Sr. Catherine M. Patten, R.S.H.M.,the first coordinator of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative was elected last summer to the general council of her community and has begun serving a six year term in Rome. The following is a transcript of a video interview that captures both her personal and professional experience of the genesis and growth of the Initiative over the first 11 years.

The Initiative was full of surprises. There had been almost four years of consultation that Cardinal Bernardin had sponsored and Phil Murnion had helped him with. When the initiative was announced the response created a national visibility for the initiative that no one had anticipated. Originally both Cardinal Bernardin and Phil thought that this would be a very small project, that it would be located in Chicago, and that it would be a good faith effort to have dialogue around pastoral issues that were affecting the church. Because four of the other cardinals immediately critiqued it and used the method of issuing separate press releases to do so, it suddenly took on national prominence. When I came on board, Msgr. Murnion said to me, “we just can’t answer the mail. Would you come and answer the mail? We don’t know what we need, we don’t know where it’s going, we don’t know how it’s going to develop.” And, within two weeks of the announcement of the Initiative, Cardinal Bernardin was told that his cancer had returned and he was terminally ill. So everything was tossed in the air and there was a kind of chaos in the beginning.

Once we knew that Cardinal Bernardin was dying, the first committee meeting was moved up to October 24th. The original thought had been that it would be after the New Year. Then the question was raised of where the Initiative would be housed and who would lead it. Nothing was clear when I came on board. I came in that September and I said to Phil, “I feel as if the train is already out of the station. You have to help me to catch up,” and he said, “We all think the train is out of the station. We are just going to take it one day at a time.” So that’s how it began.

EARLY CHALLENGES

I would say the first challenge was trying to figure out a program to put under an idea. The Initiative really was a vision, a vision of church as people really talking to one another, not being polarized, coming together. But there wasn’t a program. Nobody had thought through what you would actually do to implement this. Nobody had really thought through the relationship between the ideas and the question of process that had to be developed to hold those ideas. Also, the leaders who had developed the Initiative were pretty much of a similar mind, being post-Vatican II centrist Catholics. Therefore, trying to draw into the dialogue people who were more conservative or represented other views was one of the very big challenges from the beginning. And it remains a challenge.

Trying to focus the questions so that they would include the possibility of discussion at the parish level was another very big challenge and it took us a long time to figure that out. How to look at what the real issues were, how to relate them to the life of the average Catholic in a parish—not simply to those who were at a more academic level reflecting on currents in the church in the United States—all of this has been difficult. Of course, the other challenge was to overcome suspicion raised because there was this controversy. We knew that some church leaders thought that what was really going on was that this was a group that wanted to get prominence for some liberal positions on controversial issues. I think the question of women’s ordination was probably the one that they were most afraid of. It took us almost the whole of the first 10 years to establish that we really were about encouraging dialogue among different groups in the church and that we were not pursuing any particular issues. We were trying to overcome polarization, but we were not pursuing any agenda whether liberal or conservative. I think at this point people are not afraid of the Initiative as a big liberal organization. But

We were trying to overcome polarization but we were not pursuing any agenda whether liberal or conservative

one of the down sides of that is then they say, “Well, what are you doing anyhow?”

DIALOGUE IN A CHURCH CONTEXT

One of the things that Msgr. Murnion asked me to do was to research everything the church has said about dialogue, and then also to research what was being said in other worlds of business and education about dialogue. I learned very quickly that most of the church statements on dialogue spoke about ad extra, in other words having dialogue with people outside the church. There were very few documents that actually talked about dialogue within the church. I learned further, over time, that part of the caution is that dialogue assumes that, at least for the time of the dialogue, the participants are equal. Daniel Yankolovitch says “dialogue and hierarchy are inherently in tension.” How to negotiate that tension, how to alleviate the fears of those who believe that if you have a dialogue you are going to question the teaching of the church, and at the same time to be able to have conversation—that really was one of the big challenges in the beginning and it remains so to some extent. I think what I’ve learned is

that if you can have a dialogue where all are equal in the course of the discussion, but it’s clear that the dialogue group is not a decision making group, it can still be valuable. In other words, if you can separate the question of dialogue from the question of authority and decision-making, it can work. If the decision maker has participated in the dialogue, while that person still has the responsibility of office to make a decision, I really believe the decision will be informed by a much wider consultation and it will be a better decision in the long run. So I think that in a church context dialogue can actually be a great contribution to good discernment. However, that is one of the areas of struggle for many people.

ne of the things that’s been tremendously helpful in thinking through this question of dialogue has been looking to other groups who have initiated dialogue on public questions that are controversial. We have learned a few basic things. One is, you make very clear that dialogue is a structured conversation and is not simply everybody exchanging views. Second, we’ve learned that having people exchange personal experience and build relationships is an important way into the dialogue. Another is helping people to talk about the values they bring to the question before they talk about the positions they hold. Asking people to share what in their personal experience influences the way they think about the issue is important. Those learnings have helped us to frame the questions very differently.

When you free people up by saying, “we are not asking you to change your mind, we are not asking you to be converted to another position, we want to understand and to really listen to know what it is you are thinking and why you are thinking it,” you open possibilities. We have found that to be a very productive approach. We’ve also tried to form the questions for dialogue in a way that raises up the commonalities rather than the differences. So, rather than starting with saying “What do you believe about this issue,” say immigration policy—we did a conference on immigration policy—we have started by asking people to talk about what are the concerns they have when they think about the issue, what are their own personal experiences with immigration. We have discovered that when we start this way, there is probably more commonality than difference, and that the differences come from prioritization that we all do around those different issues. Listening across those lines creates a wider understanding. It opens up the complexity of an issue, allows us to understand nuance, and we all come away richer.

COMMON GROUND IN SERVICE TO THE CHURCH

I actually think that we are at a place now with Catholic Common Ground Initiative where it can be enormously helpful to our pastoral life in the church. I think we’ve learned about the relationship between the ideas and the process and we’ve learned some processes that can be used fruitfully in parishes and that can be used fruitfully in other kinds of diocesan meetings. Quite honestly, I think this process would be wonderfully fruitful if used at some of the national bishops’ conference meetings. It opens up the possibility of discussion.

It’s pretty clear to me that we are in a time of great shift about the nature of the parish and that relationships are increasingly important in dioceses and in the church at large. I think that people more and more think about their parish as a series of relationships, more than as being part of a particular institution. We see this in the way people are making choices about their territorial parishes. They feel free to go elsewhere if they have the choice. We are seeing it in a loosening of ties to the local parish. Consolidation and restructuring also loosens those ties. I believe that the future of building the Christian community is going to hinge on whether or not we can find creative ways to bring people together, to share faith, to work together on issues of social concern, and to build the relationships that really undergird the Christian community.

A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

I think that my taking this job was providential. Sometimes when I am introduced I say to people, “I’ll figure out what I want to be when I grow up.” My background was pretty eclectic. I began as a teacher and was fortunate to receive a wonderful education. I got a doctorate from New York University and my future looked as if it was going to be in college teaching. After teaching at Marymount Manhattan college for a period of time, very quickly, due to a whole lot of circumstances, I ended up in administration at Marymount School of New York. After that I spent 10 years in a small contemplative community doing spiritual direction. It was just a very different turn in my life. And then at the end of those 10 years, because I needed to take care of my family, I moved back to New Jersey to be near my father and worked for 10 years as a director of social ministry in a parish. That combination of spirituality, academia, and parish, has served me enormously well in the Initiative. I love the intellectual questions, I love exploring, I enjoy doing the research, but I also have a keen sense of what this will mean for parishes, for dioceses, for people on the ground. In addition, my own spirituality gave me a great feel for the fact that we are all called together and that the unity of the church is much more important than any of these ideas that we are arguing over.

I spent a lot of time in the beginning reading everything I could find from every point of view. It was amazing to me to realize that we were not arguing over the nature of the Trinity, or the incarnation of Jesus, or belief in an after life. None of those big issues were contested. We were actually arguing over everything around authority, sex and sexuality, and gender. And I came to understand that those three issues were tightly interconnected and also that they are societal issues. While they are very important, they are not at the heart of the faith. So part of what gave me passion for the Catholic Common Ground Initiative was a belief that we should not let those more superficial issues interfere with the deepest things that bind us together—belief in Jesus Christ, being called into a community by a common baptism, and being called to share the good news with the larger society.

Nonetheless, there were times when I was really heartened to hear Phil Murnion say that the Catholic Common Ground Initiative was the most difficult thing he had ever attempted. I think I can say that I found it to be one of the most difficult things I ever attempted. Part of the difficulty is that it requires an enormous asceticism to stop thinking your own thoughts and to listen with openness as best you can to somebody with whom you know you disagree. It required of me a willingness to examine my own knee-jerk reactions or my own positions and to step back from
them to welcome the other for the sake of the larger community to which we belong and for the sake of the larger church. That takes enormous amounts of staying power, and I honestly think it was my time in the house of prayer and the basic spirituality that I brought to it that enabled me to stick with it. I was actually there for 11 years.

LISTENING NOT TALKING

When people think about dialogue, very often they begin by thinking “We are going to talk to one another.” I usually try to say to them, “No, think first about a big ear because the first thing you need to do in dialogue is stop talking and listen.” Every group we’ve tried to do this with says that this is really hard. We are not used to doing this. We are in a society that operates on argument for the most part. We are not good at listening. It’s a wonderfully rewarding and a spiritually deepening prospect but it is very difficult to do. Obviously when you are trying to convince people to engage in a dialogue you don’t want to begin by talking about the difficulties, you want to talk about the rewards. And I do believe that the rewards of building the community, of enlarging the church, of augmenting the mission,

are absolutely wonderful and they are needed. I’ve been enriched by incredible relationships with many different people and by the wonderful “aha” moments of coming to understand why somebody thinks something that I just thought was ridiculous. Someone said at the end of one of our conferences, “You know, you just can’t go back and write a nasty article about somebody you just had dinner with.”

One of the things I learned that surprised me enormously is that we Catholics tend to belong to organizations where everybody in the organization agrees with us. We tend to read the magazines or the newspapers that reflect our own positions. That’s for the sort of literate Catholic. It’s a very good exercise to read publications of the other side. But a deeper problem is that most Catholics are getting their news about the church from television, from the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, or the blogs. They are not getting it from Catholic publications.

Adult learning research tells us that one of the great ways for adult education is to engage people in a common project of learning, perhaps reading a book together and discussing it. The key is that engagement, and discussion, and exchange of ideas. I really believe that with an educated Catholic populace such as we now have, the way forward is to engage people in this kind of conversation. The Initiative is an ideal tool. We’ve now learned how to do it, and so we can move forward.

Another thing that I learned early on is that I would call people who are known for liberal views and ask them to come to a meeting and they would always say, “Oh yes. Wonderful. Where is it? I’m ready to come.” Then I would call people with a more conservative view and they would say, “Well, I’m not sure. You know we have the truth. Why should I enter into dialogue with you?” So the initial feeling was that maybe liberals were more open to dialogue than conservatives. But as I moved through the years, I learned that actually neither group was terribly open to dialogue. The extreme left very often wanted to enter into dialogue because they thought that if you just listened to them long enough you’d be convinced, because they knew they were so logical and that they were so right. Actually the conservative people also thought they were so right and that’s why they didn’t enter into dialogue. I’ve learned that people who are committed to a prophetic stance around an issue or whose life is formed about advocacy may not want to enter into dialogue. Not everyone is willing to do this. But there is a very large middle group in the church and in society who desperately want to have ways to engage in civil conversation. And people are extraordinarily grateful when you give them the experience and they know that this is possible.

WIDEN YOUR TENT PEGS

There are two quotes from scripture that have helped me and inspired me in working with the Initiative. The first one is from Isaiah 54. It’s the vision of the end time, of what the wonderful eschaton will be like when the reign of God comes. Isaiah says “widen your tent pegs,” make the tent larger. The Initiative is not about drawing everybody into a mushy middle or making everybody agree someplace in a very gray center. Rather, it calls for thinking about this church as a bigger tent, widening it, opening it up, In fact, this is a very big tent and we can accommodate a lot of different views within our Catholic tradition. History tells us that we have always had a lot of different views, so to think about widening the tent pegs is helpful.

There is another inspiring passage for me. It’s Jesus’ priestly prayer in John 17: “That they all be one. As you Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” It’s that great prayer of Christ for his church for the Christian community. I heard that same plea from Cardinal Bernardin as he was dying. He talked about the Catholic Common Ground Initiative as his legacy for the church, that great plea that we could remain united, that we could be one even beyond difference. I think those two scripture passages point to the heart of the matter for the Catholic Common Ground Initiative.