Dennis O’Connor is the author of Bridges of Faith: Building a Relationship With a Sister Parish (St. Anthony Messenger Press)

RR: Why did you write this book?

DO: I had looked around the marketplace for something like it, and there was only one book out about sister parishes; it was a 1996 book by Dick Fenske called In the Good Struggle: The Sister Parish Movement. It was specifically related to his experience in Guatemala, so it was very country-specific. Dick’s perspective was from the Lutheran Synod, and I thought the heart and soul of the sister parish movement in the U.S. is Catholic, not entirely so, but by and large, the lion’s share of the faithful participating in this process are Roman Catholic. So, the newest product out on the topic was ten years old, and it was specific to Guatemala. I thought there was an opportunity.

RR: I want to give you a scenario. There’s a parish pastoral council meeting in an upper-middle income parish. Someone gets a bright idea which becomes brighter as the meeting goes on: “We ought to develop a sister parish relationship with a parish in another part of the world.” Then someone else says, “Fr. Kwadwo from Ghana, who served in this parish for a few years, has returned to Ghana. Why don’t we partner with his parish?”

What advice would you give them?

DO: That’s really how it happens a lot of times. You’ll have a visiting missionary or a visiting priest or religious come through and actually spend time with a faith community. It’s only natural that you maintain contact. Pretty soon, he or she will begin inviting the faith community to come and see what they are doing, and little by little you get more and more drawn into this partnership.

The advice I would offer is try to use the resources that are available. If you’re in a Roman Catholic diocese, chances are good that you will have an active mission office, and the mission office will be tied into support groups throughout North America and even internationally. They are going to be able to find leads on resources available to you and help you with the kinds of decisions which need to be made.

Do you send a group over to explore the feasibility of such a partnership, and if so, how large should that group be? Normally, what happens is that one to three people from a parish would actually hop on board a plane and go. They would do a feasibility study on the spot, see what the needs are, see what kind of financial commitment is involved in the process. There almost always is some kind of financial commitment, even if it’s just providing transportation back and forth between parishes. Sometimes a parish will get involved in ministry and lay town money toward that goal.

A good illustration of that is Immaculate Heart of Mary parish here in Cincinnati. This parish has had a partnership for years in Managua, Nicaragua. The former principal of the school was a Sister of St. Joseph. She decided after 30 years of teaching that she wanted to be a missionary. She bopped around in Central and South America, and she landed in Managua, at a cultural center. The pastor at IHM, he was listening to his social action committee. They were saying that they would like to reach out and form a partnership. He said, “Why reinvent the wheel, let’s call Sr. Margie Navarre, SSJ and let’s see if she has opportunities for us. To make a real long story short, after a long process of sending people back and forth, bringing groups of Nicaraguans to the States, and having groups from southwestern Ohio going down, they pledged over $300,000 over a several-year period to help the center.

Back to the advice: take it slow. If you’re in a Roman Catholic parish, go to your diocese, and ask them what kind of steps to take. Buy copies of Bridges of Faith. If you’re looking for some of the best minds in the business, Mike Gable in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati Missions Office is probably the leader in this concept nationally. Mike Haasl from the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis Global Solidarity Office is also right on top of the movement. Rosanne Fischer in the Diocese of St. Cloud is also very well-versed on the topic.

RR: Is this really a new idea? If you look at St. Paul’s letters, it seems like there was a lot of solidarity among the early churches.

DO: Yes, all of this is a fanciful way of building community. Transportation changes—being able to hop on board an airplane and fly anywhere—have eliminated a lot of borders and allow for new communities of faith to be formed, through this process. That’s been going on for two thousand years, building faith communities.

RR: How do these parishes act on each other once they are in relationship with one another?

DO: The answer is that almost always, the North American faith community ends up being humbled by the partner, just through the spirituality that they witness. This is what I have seen time after time. Most often these sister parishes are in Third World settings, so you have all the challenges of that: poverty, lack of national development, infrastructure, roads, running water, and that kind of thing. People in the United States have this built-in gene of being chauvinistic problem-solvers. It’s just ingrained in us. We see a problem and we go fix it. Often when you get involved in these relationships, the Third World partner will not rebuff, but will say, “Look, don’t throw money at this; money isn’t what we’re talking about here. Yeah, we’d like to do something, down the road, but what we want to do is for you to come listen to our stories. Almost always, Americans will walk away from these experiences with a deeper sense of spirituality than they’ve ever understood before—in almost every case. In short, what very often happens is that the overseas partner will provide spiritual sustenance and the Americans will provide material sustenance.

RR: Say you’ve got a parish with a sister parish relationship, but it’s currently simply about the transfer of money. What advice would you have for them?

DO: It’s important to maintain that relationship. Not every faith community in the United States is going to have the depth of partnership that others will. Not every parish is going to have ten people on a committee who are going to want to go over once a year to visit their faith partners, but one thing they can do is recognize their faith partners in prayer, in community celebrations, a Mass, once a month, that’s dedicated to their faith partners, and then giving the money is very important. When people say that money isn’t the only solution, that’s true, but money opens doors. It’s an important activity for a parish even if most of what they’re doing is giving money. As long as it’s not just an annual collection and that’s all they think of the other parish. If they’re involved in an exchange of letters or some other kind of communication, you don’t necessarily have to have a back-and-forth program of visiting.

RR: Catholic Relief Services has a program of diocese-to-diocese partnerships. What do you think of those?

DO: Those are great. The best example I can think of is the Diocese of St. Cloud. They have a partnership with the Diocese of Homa Bay, Kenya that evolved bishop-to-bishop. What’s great about these partnerships is that they allow for smaller sister parish relationships to evolve. The partnership energized the whole diocese to become involved in mission activities. They’re in Central America, Africa, and poor areas of the United States.

RR: How can a program like JustFaith help sister parish relationships develop?

DO: Unless you are inherently oriented towards social justice, you need some formation. JustFaith brings participants into the mindset of a person who is really just working through the challenges of what it takes to survive. Programs like that, such as Salt and Light here in Cincinnati are invaluable for individuals who are just getting their feet wet in the whole area of mission.

RR: What’s different about “sister school” relationships?

DO: The school relationships are great because they get young people involved at a time when they will be most influenced by the experience. As a practical matter, faith partnerships with schools are geographically limited, in most cases. Most times, you do not take a group of kids, hop on a plane, and go to El Salvador. What you can do is have an exchange of letters, have an exchange of emails, maybe have an exchange of audiotapes or videotapes. And probably the most valuable learning experience for the students is for them to discover how much commonality they have among themselves: “This kid’s just like me.” There’s more formal structure to it, because you’re in a classroom setting—and that’s fine. Oftentimes, what you’ll find is that a parish has a sister parish relationship and then adds a school component as that relationship develops.

RR: Are their opportunities for legislative advocacy that emerge from sister parish relationships?

DO: I think these kinds of partnerships are a wonderful opportunity to explore how much influence people actually have, and how much voice they can actually bring to someone who is dispossessed. One of the things we’ve done here in Cincinnati is getting in the habit of seeing our congressman, who happens to be on the House Foreign Relations Committee. If you are working with a particular faith community and they are having a particular problem that could be influenced by legislators in this country, legislators will listen to you. That’s one of the great strengths of these programs. If we make the wheels squeaky, we can make things happen.