Toby Charbonnet are not just talking on the phone, they are visiting one another's homes, building relationships and friendships, working toward closing the gap between blacks and whites and the haves and have-nots in their community, working to help individuals, and working to change unjust systems.
"We've found we have very many common points of interest," Harris says. "We have many likenesses as well as differences. But before we could do anything, we had to get to know one another. I think there was a lack of knowledge by both parties."
The parish partnership program led a core group of people from both parishes into one-on-one dialogues. It also got them involved in an ongoing conversation about race. That chat got especially interesting when the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced. Harris says, "We couldn't [resolve that] in one night."
Charbonnet, too, remembers talking long into the night on the Simpson acquittal. She says the parish partnership program was one of the few places where blacks and whites could discuss the matter freely.
"You need a forum where you have a safe place to dialogue, a place where you're not going to be shot down," Charbonnet says. "We're not looking to find fault; we're looking to find peace."
The partnership held its fourth joint Advent service at the beginning of the current church year. The parishes exchange ministers of the altar and hold social events that pull people together. In football- crazy Louisiana, a football-watching Sunday was one activity that drew the men together.
The parishes also donate food and put together Thanksgiving baskets each year. Charbonnet likes the fact that a black member of Blessed Sacrament and a white member of Holy Name then go together to deliver the baskets. "It's important that people of both races see blacks and whites working together," Charbonnet says, "so that it is an accepted thing, a good thing."
Learning to ACT up
The partnership with Blessed Sacrament has drawn Charbonnet's parish into the highly respected community group All Congregations Together (ACT). She thinks that the addition of the wealthier Holy Name parishioners to ACT's lobbying efforts helped win improvements for an inner-city playground in Blessed Sacrament's neighborhood.
The church-based community group has also had some success holding political forums and has pressured the mayor to accelerate the clean-up of abandoned housing.
"Now we need to build up what the church can do," Harris says. "We have to work on how we can do what Jesus started—not just feeding the hungry, but helping them move out of poverty."
Mike Lewis is a 49-year-old pipefitter from "the first parish over the bridge" in Kansas City, Missouri. Although St. Patrick is located within the city limits, Lewis describes his middle-class parish as "near suburban." The Missouri River is both a psychological and a physical barrier between St. Patrick and the inner-city neighborhoods south of the bridge.
"There's an entrenchment mentality about north and south of the river," Lewis says. "I wouldn't describe it as highly racist, but there's a fear there."
He says the Campaign for Human Development's Target Parish Program is helping to reach across that natural boundary by getting people at parishes on both sides of the bridge to talk about issues that affect them in common.
People from St. Patrick and from two inner-city parishes—Risen Christ and St. Joseph—are in their third year of the Target program. More than a hundred people showed up for the first meeting between the parishes, Lewis says. "We just shared a simple meal together, listened to a speaker, and prayed together."
Since then the parishes have held several social events to build relationships between people, and a core group meets regularly to talk about values and Catholic social teaching using material the Campaign for Human Development has developed. There's also a regular first Saturday meeting for prayer.
JoCele McEnany of inner-city St. Joseph's says the Target program has fostered "a reawakening among average working people" about their values and the common good.
Common ground was found in the past year over the issue of media violence. A series of "Target Evenings" on various aspects of violence brought together a number of parishes in the Target program.
Afterward, petitions were gathered at St. Joseph south of the river and at St. Patrick and several additional parishes north of the river to ask local television stations to meet with representatives of all the parishes about how the news was being marketed and about racial connotations of crime news among other points.
"We didn't want to get into censorship, so we tried to approach the issues in a positive way," McEnany says. "We found they were on our side, and they encouraged us to explore ways we can be better critics of programming."
"I wish I could say we've had more major victories, but I think we're making progress linking our faith and our citizenship," McEnany says.
Lewis, a permanent deacon for 16 years, says the major benefit of the Target Program outside of building personal relationships is plugging Catholics into the social-action opportunities that already exist. For example, St. Patrick's middle-class Catholics were able to join with another community organization to pressure the city into putting a stop light at the dangerous intersection of 85th and Wornall on the south side of the river. But those actions are limited, Lewis acknowledged.
"It's difficult for white, middle-class Catholics to identify issues; it's not for blacks. The issues are there every day when they get up," Lewis says. "And they're getting used to organizing.
"I think [middle-class Catholics are] very comfortable even when we struggle. We don't even know about our own [church's early] struggle in this country. We don't know about the justice issues that were there for Catholic immigrants in the past.
"Now that we've made it in American society, can we reach down the ladder?" Lewis asked. "Are we so high that we can't reach down two or three steps?"—END
Get past the personal
Some parish organizers worry that much of the progress communities have made to reach across racial or economic differences is being made only at the personal level rather than at a level where systemic change happens.
Rosie Papion, youth minister at inner-city St. Peter Claver parish in New Orleans, says she's seen relationships develop between people from her parish and its partner parish, St. Edward the Confessor in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana—David Duke country. "We've witnessed and appreciated the differences in culture that we have," Papion says. "And when the youth groups get together, the kids do really well.
"But the people who are involved are there because they want to be. The core group doesn't represent the main body of the parishes. It's not curing everything that needs to be cured, but it's a healthy stab at it."
Mark Guidry, a computer analyst from Metairie, says the "Common Ground Process" developed by Lance Hill at the Southern Institute for Education and Research has helped establish the dialogue that exists between St. Edward and St. Peter Claver. The process, a six-hour structured discussion program on race relations, allows people to meet as equals on equal ground, Guidry says, and to talk face to face.
"It's easy to talk about people in the third person, saying things like: 'black people are lazy,'" Guidry says. "If we are going to help people stop believing in stereotypes, we have to start with ourselves and work from there."
Common Ground has three objectives: to bridge racist division by developing a direct dialogue between blacks and whites; to teach prejudice-reduction skills, including interracial conflict resolution; and to assess the community's race problems and explore solutions.
In the 1996 election year the Office of Peace and Justice of Catholic Social Services of Central and Northern Arizona has a piece in place to help raise public discourse and increase political participation. "The Values Challenge" forces people to look inward, to reflect on their values, see how they fit with political realities, then to speak and act according to their consciences.
The program offers education in human values and Catholic social teaching. It provides facts about issues like health care, poverty, the environment, economic justice, and education, and it includes questions voters might ask of candidates for elective office about those issues.
Some 4,000 copies of the material have been distributed, and parishes like Sts. Simon and Jude in Phoenix have made the Values Challenge their Lenten program. Marie Sullivan directs the Phoenix Office for Peace and Justice.
"The fact that people are even using a document to enter into a discussion of values is progress," Sullivan says. "Arizona traditionally has been a very conservative state."
One parish where the program has taken hold is Our Lady of the Valley in Phoenix. After sponsoring the Values Challenge, the parish moved to identify an outreach coordinator. It is also evaluating how it can build community and increase the opportunities parishioners have to encounter people of different income levels.
"Arguments seem to have diminished about the deserving poor and the undeserving poor," Sullivan says. The program is now moving into the civic community, bringing the values discussion to neighborhood organizations as well.
"We're finding people interested in tapping their values to revitalize their neighborhoods," she says.—End
Getting started
However your parish chooses to deepen its connections with people from different racial or economic backgrounds, veterans of such efforts agree successful programs repeat some key elements:
—Begin with faith. Partnerships in Cleveland, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri got started by inviting people of different parishes to liturgy and prayer. Catholic traditions held in common—prayer, a belief system that values each person as a child of God, and an educational base in Catholic social teaching—are assets: put them to use.
—Teach the contemporary social implications of Catholic faith and life. The Palm Beach immersion process begins with a Friday evening session of prayer and a reintroduction to principles of Catholic social teaching, such as the common good, personal rights and responsibilities, human dignity, human solidarity, and the responsibility to care for the poor and vulnerable.
In Minnesota, Catholic social teachings are repeated over and over during the "Common Good, Common Ground" sessions that help suburbanites see the things that link them to the core neighborhoods of the Twin Cities.
—Provide opportunities for firsthand contact. It's important for people in both wealthy and poor parishes to see and become used to seeing people of other races, cultures, and incomes.
Al Ragona says it is one thing to tell the youth at a parish that migrant farm laborers work hard, but his parish takes young people out to the fields to pick fruits and vegetables for a day. "They find out firsthand how hard the migrants really work," Ragona says.
—Offer ways for people to interact on a variety of levels—social, educational, liturgical—and through in- depth, structured discussion sessions.
The deeper the contact goes, the more one-on-one opportunities that are offered, the deeper the relationships develop.
—Look for common concerns. Mary Harris of New Orleans says that common concerns help people look past the things which divide them. "You don't notice the differences that much when you're working together on something that is important to both of you."
—Reflect on all that personal contact. Participants in successful programs are asked immediately after their direct contact questions such as: what does this mean for me as a Christian? What does the church teach about these issues? What might our parish do to change things?—BZ
For more information:
Barbara Roth: Middle Income Process The Pastoral Center Diocese of Palm Beach P.O. Box 109650 Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410 407-775-9579.
"Common Ground Process" Lance Hill Mail Room Box 1692 31 McAlester Dr. New Orleans, LA 70118-5555; 504-865-6100.
"The Values Challenge" Marie Sullivan Office of Peace and Justice 1825 W. Northern Ave. Phoenix, AZ 85021; 602-997-6105.
"The Church in the City" Sister Rita Mary Harwood, S.N.D. The Parish Life Office Diocese of Cleveland 1031 Superior Ave., Room 300 Cleveland, OH 44114; 216-696-6525, ext. 220 or 350.
Target Program Middle Income Process Campaign for Human Development 3211 Fourth St., NE Washington, DC 20017; 202-541-3000.
"Common Good, Common Ground" (Joe Sullivan) Voice for Justice Network (Kathleen Tomlin) "A Tale of St. Justin's" (Ron Krietemeyer) Office for Social Justice Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis 328 W. Kellogg Blvd. St. Paul, MN 55102; 612-291-447.Salt news | In session | Stat house | Salt links | Idea exchange
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