Remarks delivered by Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture
National Pastoral Life Center, 25th anniversary celebration
March 26, 2009

Our assigned task is to talk about the signs of the times in a response to our speakers’ presentations on Paul. Let us recall that the phrase, “signs of the times,” was used by John XXIII in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris, and by the authors of Gaudium et spes: “At all times the Church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the time and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. In language intelligible to every generation, she should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which men ask about the meaning of the present life and of the life to come. We must be aware of and understand the aspirations, the yearnings, and the often dramatic features in which we live.”

Let me preface my response with a stipulation, that is, I propose that you accept the following facts without requiring proof, some of them will seem self-evident. Here are some of the signs of the times: Everything is a mess: the country is a mess, the world is a mess, the economy is a mess, here in the U.S., and even more so around the globe where many people are suffering from the downturn far worse than we are. The U.S. Congress is a mess: the house of representative acts like a gang of sophomores let lose on their Spring trip to DC; the U.S. Senate behaves like a herd of self-serving apparatchiks. The media is a mess. Having ignored the housing bubble for five years, they are after Secretary Tim Geithner and President Barack Obama to fix things up in a few weeks. The church is a mess; parishes are closing; schools are closing; the sex abuse crisis lingers; the New York state legislature is considering a measure to lift the statute of limitations for sex abuse on religious institutions and organizations. And then, just this past week, the annual Catholic college commencement donnybrook broke out when Notre Dame announced that President Obama would be their commencement speaker. Then the twice-divorced, thrice-married, Newt Gingrich, you remember him, soon to be received into the Catholic church attacked Notre Dame for being anti-Catholic in inviting the President. Let’s give Gingrich the chutzpah award. Every day these messes become messier. So in conclusion to this preface, I stipulate: we have a mess of a mess.

I wanted to stipulate all of this because, first, I had to get it out of my system and, second, I wouldn’t want any one here to think me a Pollyanna: not everything is a mess; that’s what I want to talk about this afternoon, the non-mess.

Let’s look at the signs of our times and our place in light of the example set by Paul the Apostle and by Phil Murnion and Harry Fagan, the founders of the NPLC, whose anniversary we celebrate with this gathering. What did the three share? Their shared work was building community. Paul and Phil and Harry were community organizers, just like you know who.

What were their qualities and characteristics? What led them to be good community organizers? First, let’s take some cues from Cardinal Rodriguez’s description of Paul’s biography: Paul grew up in a pluralist city, Tarsus; he’s a city boy; he is multi-lingual. At the same time, he is well-grounded in his own culture; he has a secure religious identity. His Jewish religious identity, nurtured from childhood, rests on observance and ritual. Later as a student, he was exposed in Jerusalem to a rigorous rabbinic education. There he masters an intellectual style that asks questions and fosters dialogue, a vigorous back and forth between rabbi and students, and probably among students. Paul earns his living as a worker; at the same time, he functions on a wide international scale. He communicates effectively through both the spoken and written word. He is an intellectual; he knows, thinks, analyzes, argues, compares and contrasts; he is knowledgeable about the ideas of others. He is inclusive in his willingness to consider the idea and thinking of others. These were terrific qualities for building community and communicating the experience of encountering Jesus and becoming a member of the nascent Christian community.

Professor Schreiter adds to this portrait by describing the close attention Paul and his friends, his deputies paid to the communities they founded. They paid attention to building them up, recognizing their diversity, and closely attending to the discord that divided them and could tear them apart. In speaking of Paul’s reconciling outlook, Fr. Schreiter writes, “God has extended the offer of reconciliation even to the Gentiles regardless of their association with Jews…. It… does not just offer a new formula for overcoming alienation, anxiety, and apathy…., but changes the very conditions of the conversation itself.” Not to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think we could say that Paul and his deputies, knew how to change the question; change the subject because they knew how to change the conditions of the conversation itself. They could do this because they were community organizers who knew their communities, they were part of these communities, they knew what Jesus taught, and they were convinced he had the words of salvation.

Phil Murnion and Harry Fagan in founding the NPLC showed the same characteristics. They were city boys, at ease in a pluralistic society; grounded in their own cultural and religious identity; educated, formally and informally, in the ways of the church and of the world. They had the same kind of entrepreneurial energy as Paul along with imagination and an equal degree of intellectual curiosity, acuity, and integrity. They knew when it was time to change the question because they knew how to change the conditions of the conversation—a talent we need more than ever. Above all, like Paul, they were full of local knowledge, how parishes and dioceses worked (and didn’t work); how clergy and laity could work together (and how they sometimes didn’t work together). They knew how bishops and clergy worked together—sometimes, but perhaps not often enough. But in contrast to Paul, Phil and Harry, all of us are immersed in a far larger church, more organized, more hierarchical, richer, even more diverse, and perhaps even more contentious. And, of course, we have 2000 years of the tradition that Paul helped shape. Phil and Harry worked with that. And as with Paul they looked to the local.

Local Knowledge, it’s obvious what it means; what people on the ground, in the neighborhood know, what New Yorkers know from walking up and down Broadway, what Catholics know from going to church on Sunday. The anthropologist, Clifford Geertz used it as a title for a book of essays to emphasize the singular and inescapable nature of what we know about the world immediately around us. He writes, “To an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of distant ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements. One may veil this fact with…[ecumenical] rhetoric or blur it with [strenuous] theory, but one cannot really make it go away” (Local Knowledge, p. 4). That was the genius of Paul, and of Phil and Harry, and everyone who works successfully in parish ministry; they have local knowledge.

NPLC focuses on the local, the knowable, the doable. Why do I emphasize the local, the knowable, the doable? We often speak of the global community as if it were a real community, and as much as we hope it could be a real community it remains a construct, an idea, more a theory as Geertz says, than a reality. Strike a sharp bang on the table-of-reality, and we realize it is largely a work of hope and imagination. But local communities, real communities do exist; they have a bang-on-the-table reality that we all recognize. You know it when you hear it. Some examples:

Pundits like to say that Sunday worship is the most segregated hour in American culture; well, we might ask how often the pundits get themselves to church on Sunday to see what it’s actually like—not segregated on the West Side of Manhattan, and many other places. But whatever we experience on Sunday in terms of race, class, ethnicity, we do experience something we don’t often take notice of. Sunday morning is the time when people turn off their cell phones, remove the ear plugs from their I-pods, and leave their lap tops at home. Sunday mornings is the time, maybe the one and only time in the week, when most of us join and belong to a real community, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, elbow-to-elbow. Where else do most of us ever sing together? Pray together? Stand and kneel together? Look someone in the eye, and say, “Peace of Christ.” Where else do we celebrate the Real Presence? Where else do we hear: love thy neighbor, do good to those who hate you, remove the beam from you own eye before plucking the one in your sister’s. For many people, many of us, Sunday worship is an oasis in a desert of “alienation, anxiety, and apathy.”

As Sunday moves out of the sanctuary into the parish and neighborhood, into Monday and Tuesday, people have to pull the experience of a real, living local community into the experience of the every day. We have to keep putting odd things together, things that don’t fit together, reconciling the apparently irreconcilable as Fr. Schreiter describes Paul’s mission. Reconcile has several meanings according to the AHD; it means to make compatible or consistent. A synonym is the word adapt. Accountants reconcile their accounts; the bottom line has to make sense. Reconcile is based on the word conciliation from consilisum (meeting); conciliate means to overcome the animosity of someone; to turn distrust into trust; to attempt to make compatible conflicting ideas, goals, persons. Reconcile can require fitting round pegs into square holes. The parish, the pastoral, the diocesan, the ministry of the local church was what Paul, and Phil, and Harry did and what the NPLC continues to do, helping to fit things together.

One of the NPLCS projects grew into the Catholic Common Ground Initiative. The Initiative was an effort to encourage Catholics divided by a long list of polarizing issues to use their brains, their intellectual curiosity, acuity, and integrity to analyze and understand that polarization, to look at its sources, to describe what it was they disagreed about and to bridge, to reconcile these polarizing views. The initiative, announced by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin on August 12, 1996, was received by some as a sign of sanity and hope in the church, but by others as another sign of dissent, dissension, and polarization. Though the Initiative has continued to do its work, so have the divisions that brought about its establishment, as Fr. Schreiter observes, these divisions are “still very much in evidence and have, in some instances, become even greater flashpoints.” Where once the divisions tended to be about ideas, movements, bells and smells, standing and kneeling, now they are often about people: who is a real Catholic, who is not, who is orthodox, who is not.

The other day I was looking through an essay, “The Catholic Church in the Public Square” that Phil wrote for a Commonweal project. It reminds us what a reconciling job Paul, and Phil, and Harry, and so many of you have. Let me conclude with it:

“By pastoral I mean those things that go into an effort to be accountable to official teaching and norms, but accommodating to local cultures, and individual needs; attentive to the demands of personal piety and morality as well as to social morality and spirituality; authentic in teaching and worship, and pragmatic in its programming. The parish has a sense of mission, combined with a desire to be inclusive even of those whose participation and commitment is tenuous at best.”

Sounds like the work is about putting square pegs in round holes. Keep up the good work.