Summer 1974

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• VOLUME 13

SUMMER, 1974

NUMBER 2

HOPE-THE GRACE OF THE WORLD

Articles PREFACE

115

George J. Dyer

SAYING "YES" TO MAN'S DIGNITY

117

Cesar E. Chavez

THE PRIEST TODAY

123

Thoma" J. Grady

THE ETHICS OF HOPE

13:l

Jack L. Stotts

SIGNS OF HOPE

146

Da.vid J. O'Brien

THE THEOLOGY OF CHRISTIAN HOPE

163

Monika K. Hellwig

PRIEST: MINISTER OF HOPE AND HEALING

175

Vincent Dwyer

REFLECTIONS ON HOPE IN THE SCRIPTURES

185

John J. Pilch

RELIGIOUS IN THE MINISTRY OF THE CHURCH

199

M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll, R.S.M.

AUTHORS

222

THE EXPERIENCE OF WOMEN

OUR COVER: "Jonah and the Whale," by Frank Eliscu. The fish's tail forms the Hebraic letter used as the word for God. Courtesy of. the National Sculpture Society, 250 East 51st St., New York, N.Y. 10022.

PREFACE

George J. Dyer

The Grace of the World

Much has been written during the past ten years about the Sin of the World. The idea is persuasive because it resonates so powerfully with our perception of the human situation. It conjures up a kaleidoscope of headlines that banner the senseless cruelty that men have inflicted not only on their fellowmen but upon the very planet that nurtured them. Not even little children can escape the pervasive poison of this Sin; even in their preconscious moments they feel its influence.

Without a counterpoise the Sin of the World is a pernicious idea that could easily leave us paralysed by apathy or cynicism.

Perhaps we might term that counterweight the Grace of the World. It is the idea that lies behind this special issue of Ch¡icago Studies. In the essays that follow we will be reminded that the Sin of the World provides us with a limited view of our milieu. God has always been present to his world as the gracious ground of its on-going development. In Jesus we find the full revelation of that grace-filling presence. The Good News of Jesus is the announcement that the long-awaited reign of God is already at work in him and in the world.

This reign is patently both a present and a future event.

As Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is already upon us. Yet it 115

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is still equally clear that the Sin of the World is still with us. \Vhatever the appearances may be, these two forces are not simply equal and opposite. God's reign will ultimately be all-pervasive. This is our confident expectation; and we give witness to it by refusing to accept greed and injustice as final and inevitable components of the human situation. If we but look, we will find that signals of Christian hope abound about us. We find them in the loving presence of Christians at the side of the poor and the oppressed, the sick and the aged. We hear them in the voices of men and women who say "yes" to the dignity of their fellows, even at the cost of great personal sacrifice.

The hope of Christians then is not an indifference to the present in passive expectation of the future. It is evidenced by an active witness to the power of God at work in them and in their world. The hungry must be fed, the naked clothed, the slave set free. Christians are not naive. They know that this awesome task will be completed only by God in a moment of his choosing. But they undertake it joyously in. the sure hope that it will finally be accomplished.

There is a new melody to be heard in the world we live in, one that sets in its proper place the older, more solemn theme .of Sin. It sings of God's power and love at work in the world; it is the Grace of the World-the theme of this fifth collaborative effort of Chicago Studies and the National Federation of Priests' Councils.

'

Cesar E.

Cha¡ve.~

Saying "Yes" to ]\,fan's Dignity

Men a.-e not 1¡eally {.-ee until they accept death.

Once they have done this; they can overcome most things.

I am grateful to the priests of the United States for the continued support they have given the farm worker movement. I take this opportunity to thank pmticularly those priests and nuns who were with us last summer in Fresno. I understand that that experience represented the largest number of religious in jail on any one social issue in the history of our country.

That kind of help is very special to us. It is the help of commitment and understanding; but, even more important, it is the help of one's body-it is the help of people getting into trouble because they are helping us. It is the kind of help that is respected and appreciated by all of us. For in our struggle to change, to bring about some dignity to man-and I say to the men, the women and the children who toil in the fields-we are seeing that, throughout the ages, little-but little-dignity has come to them.

In the days of the horse and buggy, the farm worker's dignity was equal to that of the beast. And today, in the day of mechanical harvesters, his dignity is equal to that of the machine. And, so, we ask ourselves: Is that saying "yes" to man's dignity?

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When priests began orgamzmg in recent years, they also were saying "yes" to their own dignity. For in former times the priests were known as clerics and functionaries ; and today they are organized. We, too, in the farm movement, want to have our own federation, to' be able to say "yes" to our own dignity. Saying "yes" to the farm worker's struggle is really saying "yes" to man's dignity because it is putting an ideal into action. We are blessed more than most men and most movements because we have had more men saying "yes." to our dignity in our struggle than most struggles in the history of this country have had. And I think that we have been said "yes" to by many people throughout the land because we are saying "yes" 'to our own dignity.

But saying "yes" to man's dignity is not something new.

It has been happening in the entire history of man. Moses said "yes" to man's dignity. And so did the prophets, saints. In our lifetime Gandhi, King and others have said "yes" to man's dignity epitomized in Christ. Why do farm workers engage in similarlY insurmountable odds against powerful forces-the growers, the Teamsters, those who oppose us? Why do we march and picket and face jailings, expose ourselves to' physical violence, fasting and praying? I think that these things are done because we are saying "yes" to man's dignity.

Saying "yes" to man's dignity means getting into trouble.

How many times when we say "yes" it becomes a controversy!

And it becomes painful because in many cases the controversy .starts-it originates-among our closest friends. Saying "yes" to man's dignity means saying no to fear.

The struggle to say "yes." to man's dignity is difficult. And we often wonder why it should not be as easy as sleeping, eating and walking. But it is not. There should not be a question about saying "yes" to justice. Why should there be given even a second thought? How many times in ¡our lives do we find that we know we are right and yet we are afraid to act? The saying "yes" in the struggle for the dignity of man cannot be bought with money. Although that struggle is endless always there is the problem that, once you say "yes," you've got to continue saying "yes." The more you say "ye~" to man's dignity the more demands there are. And I think that is the way it should be. Wherr we sa.y "yes to man's dignity we are saying

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"yes" to life because that is really what life is all about.

FEAR AND' FREEDOM

People who were in jail in Fr~sno for two weeks last, summer were certainly very uncomfortable. But by their action they said "yes." And by their "yes" they stopped the arrests. They gave their bodies and they were in jail for two weeks. But they kept hundreds-God knows how many hundreds-of farm workers from going to jail. The way things stand now we may have to have more "yeses" to man's dignity this summer.

Saying¡"yes" to man's dignity is not only a Christian thing.

We know some agnostics in our day who said some very profound things-simple but profound. Saul Alinsky, a most controversial man, said "yes" to men-to the dignity of man-always. He once said that you really aren't free until you accept death. Once you accept death you can overcome most things.

You can overcome fear which will set you free then to struggle and to do God's work in this land. And, so, the fear of struggling, the fear of material security, the fear of death many times may interfere with our duty to put ourselves on the line.

The conflict with the obligation of service often becomes political controversy.

Strength comes from God, and if man is created in God's image, it should come from man. The problem we have then is that when you say "yes" to man's dignity and you get elected to public office, something strange happens. The power came from the people. No sooner is power acquired than the same man who got the power from the people begins to isolate himself-insulate himself-from people. Labor leaders have the same problem. The power comes from the people. There is a strange paradox here where we spend more time planning how not to be with people than the time we spend planning how to do the work. I understand that even some pries.ts are not immune to this. It is that demand that we are afraid of, the demand that people know there is a good priest over there. We don't care what time or hour of the day or night it is: he'll say "yes." It is an awful thing, because that word spreads, and peopl~ come from all over and make demands. And, the more he gives the more they will want.

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It happens to us, too. There is a fear to put a limit. Twentytwo years ago I was working in a small community in Madeira, Calif. and I got myself caught in a very difficult situation. I was beginning to organize and beginning to be successful at it.

The more I did, the more that was demanded of me. I was beginning to get very angry with myself and with people, because I wanted to have one Sunday off. And, after working about six months, I began to plan with my family-my wife and kidsthat I was going to go to the park on that Sunday and have a picnic-and I didn't give a hoot who came. I was going to give it up. I was just not going to be anybody's fool. I was going to take some time off. I was getting very, very upset about the whole idea I don't nlind working 13 hours a day; but on Sunday I need a day off. And I was having difficulties living in a situation with millions of problems of people, poor and exploited, finding someone, some organization that was beginning to deal with their problems.

So, on Sunday I wanted to get out of the house very early.

I got the kids in the car, went to very early Mass, came back home--made the mistake of coming home to pick up the picnic basket-and there was a car there with a family. Could I help them? Their son was in jail. And could I please help him?

What I wanted them to do was to go away, because although I did not want to help them, I felt very, very guilty. I did not have the courage to say "no." So I went with them and spent most of the day trying to get that man out of jail. By the time I came back, there was no way in which I could go to the picnic -and I had spent another Sunday working.

I made up my mind that day. I told my wife that I can not continue this way. Either I get out of this work and do something else where I work 40 hours a week; or, if I decide to stay here, I've got to decide that it is a pleasure to help people. And, if I cannot get that in me, really I'll be miserable the rest of my life. And I don't want to be miserable. So, I gave myself six months. That was 13 years ago.

Saying "yes" to man's dignity when you teach means supporting them. Our union runs five or six clinics. There are nine people on the executive board of the union-seven Catholics, one Jew and one Protestant. The issues of abortion and the pill were before us. When we came to the executive board every-

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one said in one voice: "Oh, we don't want to get into that. We don't want to have abot'tions in our clinic, or the pill. We just can't have that." Easier said than done! Right away 40 or 50 percent of the people working in those clinics began to rebel, and some left because we were saying "no." We thought we were saying "yes" to man's dignity by saying, "Let them live."

On the other hand we were being told "no" because, if we say that, then we who are doctors and nurses can't stay here. We have to leave.

PATERNALISM

I was brought up with the liberal idea that fann workers were too poor to pay dues. And we know that, if we are going to build a movement, we have to build it ourselves, and we had to sacrifice to do it. But we did not want to ask the workers to do it because of our paternalism. Several years ago, I was confronted with the decision one winter evening. I went to a man's home who was, I remember, one month in arrears, and the second month coming up. I went to collect the $3.50-there were no contracts then, no benefits just the idea of a union.

And this man said: "I was just going to the store. I have a five dollar bill. I will give you $3.50 if you come with me." I went to the store. He changed the five dollar bill, gave me $3.50, and he bought $1.50 worth of groceries. I had his $3.50 in my pocket and I went home. I couldn't get over that. I couldn't sleep that night because I was asking myself: "Who am I to take $3.50 from this man for the dues, when he needed that money right last night to buy food?" But, then, saying "yes" to man's dignity means having hope. About four years later that same man was among the first workers to be hired when we got our first contract. I never forgot that. I went back to his home when he got his first paycheck. And what impressed me so much had not even made a little ripple in his memory. I reminded him, but he didn't remember. He, too, was saying "yes."

We have a duty to understand the difference between saying uyes" to man's dignity in terms of service or saying 41 yes" to man's dignity in terms of being a servant. I think being of service at our convenience is not really truly letting go. For, when a man says, "I will say 'yes' to man's dignity by being a

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servant," I think that that makes all the difference in the world -being of service on a certain day at a certain place or at a certain time as against being of service all the time, everywhere and to everyone. Fighting for social justice, it seems to me is one of the most profound ways in which men can say "yes" to man's dignity. And keeping silent about these issues is probably one of the most effective ways of saying "no" to man's dignity. We don't say "yes" to man's dignity by thinking that prayer is an end to things instead of a means, that saying "yes" is all we have to do instead of saying "yes, here I am here is my body." I think that saying "yes" to man's dignity really means sacrifice. There is no way on this earth in which one can say "yes" to man's dignity and know that one is going to be spared some sacrifice.

To priests of America I am happy to say: You have said "yes" to us many times. And your saying "yes" to us has meant that other people have said "yes" to us, that countless numbers of people--probably into the hundreds of thousands or even millions-have said "yes" because you have said "yes" to us.

And so, dear brothers, you at¡e then the source of hope for usthe harvesters of Jove and the symbol of faith.

Thomas J. Grady

The Priest Today The priest bTings his people not <mly the hope that someday-maybe some ja1路 daythings will be clijfe1路ent but also the knowledge that here and now there is someone 'Who cares, someone who bea1路s the burden of thei1路 lives.

North of San Francisco, near the giant trees of Muir Woods, fronting the ocean is a mountain called Mt. Tamalpais. In a poem titled "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," poet Lew Welch has a refrain: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go." The refrain is repeated after every verse. And the verses say that mankind follows the sun, always moves westward. But here, at the west coast where the headlands fall into the sea, man stops. The Irishman, the Slav, every man stops.

The clouds swirl around Tamalpais like drifting incense. The sea lays stones and shells like jewels on the shore before the mountain. And the waves drop their white heads like worshippers. The last refrain has a subtle change: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else we need to go."

There is something sad in the last refrain: There is nowhere else we need to go." The poet knows that there are ships and there are planes and that there is westward traffic. But somewhere, somewhere, he says, man must stop. Why not where Tamalpais sings, where the mountain clutches the earth and raises its head to the sky, where the sea turns gold, where the 123

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earth is good? The statement is beautiful but it is the statement of a stoic.

Priests are not poets. We are something else. It seems to me that we are called upon to say to men: "This is not the last stop. Walk out on the water. Walk into the sun. There is no place at which you must stop. You can go on forever." As priests, we must outdream the dreamer, outdream the poetnot with our thoughts but with the thoughts of Jesus Christ.

He invites every man, as He invited Peter on the Sea of Galilee, to walk on the water. He invites every man into the blinding light of His presence. He says to all of us, there is always tomorrow--even beyond death.

In reality, what you and I as priests bring to men is not dreams but the good news of Christ. The good news can be accepted only in faith and faith is a step onto the water, a step into the blinding sun. In an incomparable way the good news gives hope to every man. The Good News says "yes" to every man's dignity. It is strength and consolation for every man.

The Good News is westward of Tamalpais.

But the Good News is God's and Christ's and we cannot make it anything we wish. We cannot simplify it. We cannot take the mystery out of it. We cannot use it for our own purposes. In order to express what I think we should do as bearers of the Good News I would like to describe three things: first, a description of a theologian's statement about the mission of the Church; second, the same theologian's conclusions about the mission of the priest; third, a personal viewpoint about the mission of the priest.

MODELS OF THE CHURCH

With regard to the mission of the Church, Father Avery Dulles has just published an excellent book called Models of the Chw¡ch.. In this book he describes five different ways of looking at the Church-five models of Church. He makes no choice between the models, because no choice is possible. No one of the models or ways of looking at the Church is complete in itself or without some shortcomings. Each model illumines some positive aspect of the Church. Each model has its limitations.

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ln the first model the Church is seen as a visible society, as a structured institution. The first Vatican Council defined the Church as a visible society. Christ founderl this society, gave it its form and constitution. The Church is distinct from all human societies and stands above them. It is a hierarchial society to which God gave power to sanctify, teach, and govern.

Dulles defends the value of structure, the need for structure.

He defends the Church as institution. At the same time, he points out that it is possible for institution to become exaggerated as institutionalism characterized by clericalism, juridicism, and triumphalism. ln the second model the Church is thought of as a mystical communion, a fellowship of men with God and with one another in Christ. In its ultimate reality as a fellowship of persons Church includes the totality of the means by which fellowship is produced and maintained-that is, doctrine, sacraments, authority. This "model" or way of looking at the Church includes the concept of "Body of Christ" and of "people of God." In the third model the Church is thought of as a sacrament, as a visible sign of God's will to save all mankind. Dulles quotes Karl Rahner, "Essentially the Church is the historically continuing presence of the world of the incarnate Word of God. She is the historic tangibility of the salvific will of God as revealed in Christ" (p. 64). The Church is not a mere sign; it is a sacrament, conferring the grace it contains. The mystery of the Church is that it points to Christ; it contains the power of Christ. And yet more and more it becomes Christ as the lives of "its members are transformed in hope, in joy, in self forgetful love, in peace, in patience, and in all other Christlike virtues." Its ultimate reward is Christ.

In the fom1h model the Church is Hera/d. This model places primacy on the word of God-the authority and the power of the word-the proclamation of the word. In this model the Church is one who has received an official message with the commission to pass it on-like the herald of a king who comes to pmclaim a royal decree in a public square. Community happens wherever the word is proclaimed and is accepted in faith .

The Church is event, a point of encounter with God. In the fifth model the Church is thought of as set-vant. In the first four models, the Church is either mediator between the

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world and God or stands above the world acting upon it. In these four models God comes to the world through the Chureh and the world comes to God through the Church. In the fifth model, the Chlll'ch as se>¡vant is seen as situated within the world, as sharing the human condition. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, however, recognizes the "legitimate autonomy" of human culture and especially of sciences. (#59) It asserts that the Church should consider itself part of the human family and share the concerns of all men. ( # l) It states that just as Christ came into the world not to be served but to serve, so the Church should serve mankind in its needs. ( #3) The Church in the Modern World says: "Mindful of the Lord's saying: 'By this will all men know that you are my disciples; if you have love for one another.' (Jn. 13/3-5), Christians cannot yearn for anything more ardently than to serve the men of the modern world, ever more generously and effectively.

Therefore, holding faithfully to the Gospel and benefiting from its resources, and united with every man who loves and practices justice, Christians have shouldered a gigantic task demanding fulfillment in this world. Concerning this task they must give a reckoning to Him who will judge every man on the last day.'' (#93) Today, the fifth model of Church is the popular model but it cannot be regarded as the model, or as without its limitations.

Dulles points out the limitations of the fifth model: "As the institutional model of the Church recedes from its primacy, there is a shift from the categories of power to the categories of love and service. We may welcome the cunent stress on the servant Church as a sign of spiritual progress. But the concept of service must be carefully nuanced so as to keep alive the distinctive mission and identity of the Church.

"Some radical proponents of the secular ecclesiology so emphasize the importance of peace, justice and prosperity in this life that they lead one to question whether there is any authentic hope for persons to whom these goals are unattainable. One wonders whether the Church would have a message of comfort for someone who, through no fault of their own, was dying poor and friendless. Traditionally, Christianity has always appeared as good news, especially for the hungry, the wretched,

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and the persecuted-those who, humanly speaking, have no right to hope at all. According to the Sermons on the Mount, the Kingdom belongs especially to those who are poor and persecuted in this life.

"Interpreted in the light of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God cannot be properly identified with abstract values such as peace, justice, reconciliation, and affluence. As Paul says in 1 Cor. 1/30, God has made Jesus himself our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification, and redemption. Not to know Jesus and not to put one's faith in Him is therefore a serious failure. The notion of the Kingdom of God, which is rightly used by secular theologians io point up the dimension of social responsibility, should not be separated from the preaching of Jesus the Lord.

The servant notion of the Kingdom, therefore, goes astray if allowed to set itself up in opposition to the kerygmatic." ( pp.

95-96) MODELS AND MINISTRY

In a chapter on "Ecclesiology and Ministry" Father Dulles correlates models of Church with patterns of ministry. If the Church is seen as society or institution, then the priest is understood as an officer of the society, a member of a class that possesses authority and power. The power to sanctify, to teach, and rule is given to the Pope and then to the Bishops. Priests share in the power of the Bishops. Since the priest teaches or governs with authority the faithful have an obligation to obey.

The priest properly administers sacraments because of power given to him and not to others. The priestly virtues in this pattern are obedience and loyalty.

This pattern has been effective and valuable in the Church for centuries. The spirit of democracy abroad in the world today suggests that a strong and efficient system of government can be combined with lay participation and coresponsibility at all levels.

If the Church is seen as a fellowship or a communion-as a

mystical body or as the people of God-then min is try focuses more sharply on gathering or building the community. The Decree on the Mini9try and Life of the Priest says, "The office of Pastor is not confined to the care of the faithful as individ-

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uals, but is also properly extended to the formation of a genuinely Christian community." ( #6) As builder of community the priest is a catalyst, a facilitator, a coordinator. His particular charism is to animate and correlate the charisms of others. Dulles praises the positive thrust of this pattern but notes that "it is not evident that all other priestly functions should be subordinated to this one." (p. 156) This pattern, he feels, is open to an underemphasis on the sacramental and mystical dimension of Christianity.

In the model of Church as sacrament, the priest is seen as mediator, as standing between God and men. This priest offers sacrifice and prayers to God and transmits God's gifts of grace and counsel to men. Strong emphasis is placed on the ritual and cultic dimension of priesthood. The Decree on Priestly Life and Ministry states, "Priests fulfill their chief duty in the mystery of the Eucharistic Sacrifice ... As ministers of sacred realities, especially in the Sacrifice of the Mass, priests represent Christ in a special way." (#13) The Decree relates all the functions of priesthood to the Eucharist. Proclamation is a preparation for Eucharist and reaches its perfection when the Word is made present in the Eucharist. The community, gathered together and nurtured in faith and trust and love, finds its fulfillment when it assembles around the Lord's table. The Eucharist is the apex and celebration of all other priestly functions. The Decree relates priestly spirituality strongly to Eucharistic celebration.

Latent in this pattern of ministry is a danger of exaggeration --of making the priest a caste figure, a hieratic figure, a role player. But the danger of exaggeration should not obscure the reality, the power, and the attraction of this pattern.

In a cultural atmosphere of egalitarianism there is a kind of revolt going on against the sacral figure. At the same time, however, there is a hunger for God, a searching for the man who is a man of God, for the man who is a man of prayer. It seems to me that society is not so much spurning the sacral figure as searching for the authentic sacral figure, the man who is possessed by the word, who humbly celebrates the word in his own actions and in his own life before he presides over the celebration of the community.

In the fourth model of the Church, that is, the Church as

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Herald, the obvious emphasis for the minister is on proclamation-not merely on preaching on or preaching with wisdom and competence but on making the word of God present. The word of God has its own power, its own dynamism. It overrides the preacher himself. Superficially, one might categorize some Protestant ministries as ministries of proclamation in contrast to Roman Catholic ministry of sacraments. Karl Rahner, however, takes the theology of the word as a starting point for the definition of priesthood. He says, "The priest is he who, related to an at least potential community, preaches the Word of God by mandate of the Church as a whole and therefore officially, and in such a way that he is entrusted with the highest levels of sacramental intensity of this word."

Considering the fifth model of Church-Church as servantthe priest finds the Second Vatican Council urging him to be sensitive to and be engaged with the human enterprise as a whole. And he finds the Synod of 1971 expressing certain cautions about political involvement. In this model the priest is seen as an agent of peace and justice, an opponent of oppression and of forces that dehumanize or depersonalize. He must work for the transformation of human society according to the ideals of the final Kingdom of God. Just as no one model of Church fully expresses the reality of the Church, so also no one pattern of ministry taken in isolation is a complete expression of ministry. Dulles concludes the chapter on ministry by saying: "The fullness of the priestly office, which very few individuals adequately encompass, would include the building of Christian community, presiding at worship, the proclamatian of the word of God, and activity for the transformation of secular society in the light of the Gospel.

These functions do not exclude one another, but they stand in some mutual tension, so that a given priest will not be equally involved on all four." (p. 165) TO TAMALPAIS AND BEYOND

Finally, I would like to say something about how at this moment in history and under the broad title of hope I see the priest. As a priest, I am afraid of romanticizing hope or of limiting what a priest can do. I hear the cry of the poor and

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of the oppressed. Not as much as if I had been born in the back of the truck of a farm worker, not as much as if I had been born Black, not as much as if I had been born poor in Calcutta, not as much, even, as I should where I am. But I do hear the cry of the poor. It would be Cl"uel, however, for me to say: "Do not fear. I am coming on my white horse. I will wipe out poverty and oppression. I will make a new world."

The task of transforming society is enormous. It mean¡s challenging deep rooted cultural presuppositions, challenging ancient prejudices. It means challenging the instinct to have, to possess, to control, to be powerful. It means challenging invested interests of enormous magnitude. To transform society means to challenge basic attitudes not of individuals but of whole peoples, of government, of cartels. I am not saying that the challenge should not be made. It must be made. The work must begin. But it will not be complete tomorrow. As an American Church we have made some significant contribution to transformation with regard to field workers and to factory workers. But, as yet, we have not succeeded in the defense of the unborn child.

I believe in the dream of Martin Luther King and I respect his sacrifice for his people. I believe in the dreams of Cesar Chavez. I respect what he has done. I believe that as priests we should make sacrifices and work for the transformation of society. But Cesar Chavez, like Martin Luther King, is more than a worker and a builder. With all of his machismo and his flair, Cesar is a lover. He loves his people. He identifies with them. And they identify with him. In love, he transcends his individuality. When people deal with him, they feel that they are dealing with a whole people. What he brings his people is not only the hope that someday-maybe some far day-things will be different but also the knowledge that here and now there is someone who cares, there is someone who is with them, there is someone who carries the burden of their lives.

The priest, it seems to me, must be not only the man of hope but also the man of care and concern and love, the man who bears the burden of the life of his people. And in some mysterious way, his care and his love must be not his own but the love of Christ working within him. His care must be the Holy Spirit touching human events, touching human hearts.

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The Lord Jesus came to our earth. He planted seeds of truth which in time transformed large segments of our society, which have Christianized, humanized our society. He gave us an ever expanding vision of hope. But most of all He gave us His love.

He came to share with us. He did not take away the prison of our flesh-the box of our limitations and disappointments.

Rather, He entered into our flesh. He did not take away the pain of life. Rather, He shared it with us. He did not take away death. Rather, He died for us and gave us resurrection. He gave us His Spirit, His Infinite Love to bind us to the Father and to Himself.

As priests, I think that we have to be builders of a new world, but first we must be lovers. We must enter into the mystel-y of God's infinite love and care and concern. \Ve must respond with thanks and praise to God's love. As heralds of God's love we must respond to the heartache and back-break of men. We must not merely rearrange the world for our people, as if from above them. We must share the world, the pain of life with them. We must be at one with them. That is why when we are at the altar at the Eucharistic Liturgy we are most of all what we should always be as priests, sharers in the pain of Christ, sharers in the pain of our people, presiding for Christ over life and death and resurrection.

As priests we must walk with our brothers and sisters towards Tamalpais, towards the world made as beautiful as we dream it might be, towards the headland of truth and justice and peace. But we must walk in the mystery of love. We must be truly present to our brothers and sisters as a sign that God is present to them. We must speak the name of Jesus to them. We must break His bread for them. We must sha1¡e His love with them. We must go with our brothers and sisters beyond Tamalpais to where God, Who is always with us, waits for us.

Jack L. Stotts

The Ethics of Hope "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, the1¡ejore we must be saved by hope."

R. Niebuhr

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope."

So declared Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the greatest American social ethicist of the twentieth century. This theme of salvation by hope has particular pertinence for the ethical task of Christians. For if our ethical task can be tentatively defined as the struggle for the individual and social fulfillment of all persons, indeed for the community of creation, then that is a responsibility that is never completed until the eschaton. Under the conditions of life as we experience it, the fullness of individual and society existence is a horizon of possibility. As what was perceived as fullness is realized, its dimensions and terms are expanded; the hodzons extend. Thus we are always on the way.

This theme of movement toward fulfillment in hope recurs throughout the Christian story. Abraham leaves his homeland, empowered by a promise of that which is to be. Moses leads the people of Israel toward a promised land. The prophets point the way, sometimes stridently, sometimes winsomely, to the life that God intends. Jesus calls on his contemporaries to follow him, to take up their cross, to seek the kingdom that lies ahead.

He promises his presence in power to all who extend themselves 133

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on behalf of their neighbors. He promises the Spirit to propel his disciples forward into new horizons of discipleship, to enter their mouths with words for the occasion, to pray for them and with them, to build them up as they build up their neighbors. St. Augustine prays and states at the same time, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." Much later Christians are called pilgrims, people on the way toward a future that is filled with expectations because it is flooded with the promise of fulfillment for persons and communities. For these Christians, as for those before them, the pilgrimage of faith is not toward a holy geographic location. It is toward a quality of life that is promised, that is partially fulfilled in their lives, but whose consummation lies aways ahead.

This image of the self as the active self, on the move, seeking a New Jerusalem, a New City, has its rootage in a belief that the future is open and subject to a different, improved quality of life than that of the present. That conviction's source is theological. It is the conviction that the God whose promise is the fulfillment of his whole creation is faithful. He keeps his promises. The God whose promise is righteousness and peace and wholeness is Lord of the future. He is present in power creating the conditions and prospects for personal and communal fulfillment. And he graciously invites his people to participate with him in the realization of his purposes, to be coworkers toward the realization of that which is still outstanding. As they do so, they are fulfilled, or at least they experience the first fruits of that fulfillment that is to be. Hope as openness toward and expectation about the future is rooted in faith.

It is, to use a traditional category, a theological virtue. It is hope in God. Hope, grounded in faith in God's promises of fulfillment and presence in power, has been a stimulus to action in the world on behalf of the neighbor. While hope's grounding is theological, its function has been human ethical activity. The way of hope has been that of love, caring for all that contributed to the realization of the expected purposes of God. HOPE SAVES US

But hope has not only been a stimulant to moral action. It

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has also been a tonic against despair, disillusionment and self satisfaction. All three of these attitudes, though quite dissimilar. share one characteristic-they do not seek change in the personal and social situation. Despair and disillusionment suffer under the pain of the present. They grumble but they do not act to alter the circumstances around them, believing that nothing can be changed. Self satisfaction rejoices in the present and seeks defensively to protect what is. But hope stabs into all three with the prospect of a better way. It deflates the pretensions of self satisfaction. It drains away the passivity of despair and disillusionment. It is an antidote to a sense of futility. It provides an orientation toward a new future, a future that is both judgment and grace. As judgment, the hoped for future rejects all in the present that does not contJ¡ibute to wholeness. As grace, it invites and compels action on its behalf.

Hope thus "saves" us in two ways. It saves us from a smug self satisfaction with things as they are. But it also allows us to affirm our present actions on behalf of the neighbor and ourselves as significant and worthwhile, even though there is only partial realization of what we would hope for. "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope."

Hope therefore has direct implications for ethical activity.

It energizes and activates persons toward the future. But there remains, after all these assertions, a need to specify how hope impinges more directly on the agent and the agent's activity.

In recent years theologies of hope have sprung up across the church. In most of them the ethical intention has been transparent. But it has not often been made explicit. JUrgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope is one example of this.

But a theology of hope may remain barren if it does not inquire into the specific question of the ethical implicates of hope in God. Or, its progency may be illusion if it yields no behavioral consequences.

A way of inquiring about the ethical implications of a theological conviction is to ask, "How does that conviction affect both personhood and social ordering?" Such a question, and its answer, holds together the polar reality of person in community, with an implicit recognition of the reciprocal relation-

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tion between the self and the society. Such a polar analysis also serves as a formal criteriological check upon any attempt to truncate the Christian ethic into either an exclusively individualistic or social response to God's ruling. Let us then look at the first pole, personhood and hope.

HOPE AND THE PERSON

Hope as a theological virtue has often been interpreted in terms of its pertinence for individual selfhood. A recent example of such treatment is James M. Gustafson's lyrical description of Christian hope in his study Christ and the Moral . Life. Taking as his starting point an understanding of human dispositions as "habits in the classical Roman Catholic usage of that term ... persisting tendencies to act in such a way that one's action is directed by these lasting dispositions," Gustafson delineates hope as a disposition of the self toward others, a bearing of the self toward the neighbor and the world.

(James M. Gustafson, Clvdst and the Moral. Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1968, p. 249.) This disposition is rooted in faith in God and shapes personal action. But it is fundamentally a characterization of the self's persistent posture toward all that surrounds him or her.

Clifford Geertz, a distinguished anthropologist, is writing about the same reality when he defines religion as "a system of symbols which act to establish powerful, pervasive and longlasting moods and motivations .... (Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966, p. 4.) In a theological frame of reference, to hope in God is to be one whose spiritual mood of expectation, anticipation, and future orientation toward the coming and present God is. also a powerful and persistent motivation to live in hope toward the neighbor.

To live in hope is thus to live in Christ and toward the neighbor. It is to live toward the purpose of Christ for the neighbor. It is also to affirm that the power of Christ is sufficient for his purposes. It is to affirm that that power is sufficient even though it is at times seen only under the sign of the cross, that is, under the sign of apparent defeat, with its con-

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sequent aura of futuility and emptiness. But hope as a mood and motivation persists beyond and through such signs. To hope is not an empty gesture. It is a disposition of the self.

Hope is both mood and motivation. If it were only mood, it might be understood as having reference only to the interior self, to the garden of the inner feelings. One could then be said to be hopeful while sitting quietly by and expect everything somehow to come out all right. But as a motivation, hope propels the self into involvement. One does not just have a hopeful feeling. One hopes for the fulfillment of Christ's promises and therefore joins in the struggle fot¡ his purposes. Hope is a persistent and pervasive way of living, because Christ is one who is persistent and pervasive on behalf of his creation. To hope is a way of living in the image of God, that is, of imaging the active, dynamic work of God toward the future that is promised. For the self who is disposed to hope is a self who is disposed to act. "Hope does not await in passivity for the good to come into being, but shapes and infonns the future by human awareness and deeds." (Gustafson, op. cit., p. 252.)

HOPE AND OUR NEIGHBOR

Hope as a disposition or as a mood and motivation can be further characterized as hope towa.¡d, for and with the neighbor.

We shall examine each of these elements in our search for ethical implicates of hope's relationship to personhood.

Christian hope as a bearing of the self can be interpreted as life lived in openness toward the neighbor. Hope points to the disposition of the self that says "yes" to the rich potentialities of the neighbor to contribute to the growth of a vital and fulfilling relationship between that neighbor (or neighbors) and the self.

The continuing temptation for the Christian is, as Martin Luther reminded us, for the heart to curve in upon itself instead of going out to the neighbor. And hope toward the neighbor propels the self outward. This propulsion by hope is subtly but distinctively different from, while complementary to, the compulsion of love. Love asks first, "What can I do for the neighbor?" Its initial temptation is therefore to cm-ve back in upon itself, to shift the center of attention away from the neighbor's needs to the "l's" actions. "Look what I am doing!"

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There is a very narrow step between love for the neighbor and self-righteousness. But Christian hope is different. It affirms, "I expect good from this neighbor who is before me." Christian hope is a stance of the self that looks outward. A hopeful person is empowered by the Spirit to look expectantly and with gratitude toward the neighbor. Thus hope's companion is humility. Its initial bearing toward the other is one of anticipation of what the hopeful self can learn, receive, attain through the neighbor's action toward it. Christian hope toward the neighbor centers first on the neighbor and that neighbor's gifts to the self.

The hopeful self is therefore one who approaches all neighbors-individuals and groups of people---â&#x201A;Źxpecting and anticipating a relationship that is potentially rich and mutually fulfilling. No neighbor is excluded from the self who hopes. One is persistently expecting from the neighbor the gifts of cohumanity. Thus, one's hope toward the neighbor is a channel that refuses to be blocked by the neighbor's initial or repeated unwillingness to be a neighbor toward oneself. Forgiveness which goes out toward infinity (seventy times seven!) is possible only as hope enables the self not to despair in the neighbor but to expect the possibility, against all previous evidence, of reconciliation and mutuality. As Robert Johann has writtten, "We have all had the experience at one time or another of being let down by someone we trusted, someone in whom we had hoped. . .. But that does not mean that we were wrong or foolish in hoping. It only means that the patricular person on whom we relied has himself fallen short as a person, that he has declined the love which our trust in him made possible and has preferred to remain alone. Our hope was not a mistake, since it is, in a sense, something we owe to all. The mistake was his who freely chose to fail us and prove himself unreliable."

(Robert 0. Johann, Building the Hnrnan. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968, pp. 152, 153.)

HOPE TOWARD AND FOR THE NEIGHBOR

To live in hope to¡ward the neighbor is a fundamental ethical disposition. It is the anticipation of receiving goodness from the neighbor's hand. To hope toward the neighbor is an ele-

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mental starting point for affirming that the purpose of God is that the self must be empowered to receive from the neighbor as surely as the self is to go out in active love on behalf of the neighbor. To live in hope toward the neighbor denotes an active willingness to seek to be open toward the neighbor, to hear and expect to be built up by the neighbor's words and deeds, to affirm that no neighbor is an enemy. Moltmann provides a suggestive summary for us when he writes, "The word 'hope' comes from the 1¡ealm of interpersonal relationships ....

Hope then refers much less to that future which is available out of my own powers than to that future which another man places at my disposal. In that case, hope is not the disposition of my future, but the expectation of the future of the other, based on his promise. (Jiirgen Moltmann, Hope rmd Planning, trans. Margaret Clarkson, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1971, pp.

180, 181.) For Christians, hope in God empowers hope toward the neighbor.

Christian hope is also hope for the neighbor. To be able to receive from the neighbor is to establish a context of life that enables one to identify with what the neighbor hopes for. From hope for mutuality one moves readily toward mutual struggle on behalf of the neighbor . â&#x20AC;˘ A mark of co-humanness is to hope for the neighbor's good.

And the Christian's hope for the neighbor is bent by love toward identification in particular with the hopes of "the least of these my brethren." While we hope as Christians living toward the eschaton for the satisfaction of the needs of all persons, we receive our ethical clues for practical priorities of advocacy from the signals of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the humiliated, the dispossessed.

These needs are multiform. But they include the human hopes for food, clothing, shelter, dignity, freedom, affirmation, and joy, to mention only a few. To hope for the satisfaction of such needs is to campaign actively for them. Thus, hope as a motivation moves the self out into the realm of social and political activity, as well as into the arena of interpersonal acts of caring. The setting of hope for the neighbor is the everyday struggles of peoples for fulfillment of their daily needs. "Give us this day our daily bread." Christians hope for and therefore

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struggle for a positive answer to that prayer, which is made on behalf of all persons.

THE GRUBBINESS OF EVERYDAY

Christian hope is therefore a way of living within the present and toward the future and for the neighbor. It is a way of living that is not oriented only to cosmic events of some startling proportions. It is a disposition to seek for the neighbor's good in the midst of the grubbiness of everday. One theologian put the point quite nicely, "It is always easy to become fascinated with cosmic and 'fabulous' events which are to occur at the end of the world, and to lose both taste and courage to be concerned with lesser things which make the difference between honoring God and neglecting him. What is a cup of cold water compared with Noah's flood, or a piece of bread compared with the Banquet of the world to come! Yet we are done or undone as we offer or do not offer water to the thirsty and bread to the hungry." (Joseph Haroutunian, "The Christian Hope and the Modern World," Theology Today. X, 3, October, 1953, p. 322.) To put it another way, an ethics of hope may lead to an ethic of revolution or to an ethic of more modest proportions. But it leads always to an ethic of being for the neighbor, and for what the neighbor hopes for.

Christian hope for the fulfillment of the neighbor's needs is not uncritical acceptance of what the neighbor says his or her needs are. The Christian knows there is always a distinction between needs and wants.

Christian hope as a way of living involves struggle. We have already referred to the bias of hope as directing the self toward the "least of these." Yet such a bias inevitably leads to identification with one person's or group's assertion of needs over against another person's or group's understanding. Conflict and contention are involved with a disposition of hoping for the neighbor. One is reminded, as an example, of the United Farm Workers' struggle with the growers. In such a case one must make a discriminating judgment about what hoping for the satisfaction of the neighbors' needs requires. It means deciding about priorities, about the validity of one claim against another.

Yet even in the midst of deciding and struggling, to live in hope

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for the neighbor is balanced by the moral claim that one must live in hope toward all neighbors, including those whom one is opposing. Just as in¡ liberation movements one applies the criterion of asking how the liberation of one group can also liberate other groups--blacks and whites, women and men, poor and rich-so in identification with the hopes for the neighbors one also inquires as to how the satisfaction of the hopes of one groups can also provide for the fulfillment of the lives of other groups.

HOPE WITH THE NEIGHBOR

Finally, to live in hope as a Christian is to live as a self who hopes with the neighbor. To hope with the neighbor is the final sign of authentic mutuality. For it is a rejection of paternalism. To hope with the neighbor is to refuse to define for the neighbor what he or she or they should want.

Further, to hope with the neighbor has as its critical ethical criterion the willingness to suffer with the neighbor. Those who hope in Christ are willing to and do suffer with their neighbors who are the victims of the world's inhumanity, indifference and self satisfaction. But unless this suffering with is joined with hope as expectation of a more adequate condition then the active element may be sacrificed. "To suffer with" must be subordinate to be also a criterion of "to hope with."

Otherwise the passivity of identification with the status quo of suffering may be paramount.

Hope with the neighbor is not hope with Christians exclusively. The limits of Christian hope with are not established by confessional statements nor institutional relations. The limits broken down by the love of Christ are comprehensive. Thus, one hopes with neighbors near and far. It is for American Christians to hope with the third world peoples, as well as with their more immediate neighbors.

Hope with the neighbor also strains against the temptation to narrow one's vision only to the present neighbors. As an orientation toward the future, life in hope anticipates the future not as empty but as a promised kingdom where persons are to live more fully, if possible, than do we. Therefore Christians who hope measure the present in terms of its potentiality for

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the future. Such an orientation is increasingly important in a period of history where actions have far reaching and often unforeseen consequences. The environmental issues of today, for example, require a sense of solidarity of hope with the future, if the present is to be an agent of fulfillment mther than of anguish for those yet to be. The ability of Christians to develop or receive such a disposition toward the future, a mood ami motivation to hope anticipatorily with the future neighbors, may be the critical ethical question in the years directly ahead.

Finally, to hope 1vith as an ethical disposition is especially significant for self-evaluation of one's motivations for working with those persons and gToups who have clear and obvious needs. The temptations to condescension and paternalism are especially severe in a period of history when the church corporately and Christians individually have themselves been identified as bearers of prestige and power in the culture. In such a time individuals and corporate bodies can easily impose their own expectations on those different from themselves. There can be an imperialism of hopes. The filter of one's own limited perspective then clouds how one sees what others need so drastically that the filter becomes a mirror. Only hope as a disposition of the self can provide a direct, limiting and critical condition that will skew one's own partial vision and experience toward a solidarity of experience and vision.

In the paragraphs above we have tried to examine some elements of the content of a Christian disposition or virtue-Christian hope. In doing so we have suggested how an ethic of hope might inform an understanding of the self as that self lives with hope in God, towm¡d the neighbor in expectation of mutuality; fo>¡ the neighbor in anticipation of being able to seek actively the satisfaction of human needs; and with the neighbor in a solidarity of humanness. Such a fundamental mood and motivation moves the self toward a life of active struggle, toward a future which is yet to be, whose outlines are seen only dimly, but whose content shall be, hope says, one day seen face to face.

HOPE AND SOCIAL ORDERING

Kenneth Underwood once wrote, "One of the most important

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things in a person's life is not just seeing a city, an institution, an organization, a social practice, as it is, but being able to see new possibilities in it, being able to participate in shaping a corporate enterprise into becoming somethlng important in the hopes and expectations of others." (Kenneth Underwood, et al., The Church, The Unive,rsity, and Social Policy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, V, I, p. 92.) An ethics of hope requires effective activity in shaping the social order so that its social bodies, policies, and practices serve human well being. Unless hope becomes operational by virtue of social possibilities that encourage human activity toward wholeness, hope becomes illusory and turns back upon the self, distorting the self.

We cannot in this brief article discuss what constitutes hopeful institutions. We will point to one criterion of hope that needs to be incorporated as persons seek to shape the institutions of the future. This criterion is empowerment through participation.

Institutions are social arrangements that have a continuity across time. They take on a life of their own. Though they are created by human beings in response to certain needs and requirements, they become self perpetuating.

Institutions, like the Sabbath (itself, of course, an institution), are made for man, not man for institutions. Yet there has recently been much attention given in the United States and elsewhere to the pathology of institutions, A continuing ingredient in the discussion is the diagnosis of this problem as being that of the alienation of persons from, what Richard Goodwin once called, "the most sensitive nerve in the American consciousness--the individual's desire for mastery over his own life and environment." Such a contention is buttressed by studies of various institutions, ranging from the family through the church and the political systems.

The most radical diagnosis is one that argues that many institutions in the West have institutionalized powerlessness.

Originally intended as vehicles for the exercise of power for and by the participants, these institutions now are seen to operate to prevent persons from participating meaningfully in shaping policies and practices that affect themselves and others.

The American political system, for example, that was designed

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to incorporate the equal participation of all people in shaping their own and others' future now, it may be argued, is shaped more by abstractions such as corporations and the military than by the people. The malady pointed to in such discussions is the perceived sense of many that they do not count for anything that is significant, that they are more acted upon than acting, that events flow through and around them without even a ripple being effectuated by their presence. It is a time not of interdependence, where clearly everyone does depend on every one else within a common venture; it is a period rather of bureaucratic process which may be characterized, as Hannah Arendt once said, as a system where "nobody rules."

Of course, in such a time and within such institutions, people are acting. But because the dominant sense is one of nonlocatable or highly abstract responsibility, there is an et¡osion of the moral base of institutions, of the fundamental purpose and of the moral restraints that are consequent upon a genuine sense of interdependence toward a common future. As that occurs, institutions that once were made for man now become tools to be used by men for small and mean put-poses. And these small and mean purposes may range from making money to re-electing a president to keeping the lid on people who try to expand the boundaries of the church's teaching. Powerlessness leads to misuse of power by some, to the detriment of all.

And the general cultural fall-out is one of cynicism and/or despair. There is a retreat by many into a privatism, of modest love for small pleasures and close friends, at the expense of a social love that embraces great causes and sacrifices personal comforts. Watergate is a sign of just such a situation.

HOPE REQUIRES POWER

An ethic of hope responds to such a time and situation in this fashion. It suggests that hope requires power. Institutions that fail to enlist the power of their members and that are not accountable in their exercise of power to limiting factors breed despair and cynicism. The institutionalizing of powerlessness is the institutionalizing of despair. On the other hand, institutions that provide for authentic participation by their members in shaping the life of others in and through the institutions are

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vehicles of hope. The institutionalization of participation is the institutionalization of hope. Hope that does not pmvide power for others is an empty hope. Moltmann writes, "The pain of despair surely lies in the fact that a hope is there, but no way opens up toward its fulfillment. Thus the kindled hope turns against the one who hopes and consumes him." (Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 23.) Hope and power are symbiotic.

A critical question that an ethic of hope addresses to all institutions is this, "Is there present in your policies and practices an empowerment of persons through their participation?" "Can they participate in shaping a corporate enterprise into something that is important for themselves and others?"

The reform of institutions toward a broader empowe1ment of persons to shape their own and others' destiny is a requirement for an effective life of hope.

Hope as an ethic calls for institutions that are able to be used by persons for creating a more humane social order. It is a call for institutions that embody hope by providing for participation of all concerned it a significant way.

An ethic of hope has implications for the individual self and for social ordering. As persons are bearers of hope they struggle toward a city where all persons are provided for spiritually, socially, and physically. They struggle and fail. They struggle and succeed. But still they seek the future for themselves and for all their neighbors that is not yet. Though Christians who hope often are discouraged and disappointed, or tempted to self satisfaction, still they work toward that which God in Jesus Christ has promised, his kingdom of love. And though its fullness is not yet, they remember Reinhold Niebuhr's words and move ahead.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope."

David J. 0' Brien

Signs of Hope If we wish to duceTn signs of hope, a rneasuc;-ing device may be pmvided by those tmditional dernocTatic values which the ChuTch is finally coming to Tecognize as heT own.

"This time, like all times, is a very good time, if we but know what to do with it." Ralph Waldo Emerson's words could stand for us today as a fair statement of our situation. We American Catholics have experienced some tumultuous changes in recent years, in our country and our Church and in our own lives. Once-stable communities have been rent ass under; long honored traditions have been undermined and destroyed; cherished beliefs have come to seem fictions, and fictions, however beautiful and meaningful they may once have been, lose their power to command our loyalty and affection. Many of our best thinkers, people in touch both with our theological tradition and with the major currents of social thought and action, have abandoned their people, turning their attention to highly specialized research or, more frequently, indulging in a nostalgiac autobiographical rendition of the ongoing fluctuations of their sensibility which, however amusing or sad, gives us little help in locating ourselves and framing personal and collective plans for the future. I have been charged with the enormous task of pointing out elements of hope amid the signs of the times, and yet I cannot but offer William Irwin Thompson's apocalyptic reflection of southern California as the future of us all. " ... more people lose their way than find themselves in this new world. As they become lost, they will fall into the artifical subcultures of Right Wing Americanism, Black Nationalism, Maoism, hippiedom, and the cults of the flying saucer contac146

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tactees. Lacking the strong connective tissue of tradition, the individual can entertain in his fantasy life various possible identities. Since nothing is to stop him from acting out his fantasies, he can flip from identity to new identity, changing jobs and communities, as he makes his odyssey through the vast Mediten·anean world of Southern Califomia. Since one lives in generational ghettos, there is no continuity in generational exchanges of knowledge. There is only the community of those who share one's historical moment, for these at·e the only one3 who can be trusted to be a genuine part of one's world."

Does that sound familiar? It should. For it is disturbingly like the reality that confronts us. At one pole we have a new pluralism, one in which our people, we ourselves, can actually choose who we will be. The Hari Krishna missioner on Harvey Cox's front porch on a Sunday aftet·noon, perhaps the son of an Irish Catholic mother and Appalachian Baptist auto worker from Detroit, is the agent of new consciousness and new alternatives in our lives, and in a much more real way in the lives Qf my children and your altar boys and girls.

Yet we know, too, the reality at the opposite pole, "the community of those who share om· historical moment." Our own effort to find liberation from the heavy-handed ecclesiastical bureaucracy, the cultural sterility and moral hypocricy which seemed to us the dominant elements of our Catholic heritage, has ended neither in a glot~ous new freedom nor a heavy clerical backlash, but in the ambiguous halfway house which is our contemporary habitat. Like Thompson's lonely Californians, we live at the razor's edge of history, fearful of being pulled apart by the twin pressures of a future alive with promise and a past which we now know had its securities and comforts. A wave of nostalgia sweeps our Church, and, like the Gothic south, we experience a literary renaissance at the very moment of om· world's collapse.

HOW DO WE RECOGNIZE SIGNS OF HOPE?

The communities of which we are a part have no firm criteria for assessing the infinite variety of events that tht·eaten to smother our minds and stifle our imaginations. The very language of discourse has become confused and cheapened. Has a war really "ended?" Is all change "refonn ?" What is "hon-

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esty" in government? Does "security" justify criminal actions?

What is critical about an energy "Crisis?" In the Church, too, a multitude of voices convey subtly different meanings with words like "spirit" and "community" and "faith" and uhis¡ tory." On all sides, the collapse of long respected institutions and the values and standards they represented gives rise to an autobiographical temper, as personal experience becomes our generation's substitute for theological speculation and social analysis. This phenomenon, not uncommon in American culture, reaches special intensity in our own day, making Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal more influential than Noam Chomsky and Michael Harrington, and Gary Wills and James Reston more representative than Gordon Zahn and Ralph Nader. Each of us, like Charlie Brown, is trying to maintain his sanity in an insane world. The effort is made quite alone, for neither Church nor school nor professional organization nor even family provide reliable guidance and support. We are tempted quite naturally to regard personal experience as the primary, even the only, reliable basis for judgment and action, a response which only deepens our collective alienation and isolation.

As a democratic society, America has always relied upon the collective judgment and action and involvement of its people, acting through a wide range of groups and institutions, to order its public life. When those groups are eroded and their moral authority becomes discredited, deterioration of public life is inevitable. Our highly centralized structures of political, economic, and military power impose enormous demands on all of us; yet our ability to develop effective and appropriate responses is inhibited by the sense of drift and helplessness which is so central to our own experience.

In our times, the Catholic Church has become a voluntary association, in fact and perhaps in theory, and as such equally dependent upon the involvement, judgment and action of its members. In Church, as in society, the demand for the collectivizing of energies and democratizing of decision-making processes run counter to the personalization of experience and the alienation of people, not simply from the institution but from one another. The sense of powerlessness so broadly present in our society, in all modern industrial nations, pervades the Churches, as well, producing the phenomenon of intense per-

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sonal religious experience amid the gradual disintegration of Church programs and Church structures. Who among us has recently met a really enthusiastic exponent of renewal in the American Church? Where does one find that excited militancy which characterized the early days of such groups as the National Association of Laymen or the National Federation of Priests Councils? On the other hand, most of us have only to go to our local parish or chancery office to discover committed and outspoken champions of moderation. Perhaps it would not be too cynical to state that the overall atmosphere of the American Church is one of concern without commitment, of adherence to what one Eisenhower era humorist called "the flaming middle of the road."

A couple of years ago the Advisory Council of the United States Catholic Conference noted the "need to establish renewed credibility with a significant portion of the Church's membership." "Despite the rapid evolution of many new institutions in the past few years," the report stated, "many American Catholics appear to be disillusioned by a felt lack of communication and by an unfulfilled desire to be actively included in the process of renewal." For my own part, I am not at all sure that the disillusionment of which the report speaks has not been indeed the product of improved communications and increased participation which resulted from the Vatican Council. These improvements have, if nothing else, clearly exposed the personal and collective attitudes of the hierarchy, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and indeed of the "people of God" themselves. Perhaps, after all, it has not been bad communications which have caused our problems, but shortcomings in what was being communicated; not frustrated participation, but active participation in activity which seemed to some increasingly futile and/or iiTelevant. In short, many who a few years ago would have greeted with enthusiasm the prospect of the National Consultation on Justice in 1976 might today regard the prospect with skepticism and indifference. This situation is the result not simply of poor communications and absence of shared responsibility, but of a number of specific and very serious weaknesses of the faith and work of the Church itself and of its members and leadership. In my view, the increasing numbers of Catholics for whom Mass attendance has become quite

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casual, and the groups of committed Christians challenging the Church-groups which include the so-called Catholic Left, the burgeoning Pentecostal communities, and the Catholics United for the Faith-all are responding not to a feeling simply of being left out, but to a felt awareness that what is going on inside is not what they feel to be important and significant in their lives.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE A GUIDE?

The central assumption of my work is that personal experience is of itself a wholly unreliable guide to responsible life in our times, particularly for those people who take seriously professions of Christian faith or democratic commitment. Only when such experience is explicitly understood and evaluated in terms of social relationships and historical locations can it become meaningful or creative. Serious analysis of the political, social and economic realities of our world is at least as important a starting point as personal experience for responding to the question: "What am I to do with my life?" The fact that that question, with its dramatic implications of responsibility for our own actions and for the making of history, has become a central question for so many of our people, is the most hopeful and promising fact of our present situation. To face that question squarely in the midst of the racism, violence, and oppression of nation states, multinational corporations and military bureaucracies is, in my opinion, a revolutionary act. It involves a commitment to history making, to personal and political freedom and to resistance to arbitrary power for which a high price must be paid. That price will be worth paying, and those commitments will be real, only if the question and the response are framed in collective as well as personal terms.

All of us have learned much about our Church, our faith and our world in the last two years. The agonies of our increased self-consciousness about our faith and our hopes are the price of greater freedom and responsibility. Despite the nostalgia we all feel for the old Church and the old neighborhood, there is no turning back, nor should there be. America has always been an ideal more filled with promise than fufillment, and the American contribution to Catholicism should be to awaken its long hidden promises. Perhaps they were "the dynamite of the

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Gospel," of which Peter Maurin often spoke. Catholics, in their turn, can perhaps rekindle in Americans some of the toughminded realism which our Founding Fathers knew very well, and which a more sentimental and self-indulgent age may have forgotten. Ame1-ica and Christianity intersect at the point of history making, of people individually and collectively accepting the burden of responsibility for their lives. Today, at that point of intersection, we must try to appropriate the central elements in our complex heritage in the process of realizing its promise.

As Americans and as Catholics we are at a point in our geography of faith and country which others have visited before.

Like them we know the sense of alienation that results from unsuccessful efforts at decent and humane reform; like them we have heard ideals in which we deeply believe used as a cover for the horro1¡s and brutalities of modern war; like them we have participated in a transformation of our Church which has opened the door to personal responsibility, and in the process endangered all sense of generational continuity, tradition and community. The result is that we must not simply locate signs of hope on the horizon of contemporary experience, to remember that the source of our optimism lies less in finding evidence that our ideals can work than in the promises from which those ideals derive. "Hope has primarily nothing to do with the historical transition from the real to the new," J urgen Moltmann writes. "Instead it is kindled by the new, by which the possible is made possible in the first place ... Faced with the historically possible, hope reaches beyond and can actually be characterized as the 'passion for the impossible,' for the not yet possible."

WITNESSES TO HOPE

The task of those who would bear witness to Christian hope in the world is not to show that things are getting better, but, in Moltmann's words, to "strive so that men can 'keep their heads up' in a world which is extremely involved, that they can recognize meaningful goals and find the courage to make human as well as material investments" for their realization. This is as true in the political arena as in the religious, for in the absence of dreams and visions politics becomes the art of possibilities defined by present power structures and political interests. As

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Max Weber saw years ago, the absence of people committed to principle results in a politics of sheer opportunism. "Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth that men would not have attained the possible unless they had reached out for the impossible," Weber wrote. "Even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has a calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when all the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of this can say 'In spite of all' has a calling for politics."

No one in the American Church has exhibited greater courage, steadfastness and Christian hope than Dorothy Day, and none has better witnessed to the manner in which the Christian struggle for greater justice, peace and love does not depend on victories. For Dorothy Day and her generation of radicals, a generation that included Gordon Zahn and Paul Hanley Furfey and Catherine de Hueck, the apparent lack of effectiveness of their peace witness during World War II in no way shook their confidence in the ultimate truth of their ideals.

In the mysterious labyrinth of history, the lonely death of Ernst Jagerstaddter, abandoned by all who knew him, unknown to any broader world, was rescued from oblivion by Gordon Zahn, to inspire another generation's quest for peace. William Miller's brilliant account of the Catholic Worker movement captures all this, and clarifies the profound challenge which the faith of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day poses for all of us, and particularly for our preoccupation with tangible and measurable successes. "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams," Dorothy Day quotes Dostoevski's Father Zossima. In the "experience of active love" which the Russian monk prescribed, the Christian is guaranteed not success, but faith. "If you attain perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without a doubt."

The Russian monk tells us that, amid the apparent failures and disappointments of contemporary struggle, hope is sustained.

"I predict that, just when you see with horror that, in spite of all your efforts, you are getting further from your goal instead

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of nearer to it-at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the mysterious power of the Lord who has all the time been loving and mysteriously guiding you."

We Catholics have tremendous responsibilities for the future of this country and of its best values and ideals. But there is no mm¡e urgent task confronting those bent upon the renewal of the Church then to purge their work of the spirit of winners and losers. It is a matter of the highest urgency that the Catholic community act decisively to reverse the drift of events toward ever greater injustice and tragedy. To do this it will be necessary to confront complacency and challenge the possessors of power in Church and State. But it is of terrible significance that this effort be carried out in a spirit of Christian hope which excludes any sense of "us" against "them," of attaining justice for some by crushing or humiliating others. The spirit of action must be that of Martin Luther King, whose people courageously challenged the structures and attitudes of a whole nation, always refusing to seek simply victory, to take over from their oppressors the reigns of power, but instead inviting all Americans to ovet¡come the divisions and hatred rooted in injustice and join together in a new community of fellowship and freedom. Confidence in the possibility of that community, and confidence in the oppressor himself-that he can indeed transcend his past sins and his present interests-these are indispensible elements of any struggle for justice which professes to be truly Christian and truly American.

THE PLACE OF HOPE

If indeed we do possess such hope, or strive for it, we still must face on a human level the task of deciding how and when to act. Given the complexity and ambiguity of ourselves and our world, where should we concentrate our energies in the days ahead? Martin Marty commented during the "death of God" controversy a few years ago that the tough thing to do these days is to distinguish a fad from a trend. Do we possess any standards of norms by means of which we can distinguish between events and movements and programs which are truly hopeful and deserving of support and those which are merely symptomatic of the general problematic? In short, can we know what to do with our times? There is reason to hesitate. Many

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of us have looked upon some person, or some organization, or some movement as the canier of the seeds of our common future, and in the end been left with a feeling of emptiness as it faded ever so smoothly into the American pillow, never to be heard from again. What was it for you: secular theology, the death of GOO, the counter-culture, black power, faith communities, discernment of spirits, floating parishes and underground churches, new politics or the new socialism? Having tasted most of those myself, it is only with the greatest reluctance that I offer some suggestions for consideration.

1. There never was, is not now, and never will be a Christian social order. The flaw of the old Catholic social doctrine was that it presupposed the existence of a mythical Christendom, and thus propagated models of social, political and economic organization derived from doctrine, heedless of the consequences for human freedom and human dignity. Political, social and economic institutions are human creations; none should be endowed with a Christian sanction.

2. Nevertheless, not all social systems are equally worthwhile. It is possible to say in the name of Christianity that racism, war, social injustice and destitution are evils, social sins. We do not know how the Kingdom of God is going to be organized; we do know that it will be a Kingdom of love; not of hate; of justice, not of oppression; of freedom and not of control. In the name of the Kingdom, the Christian denounces and confronts social evil and calls all people to struggle against it. These are important prophetic tasks demanding courage, strength and knowedge. In no way does an honest recognition of the absence of a specifically Christian model of the good society make the Christian a social relativist, indifferent to crimes against humanity. While there is no specifically Christian understanding of the world as it ought to be, there is a clear commitment to equality, freedom, justice and love, and an imperative to act.

3. Each person is responsible for his actions and for his life.

Every human being, Pope Paul writes, is "endowed with intelligence and freedom (and is) responsible for his fulfillment as he is for his salvation. He is aided, or sometimes impeded, by those who educate him and those with whom he lives, but each one remains, whatever be these influences affecting him,

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the principal agent of his own success or failure. By the unaided effort of his own intelligence and his will, each man can grow in humanity, can enhance his personal worth, can become more a person."

All men should have that power which is the ability to act, to make honest judgments and to act upon them. Power as oppression, power as the ability to control and manipulate others, is an evil against which all people are called to struggle.

The power of rich nations over poor nations, of privileged classes over powerless classes, of military and technological elites over national policy, of whites over blacks, of men over women, of the old ovet¡ the young and young over the old-all these forms of power are the results of sin, they contradict the demand for free and responsible life, and they should be fought with all the strength we have at our command. Perhaps this means we begin living the life of powerlessness now, through pacifism, nonviolence and voluntary poverty, after the model of Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Perhaps it means we struggle to find mechanisms of participation in which necessary inequalities of power are made legitimate and held responsible, political institutions guided and guarded by a sturdy, resolute and vigilant people, after the model of the American Constitution.

Whatever the problems of finding solutions, the fact remains that arbitrary power is the major evil in our world; it has become thoroughly demonic through the workings of modern imperialisms--â&#x201A;ŹConomic, military and ideological-and it should be defined as the enemy to be combatted.

INALIENABLE RIGHTS

The same truth emerges from the American heritage. We are created equal: We possess inalienable rights--and inalienable does mean inalienable. The exercise of arbitrary and uncontrolled power over the lives of others-slaves, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese--has always been recognized by our best people as an evil, unAmerican because a violation of the deepest meaning of that common humanity on which the American creed is founded. Of course, America has sinned grievously against its creed. We Catholics know well how far and how deeply an institution can depart from its founding spirit. The call today, as yesterday, is nevertheless clear: to make live in

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our lives once again that dream of personal liberty and independent self-government which drew our fathers to those shores. Ah! we say, OK. Fine. But, of course, how far do we want to go? Do you really want the workers to run the factories, even if they don't have degrees in management? Do you really want to turn the oil companies over to the public, or the schools over to teachers, parents and students? I'm not sure, but I wonder at such questions posed by people who speak of a Gospel of development and libemtion. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself," Thomas J efferson once said. "Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?"

The world is a tough place. It is relatively easy for Americans to pay homage to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and for Catholics to acknowledge the dignity of man and the rights of development. But, then, there is the question of goring oxen. People with power are very happy to talk about means whereby the institutions within which they work might be made more responsive to those they serve; in fact, corporations, trade unions, churches and universities have all been quite good at developing mechanisms for consultation: Advisory bodies, citizen participation components, public representation.

What is more difficult is to develop mechanisms of accountability. It is one thing to be responsive to one's clients, another to be responsible to them. My Yankee forebears in New England had the unusual idea, derived from a rather pessimistic Calvinism, that people and institutions were most likely to be responsive when they were responsible; that is to say, if you kept electoral districts small, and a vigorous, independent press and a relatively vigilant citizenry, and then forced an elected representative to return frequently for elections, he would quite likely be sensitive to the concerns of his constituents. Create a big government, though, with large electoral districts and infrequent elections, and for all the fine talk you would probably end up getting nailed. What this means for us, I think, is that we should not be too happy with elaborate consultation, even if labelled participation. We should be happy with structures of accountability for all offices in every institution, particularly when those structures provide for relatively easy re-

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placement of the officeholder and, equally important, have cont.-ol over his budget.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP

If one, for any reason, decides against the personalist wit-

ness of voluntary pove1ty and personal powerlessness and the revolutionary option of overthrowing present institutions in one fell swoop, then it seems to me that he is required to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. Back in the bad old fifties John Cogley wrote of the Catholic attitude toward liberal society: "We content ourselves with standing in moral judgment on it, as if its problems were not our problems, as if its failings were not our own, as if the challenges confronting it were not confronting us." At some point are we going to have to make up our mind when and under what circumstances we accept the responsibilities of citizenship. While many care about the concerns, moral or material, of their own community, who cares deeply about the city as a whole, or the country as a whole!

If indeed all social problems are related, if local issues involve national priorities, if local movements at change and decomcratization founder over the opposition of large-scale corporate and governmental institutions which control the resources on which we all depend, who in the end is going to challenge those institutions effectively? Whatever one's position on the suitability of priests running for office, we should all be grateful for the witness of men like Robe1t Drinan and Gene Boyle, who are offering models of the acceptance of the responsibilities of citizenship to a Catholic community never long on civic concern, with all its frustrations and ambiguities. Because of the manner in which he entered polities and his steadfast loyalty to party reform in those Massachusetts citizens' groups which have shaken the Democratic party in that state to its foundations, Drinan's witness is pa1ticularly significant. For my part I would point to such political action, and the corollary efforts of such groups as the National Center for Urban Ethic Affairs, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and the Sisters' Network as among the most hopeful developments on the American Catholic scene.

What we are talking about, in the end, is democracy. It has taken us a long time to do so. After all our years in this coun-

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try, it is about time we Catholics began to take the message of American democracy with full seriousness. What we are about -and we now have plenty of theological and magisterial support for it-is democratization. That is to say, the struggle to limit arbitrary power, to provide that power is exercised only when legimatized through mechanisms of consent, and calling people to the active and vigilant exercise of the tasks and responsibilities of self-government. In the civic arena, this means recognizing the fact of our common complicity in government actions: non-participation in the political process is consent to prevailing policy. Political parties are necessary features of any democratic political system wit.hin which people differ; participation in the party is a sine qua non of political responsibility. It is not necessary for Christians to agree on politics; it is necessa1y that they choose. So we must call our people to that responsibility, seek to widen the oppmtunities for access to information, perhaps by the use of our press and our pulpits, and force officials to address themselves to the real issues, particularly to the issues of greatest concern to the poorest and least articulate of our citizens. But freedom and self-government are indivisible; concentrated power in society, whether exercised by corporate or by technological or by ecclesiastical bureaucracies, will perve1t the political process and destroy the foundations of democracy. So, social democracy is the necessary corollary of political democracy. Participation in the life of trade unions, professional organizations, Churches, ethnic societies, neighborhood associations-all are necessary if the whole range of our social life is to be made truly human.

DISCERNING SIGNS OF HOPE

If we wish to discern signs of hope, I would suggest that our

measuring device is provided by those traditional democratic values which our Church is finally coming to recognize as her own. Never were these more eloquently described than they were by the greatest of American historians, Carl Becker: "To have faith in the dignity and worth of an individual man as an end in himself, to believe that it is better to be governed by persuasion than by coercion, to believe that fraternal good will is more worthy than a selfish and contentious spirit, to believe that in the long run all values are inseparable from the

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love of truth and the disinterested search for it, to believe that knowledge and the power it confers should be used to promote the welfare and happiness of all men rather than to serve the interests of those individuals and classes whom fortune and intelligence endow with temporary advantage--those are the values which are affirmed by the traditional democratic ideology. But they are older and more universal than democracy and do not depend on it. They have a life of their own apart from any particular social system or type of civilization. They are the values which, since the time of Buddha and Confucius, Solomon and Zoroaster, Plato and Aristotle, Socrates and Jesus, men have commonly employed to measure the advance or the decline of civilization, the values they celebrate in the saints and sages whom they have agreed to canonize."

Such an outlook may appear utopian; all outlooks which do not accept prevailing orthodoxies about necessity seem that way. Many fine people, from social scientists like Daniel Bell to politicians like Richard Nixon, will tell us that the world is complicated and its affairs are best left to those people who can master and understand its statistics. The Catholic tradition, odd it may seem, has always been quite utopian, insisting that private and group interests must be subordinated to the common good; the desire for fame or power, wealth or comfort, must always give way to the demands of justice. And, from the day when Alexander Hamilton told the nation how good for the country it woud be to have factories into which women and children, heretofore relatively unproductive, could go to work and contribute to the gross national product, we have had more tlian our share of those who have told us that human considerations of friendship, community and fairness must give way before the demands of progress or the threat of some foreign enemy. For my own part, I think that the surest guarantee of national progress and national security is a body of people who live and work for a better life for themselves amid sun-oundings they find tolerable and among people they trust. In the long run no occupying army could have held America for England once that nation had lost the trust of its colonial citizens.

In their struggle for freedom the young men and women of that revolutionary generation thought they had learned some

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lessons. In his Pulitzer prize-winning study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolntion, the nation's leading colonial historian, Bernard Bailyn, describes the attitudes of the ordinary men and women who founded this country: "What reasonable social and political order could conceivably be built where authority was questioned before it was obeyed, where social differences were considered to be incidental rather than essential to community order, and where superiority, suspect in principle, was not allowed to concentrate in the hands of a few but scattered broadly through the populace? No one could clearly say. But some, caught up in a vision of the future in which the pecularities of American life became the marks of the chosen people, found in the defiance of traditional order the firmest of all grounds for their hope for a freer life. The details of his new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinction ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted. It was only where there was this defiance, this refusal to truckle, this distrust of all authority, political and social, that institutions could express human aspirations, not crush them." To return to where we started, it is not necessary to find evidence that the right of development and its democratic corollaries are being recognized and implemented around the world in order to believe that the struggle for their realization is indeed the highest form of human endeavor. Nevertheless, we need not feel that we are abandoned, for both the last quarter century and our very recent history contain plenty of testimony to the strength of the human spirit and man's undying hope for freedom and dignity. Again and again people have borne witness to the ever-renewed dream described by Pope Paul, "building a world where every man ... can live a full human life, freed from the servitude imposed on him by other men or by natural forces over which he has not sufficient control; a world where freedom is not an empty word and where the poor man Lazarus can sit down at the same table with the rich man."

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Are we looking for signs of hope? Within a quarter of a century huge portions of the human race have thrown off the yoke of the oppressor and taken new control over their lives.

In black Africa, amid all the ambiguity and conflict of regimes from Ethiopia to Tanzania, who can deny that a turn has been made? Neo-colonialism there may be, but the blossom of freedom and dignity is can¡ied by a generation which knows itself to be good and strong and alive with possibility. Look north of our borders to Quebec, where a nation has been born, still in fraternal collegiality with its English brothers, sharing half a continent with a pride and hope that contrasts sharply with the self-deprecation and sullen hostility of French Canada just a few years ago. Look south of our borders, where only the most brutal and cynical use of violence holds in check a continent yearning to be free. Look across the ocean to that nation whose friendship we Americans once cherished, to China, where a growing number of visitors testify to the speed with which oppression and defeat have been replaced by a joy and dedication known only to those who are building their own land with their own people. In our own country, contrast the angry and defiant spirit of the young among our black and chicano population with the repressed anger of the past.

Only an America grown timid and cowardly would regard this awakening as a threat to prevailing order rather than as a promise of national enrichment. In the Church, too, there are many items of interest to those who seek. Of course, not all the stirrings of the last decade have borne fruit; of course, many have been lost in the effort. But there are an amazing number of dedicated people working for the Kingdom in this country, many more who are searching for a form and style of ministry and service' appropriate to the age in which we live.

Of course we need better leadership; of course we need new priorities and new structures of decision making. But we should have known-if we didn't-that the task of providing these things was going to be long and arduous and, in fact, never fully accomplished. Today's radical innovations become tomorrow's sterile anachronisms. But the crucial thing is that we are a far more democratic people today than we were yesterday. We will become, because we must, a voluntary Church whose members will be there not as at the service

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station to heaven, but because they honestly believe what is taught there and wish to share in the work being done. To be a Catholic is now a decision; those who make that decision will carry heavy responsibilities if you and I take seriously the ideas of contemporary social doctrine. Yet the prospect of joining together on a new basis of understanding, recognizing one another as brothers and sisters, and joining in a work that is of immense importance to the nation and the world, is surely exhilarating. You and I together, trying to learn not only how to find signs of hope but learning from one another how to be signs of hope--that, I think, is probably the most hopeful thing around.

Monika K. Hellwig

The Theology of Christian Hope We shall discover the content of Ch1¡istian hope if we pu?¡sue the ideal of fmte?-nal cha:rity.

For we shall see the reign of God coming.

We have long listed hope as one of the three theological virtues, giving it a place at the heart of the Christian message. We have traditionally said that the object of Christian hope is God Himself, that is, the Beatific Vision by which a human person is fulfilled beyond all expectation and all "natural" possibilities. Standard teaching of Christian spirituality (As presented, for example, by Adolphe Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life. Desclee, 1938) also analyzed hope in quite practical psychological terms. It consists of a d~-sire for the goal strong enough to effect the necessary ordering of values and priorities; of a confident expectation that this goal can be reached; and of the effort appropriate to reaching the goal.

All of this is good common sense, reflecting on the Gospel and Christian experience. And yet it spectacularly fails to satisfy the questions that people are asking today, because the above eplanation of Christian hope seems individualistic, ethereal, and somehow exclusively concerned with a realization of promises beyond death and outside history and experience.

The questions that are being asked insistently today are social, political and economic because we have realized how much these factors influence the possibilities of personal development.

Today people are realizing that war and violence are not only sporadic disasters in the world but have the capacity to spiral very rapidly to the point of destroying all civilization and perhaps all human life on the earth. They want to know whether there are any grounds for hope that will create a better world for us and for our children to live in. Today we realize that accurate statistical predictions can be made as to which strata of society and which conditions will pro163

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duce individuals prone to crimes of violence, acts of extreme cruelty to children, radical loss of self-esteem and other kinds of personal and social disorientation. We are forced to ask whether we have any hope to creating a better society in which the conditions that produce these problems are eliminated.

Now that we know the extent to which life-long physical and social deprivation brutalizes people and makes them incapable of reflection, of action according to their own conscience, of concern with spiritual goals, and of genuine love, we can not really hope that people who are so brutalized will somehow suddenly attain high spiritual fulfillment beyond death when there has not been the possibiity of development towards it up to the time of death. We must ask again what hope there is for the salvation of such people, and that question inevitably takes on very concrete, social, economic and political forms.

It is in this context that the German "theology of hope" developed. (The best introduction to this literature is probably, Jurgen Moltmann, Religion, Revolution and the Futzu¡e.

N.Y.; Scribners, 1968. Also helpful is, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969.) A group of German Protestant theologians, most prominent among them being Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, found a growing sense of alienation of their academic colleagues from the churches and from Christianity.

They discovered that in the aftermath of World War II intelligent people raised in church membership were coming to the conclusion they must choose between faith in God and responsibility for the future of the nation and of mankind.

It seemed as though one must be a Marxist or other atheist humanist in order to act creatively to bring about peace and justice in a better world.

It seemed at that time to the theologians reflecting on this unfortunate situation, that there was an understanding of the Christian message that saw all significant events of history as having happened long ago in the past. This would mean, of course, that whatever salvation we hope for must either already have happened or must come about beyond death and outside history. The consequence of this is that the task of the Christian is, in a very literal sense, to save his own soul out of the wicked world which will go its own way no

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matter what Christians and other men of good will may do.

In other words, salvation would be attained by personal repentance, good behavior within the slot in which the present society may have cast the person, and the observance of rituals prescribed by the Church. Salvation would have little relation to changing the situations that brutalize people and make the world miserable for large numbers of human beings.

It might even be concluded that the less one gets involved in public affairs the more likely he is to save his soul, and that any attempt to change things in the order of the world could only be a rebellion against a good God who ordained things this way for his own reasons.

JESUS AND THE POOR

Moltmann, and subsequently others, reflected on this situation and found that they simply could not reconcile it with the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is seen in the New Testament and the tradition of the church as the champion of the poor and oppressed, and is shown in the Gospels as constantly occupied with the relief of physical and mental suffering and the challenging of oppression. Careful study convinced these scholars that the basic Christian message is not about the past at all but about a future that is yet to be realized, that is, the Coming of Christ in glory, the realization of the Reign or Rule or Kingship of God in the world of men. The whole of Christian doctrine falls into a different focus when it is seen as basically concerned with a future that is not yet determined or blueprinted, a future that human beings are to co-create by their free initiatives, a future that concerns the world, the life and the experience that we know in all aspects. Once things are in this focus, the action appropriate to Christian hope becomes very much a this-worldly enterprise, and takes on inevitable social, economic, cultural and political dimen~ sions.

Many people have asked by what right a cluster of German theologians could go ahead and try to change the focus and thrust of the message as we were taught to understand it.

They themselves had to ask that question, of course. Their main base is in contemporary scripture scholarship and in some investigations of the teachings current in Israel between

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the final writings of the Hebrew Scriptures and the time of the Apostolic community. In this intertestamental period, significant developments were taking place. They must be taken into account in interpreting the teachings of Jesus, because, as we have all noticed when trying seriously to meditate upon the texts of the Gospels, the teaching of Jesus is sometimes quite obscure unless one has information on the background.

Among these obscurities there is none to rival that of the meaning of the term, "the Kingdom of Heaven." In the many passages that begin, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ... ," we never are told what it is like but mainly how it is to be attained. In fact Jesus gave no definition of the term, or if he gave one his disciples did not bother to report it. Since it must reasonably be assumed that the term, therefore, was not obscure to his listeners or to those who later heard the Gospels proclaimed, scholars have looked for information as to how that term was understood at the time, and have found it in the intertestamental teachings of he rabbis. (The meaning and use of he term in the intertestamental period is succinctly described in Vol. II of Gerhard Kittel, Bible Key Wm¡ds. N.Y.; Harper & Row, 1958).

THE REIGN OF GOD

The concept of kingship was ambivalent in Israel. To put it very briefly, Israel had hoped much from her kings and been bitterly betrayecl in this hope. They were expected to be the viceregents of Gocl whose people Israel was, and instead they provecl to be selfish and oppressive like other rulers.

Nevertheless some of them, particularly David and in a lesser way Solomon, became great folk heroes around whom legends and popular loyalties clustered. To the theme of the kingship as it had been experience in history there was counterposed the theme that the rule of God was not like the rule of the kings of this world who oppress their people. The rule of God liberates, because it is a sharing of the very wisdom of God Himself, a sharing in His creative freedom and power.

The rule of God is through consciences not through external sanctions, and it respects the dignity of every man and does not regard any man simply as instrumental to another's profit

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or wellbeing. Under the rule of God there is no poverty, no brutalization, no oppression, no advantage taken of the weak, no wars, divisions or hatred. Because the name of God was held in such deep awe in Israel, it became customary eventually to refer not to the Reign of God, but ·to the Reign of the Heavens, a simply customary ci1·cumlocution for God which did not imply another world than this one, whether in the sky or elsewhere.

Of course, the really important question was not so much about the concrete details of what it would be like when the Reign of God was achieved, but rather how it was to be attained. In the intertestamental period this became a scandalous question, because fidelity to God's law seemed to lead not to the Reign of God but to further persecution. There then emerged two strands in the rabbinic teaching. One was that of apocalyptic utterances and promises and threats: God would come swiftly, wonderfully, with great power, in an unpredictable manner, and with cosmic disturbances, to establish His Rule over men. The other strand was that of guidance to the individual concerning his way of life in difficulties and times of persecution. He was exhorted to live as though God reigned now and all other powers had already been rendered subject. One who did so and did not reckon the cost to him- · self in persecution or personal disadvantage in a cruel and selfish society would so to speak see the Reign of God coming from within.

When we look at the life and teachings of Jesus as passed on to us, and when we put Jesus in this context, some of the radical urgency of his proclamation of the Reign of God comes to make sense in a way we can understand. Jesus appears as the Just One and the prophet par excellence; out of the singleness of purpose of his own life, in which the Reign of God was undisputed, he saw with vivid clarity and urgency the possibilities for the coming of the Reign of God for the world.

The Sermon on the Mount, some of the parables and some of the replies given to individual questioners give a rather clear picture of the type of radical action and radical reversal of values of the world that he envisioned as the approach to the realization of the Kingdom. The New Testament documents testify to us that it was only after he had driven the con-

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frontation with worldly standards and expectations to the limit and been annihilaed by the powers of the world that his disciples began to understand what his message really was. In the essentially ineffable experience that they named Resurrection, they recognized his death as the basis for their hope that the transformation of the world of mankind into that of the Reign of God, was not a wishful dream but a reality already begun and now placed within their power to realize.

(The meaning and use of the term "Reign of God" in the N. T. is set out in great detail by Rudolf Schnackenburg, God's Rule and Kingdom. N.Y.: Herder, 1968. A bold, radical interpre¡ tation of the biblical material pertinent to this article is given by the Mennonite author, John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).

Working with this biblical material, the German theologians of hope have placed much emphasis on eschatology as the heart of the Christian message, seeing all other doctrinal formulations as serving the focus and clarity of the eschatological claims. This made way for a much more concrete interpretation of what we mean by faith, hope and charity and of what we understand as the process of redemption in the world.

The thrust became one of the necessity for political involvement, but it tended to remain quite vague and abstract in its formulations.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY

This work of mainly Protestant authors, was taken up by the Catholic fundamental theologian, J. B. Metz, also in German, in various writings that have been grouped under the name, Political Theology. What Metz added to Protestant thought is mainly a concern with the Church as institution and its relation to the world to be redeemed and to the Reign of God. (See, for instance, Paolo Freire, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. N.Y.: Herder, 1973). Metz has really forced Catholics to ask some sober questions about the structures of their church in relation to what that church is supposed to be doing to help bring about the redemption of the whole world and the whole of mankind. When the task of the church is seen not primarily as that of maintaining itself and its explicit membership in the sacramental life, but primarily one

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of making a difference to the way the world is run in terms of eliminating poverty, oppression and suffering, then the involvement of church officials in political, social and economic issues takes on a completely different aspect. The question becomes not, "Why are they not minding their own business, that is, ritual and doctrinal matters in the church?", but rather "Are they minding Christ's business, that is, are they properly aligned with the outcast, the poorest, the weak, the oppressed or dehumanized, the suffering?". In this perspective it becomes plain that there is no way to work for the redemption of the world without getting involved in political issues in order to challenge injustice and oppression.

Metz has a rather dramatic explanation for his perspective.

He sees the Cross, the central symbol of Christian faith and life, as basically the proclamation that for us as Christian believers, history is written "upside-down" from the point of view of the loser. The Eucharist, and the whole of Christian meditation on and identification with the life and death and person of Jesus Christ, is an anamnesis, or calling into consciousness, into reflexive awareness of the suffering that is hidden in the ordinary understanding of history and of society where the norms are set and the story is told from the point of view of the conqueror. It is only when the story is told from the point of view of the loser and when we raise our consciousness to take in the experiences of mankind we would just as soon not know about, that the agenda of unfinished business for the redemption of the world comes into perspective. It is only then that we see that concern for social injustices is not a charitable extra in a Christian commitment but the starting point and the central focus throughout the quest of Christians in history.

This thought has had and continues to have very obvious relevance and very strong appeal in the so-called Third World.

Catholic thinkers in Latin America and some Protestant theologians from a Latin American background have particularly worked with these ideas of the Germans, to try to realize them in a more concrete fashion. In doing so they had of course some models of actual protest and liberation movements to work with, notably those of Mohandas Gandhi, who was much influenced by the Gospels and the figure of Jesus though he

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was not himself a Ch1¡istian, and of Martin Luther King, who reflected on his actions in very specifically Christian terms.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY

The Liberation Theologians of Latin America, among whom Gustavo Gutierrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and Rubem Alves are the most readily available in English, have consistently tried to move from praxis to reflection and theory. (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973.

Juan Luis Segundo, Theology for Artisans of a New Society.

Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973, 1974. Rubem Alves, Towards a Theology of Human Hope. Washington: Corpus, 1969). They see theology not simply as wisdom for living one's individual life, much less a rational knowledge to be acquired by speculation and careful logic, but as essentially reflection on the praxis of living as a follower of Jesus Christ in the community of the followers of Christ. Hence they see the task of Christian theology and catechesis and preaching today as one of listening to the problems and sufferings and protests that are being made today, and asking what light the gospel has to shed on these issues.

For the Latin American liberation theologians, it is not only eschatology and ecclesiology that must be constantly rethought and questioned and thrown into social perspectives of the present. It is the whole gamut of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity that mnst be reexamined in terms of reflection on the praxis of living a truly Christian life in a community that is struggling to be truly Christian. This is why they have embraced with enthusiasm the experiences and theories of conscientization, or consciousness raising of Paolo Freire. (See, for instance, Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of ihe Oppressed. N.Y.: Herder, 173). Does our way of preaching and considering the doctrine of creation make human persons more or less human? Are we making people passive as the price of Christian faith, when common sense and the Bible see them as active? Are we attributing to the creator God, under the tag, "nature," what is man-made and man-controlled and belongs under the tag, "culture?" Do we preach as though the creator God made some men poor and some rich, 5ome powerful politically and some powerless, and so on, so that

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all should "accept their station" as divinely decreed and not rebel against it, for that would be to rebel against God? Are we teaching the doctrine of creation as though God provided a finished world, complete with political and social and economic structures, and blue-printed foreve1¡? And if we are p1¡eaching and teaching and thinking this way, is it not quite untrue, demonstrably so in terms of common-sense observations of reality, and demonstrably so in terms of the Bible and the tradition seen in historical perspective?

Beginning with the important question, what is it that God creates and what is it that man creates, that is, how should we distinguish between nature and culture?, theology must then also ask the question, what is the relation between man's freedom and action and that of God in the relationship of creator and creature? Our whole western civilization is built on non-acceptance of the given of nature as a permanent and inscrutable, unchangeable given world. Is that the proper response of creaturehood, of worship, or is it rebellion and sin?

As Christians we look to the person and life and death of Jesus Christ for the revelation of what man is in the likeness of God, or what man is called to become. We look to the person of Jesus as the "law" that reveals to us what is sin and what is obedience to the voice of the creating and redeeming God. But again the questions arise as to whether we are preaching and teaching a concept of sin and redemption that is distorted by privatization, is etherialized, and made otherworldly and unreal in terms of what people are, what it is that constitutes them in their personhood.

GRACE AND NATURE

Most importantly the liberation theologians are asking for a rethinking of our usual formulations of grace and nature, of the natural and the supernatural, the worldly and the spiritual. At the beginning of Christianity grace became a technical term for Christians, being chosen to describe an observable reality among Christian believers and Christian communities. Whether people were living in grace was thought to be observable in their behavior, and was seen as making radical differences in the social and economic and internal political structures of the Christian communities. This suggests the

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need for some sober reflection on the way we use the term grace today. Do we preach and speak as though it nowise impinged upon the realm of experience, that is, as though it did not and was not meant to make a difference to the way people live and the way their social, economic and political life is structured? And if we do, is it simply untrue to the gospel?

That in turn leads to the re-examination of the church, the task of the church to play a prophetic role in the society and the roles and initiatives within the church structures and the church communities by which a prophetic role might in fact be exercised. In times of outright persecution we have always done well in playing a prophetic role. When we enjoyed patronage, whether it was under Constantine and Theodosius, or under Charlemagne, or under the Kings of Spain, or indirectly under the American Constitution, the record for prophetic leadership has been dismal. How we deal with the questions concerning church mission and church structures is, in turn, tied in again with the exchatological doctrines and the doctrines of creation, sin and redemption in Jesus Christ.

What German and North American readers have found rather exasperating about the Latin American liberation theology, is that it seems always to proceed by way of hints and suggestions and questions and anecdotes. These Latin American authors are extremely reluctant to commit themselves in any once-for-all, universally applicable formulations for preaching, catechesis or theology proper. This is consistent with their basic tenet that theology must be the ongoing, personal reflection on the Christian praxis in which one personally participates. Therefore, no-one writes a theology of this kind for an another culture or society or community.

The Latin American work seems to be a plea for much less academic complexity, rigidity and pomposity and much more attention to what God may be saying to us in the world in which we live. In this the Latin American work is much in tune with current understanding of revelation and how we participate in the revelation in Christ. It assumes a polarity between today's questions and experience on the one hand and the heritage from the Christian past on the other. Theological reflection, and preaching and catechesis, works creatively with-

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in this tension, not to take over a finished product from the past and make it relevant to the present and the future, but to take the very real questions we now have to solve and seek enlightenment in solving them from the experience and reflection of our past.

A THEOLOGY FOR NORTH AMERICA

There have been various efforts to create a liberation theology, a political theology or a theology of hope for our North American culture. It is still in a very rudimentary stage, partly because we are so unaware of the oppression caused by and in our society, by and in our political system and our economic structures and our social and cultural patterns of values and priorities, that we do not seem to be asking the questions very well yet. In so far as some progress has been made it has happened where we have been forced to become aware, notably in relation to race and war. Perhaps the most general attempt at a theology of human and political hope is that of James Douglass, who certainly provides a very happy introduction to the available literature. (James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1968). What is central to his thought, and seems to sum up the thought of many of the North American (as well as the French) contributors to the discussion, is the critique of the power of violence, becoming a critique of our concept of man and society and an attempt to restore a covenantal understanding of human nature. The question that constantly arises is whether we are to take the norm of human behavior, and content of the idea of human "nature" from the sum total of observed behavior thus far in the history that is known to us, or whether we are to project norms for mankind and for human behavior on the basis of possibilities as yet only faintly glimpsed, but which we have grounds for hoping to realize. For example, are we to suppose that because wars have been recurrent in history that it is "natural" to man to resolve differences by killing innocent persons not involved in the dispute? Are we to suppose that might in terms of firepower is the best we can do by way of defining right, and that when men are called upon by their governments to go out and kill strangers, the matter is morally and religiously indifferent because the world

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can not be any other way?

These are serious questions, and they can be duplicated in questions of poverty, of what help will be given to the children of the poor, what guarantees and supports the society and its government owe to the poor because they are powerless in making economic bargains with the rich, whether racial discrimination must be accepted as a permanent fact of life or can be eliminated, whether it is enlightened and unadulterated self-interest that makes the world go around or whether love would get it rolling too.

These questions come around full cycle to the point at which this article began, namely, the content of Christian hope. The essential or ultimate content, is indeed God Himself as the end and future of man, hidden, elusive, never concretely definable . . . . However, it is necessary, if there is to be any action at all, appropriate to our hope, that we begin to be more concerned with the intermediate goals which we ourselves must project out of the experience of trying to live a Christian life in the world as it now is. To attempt to live now as though God reigned and all other powers were already subject to His rule is to come in conflict quickly and accurately with the powers that are ranged against the power of God and to discover equally swiftly and accurately intermediate goals that must be striven after. Such goals will manifest themselves frequently as a direct challenge to the economic structure and presuppositions of the whole society, and perhaps of the international complex of national societies. They may manifest themselves as a political challenge, and as a challenge to deeply held cultural priorities and values.

Action according to conscience on any one point tends to be revelatory in terms of the whole cultural and the network of sin within the culture, and therefore tends to bring about reflection and radically oppositional commitments across a much broader range. The key to orthodoxy, or orthopraxy, here is basically always the same, being serious and consistent about the brotherhood of all mankind. If we pursue the ideal of fraternal charity as its demands become more far-reaching we shall keep discovering the content of Christian hope, because we shall, so to speak, see the Reign of God coming from within the experience of the Resurrection which anticipates it.

Vincent Dwyer

Priest: Minister of Hope and Healing There is rea.~on to believe that we are on the verge of the greatest spiritual 1¡enewal in the Chm¡ch's histM'1J.

"You will never be anything but a clam digger." This was my father's prediction for me as I grew up in Massachusetts, always in trouble. He uttered the prophecy after I had been rhsmissed from school and joined the Navy. There have been times when I wished he had been right.

For a number of years I have felt like a voice in the wilderness. The feeling was especially strong in my own monastery when I proclaimed that the real problem in Trappist life was that of spirituality. As a monk I was very much involved in helping men of our monastery who had decided to leave to readjust to the active side of life. In monastic parlance I was the "outside contact man." I was also in charge of the farm and its production of jams and jellies. I always tell people that "there is a picture of me on every jar." Some people think that we make these jams and jellies in big buckets. But if you were to walk through our plant, you would find it one of the most modem on the East coast. We are very efficient in this dimension of our lives. In what might be called the spiritual side of our life, however, we were following insights that were given us many centuries ago. Many of these insights were those of a man named DeRance who was responsible for the reform of our Order; he was a monk of LaTrappe monastery in Normandy.

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History tells us that DeRance had been something of a playboy. Then he repented of his ways, returned to his monastery to pay for his sins-and inflicted upon us all kinds of sins.

Some of us wondered why we should be doing all these penances when we hadn't committed all his sins.

When I became sick, my superiors did not know quite what to do with me; so they sent me to school. I decided to study the spiritual life. I wondered if my intuition was right, that the real problem in Trappist life, indeed in other religious orders and perhaps the Church itself, was that it faced a crisis in spirituality.

THE PROCESS OF INTERNALIZATION

I became very involved in the work of John Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who is famous in the United States for his contribution to the idea of "moral development." I became fascinated with his views of moral judgment; I saw it as a vehicle for dealing with the internalization of principle, the internalization of commitment. Here perhaps was a means of dealing with our present spiritual crisis, but only if one granted that the spiritual life is indeed the internalization of the principles of Jesus Christ. We all know how Christ felt about the inside of the cup, how outraged he was at the pharisees and scribes who conformed "to the rules" yet were full of corruption.

In the process of moral judgment, or the internalization of principles, there are basically six stages ( cf. L. Kohlberg) ; perhaps now we may say that there are seven. In the first stage people act out of fear of punishment. In the second stage they are motivated by reward (I sometimes refer to this as the Monsignor stage). The third might be called the Good Boy stage; here we meet the good father, the good mother, the good student, the good priest or sister. The fourth is the "Law-and Order" stage; I have come to call this the "cop-out" stage. Here people refuse to internalize the principles of the law; they are unwilling to assume the responsibility for that internalization.

They obey the law, not because they believe it is right, but because they were told to do so by the Church or by their bishop.

The fifth is the Contractual stage. It is a movement away from the externals to internalization; and it involves choice, respon-

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sibility and commitment. The sixth stage is the movement away from a mere contract to the universality of principles; in terms of our spiritual life, it would be the universal application of the commandment to love.

Do these six stages represent only an exercise in behavioral science? Some people have said so, but they should be aware that the great mystics have described the same phenomenon in different language. Saint Theresa of Avila viewed Christian development as a transition through a series of mansions. John of the Cross saw to it as process of climbing a mountain to its peak where one experienced an unbelievable unity and community with God. In Theresa's opinion most people never passed beyond the third mansion; she called it the mansion of the good priest and the good religious. It is here that people dwell who are neither happy with the things of God nor happy with the things of the world. It is here that we find people saying: "It is too much to follow Jesus Christ all the way; it is too much to really say that he is the meaning of life." It is a mansion of mediocrity.

As Cesar Chavez has said: "Being able to say 'yes' means a willingness to pay a price." Cardinal Newman described it as the difference between notional and real assent. People say "yes" in their heads, but never "yes" totally. Therefore, their behavior does not change; they do not live out their vocation -their "yes." Theresa said that the Church would be better if they would stand up and tell the whole world: "It is too much." At least the Church and the world would not be deceived. In Theresa's opinion then the third mansion is "where most people are." In my own experience it is also home for many priests and religious.

RENEWAL WITHIN THE CHURCH

The Second Vatican Council said that all renewal within the Catholic Church must begin with a renewal of its spiritual life. There has been a striking change in the external appearance of the Church since Vatican II; the great sign of hope today is the realization that we are now asking questions about spirituality-about renewal from within. We have thrown out

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the spiritual exercises without ever asking: Where do they come from? What are they grounded in? What meaning do they have? We dismissed them as excess baggage.

As I said earlier, I long felt that I was a voice in the wilderness, but no more. Priests across the country listen to me; and not only priests, but bishops and Cardinals too. I believe that we stand on the verge of one of the greatest renewals in the Catholic Church because we are facing up to the serious questions of spirituality. Needless to say, we have a long journey ahead of us. Let me illustrate one of the problems we shall face; it surfaces in the bishops' document: Spi1路itual Renewal of Anw1-ican Priesthood.

In the very first page the authors refer to the half-million dollar study commissioned by the American Bishops. "These studies," say the authors, "have shown the American priest to be an ordinary man, much like his fellow citizens on the scale of psychological growth, and therefore, most of them fitting into the largest category of adult American males of comparable background, that of emotionally underdeveloped adults." Well, that sentence is reassuring; we are in the same boat with everyone else. The authors continue to reassure us: "This does not mean that we are disturbed (people)." It just means that our "growth-index follows the pattern of the majority of (our) secular counterparts" and that we have not developed.

In another section of the Bishops' study we find this sentence: "According to the psychological study, a large proportion of American priests are underdeveloped psychologically.

This does not mean (to say) that (we) are sick, but that (our) growth has been arrested." So you are not sick, I am not sick; we are just underg~路own.

"Generally (we) have not worked through the problem of intimacy, and (our) level of maturity is lower than (our) chronological age. (We) do not relate deeply or closely to other people." We must not feel bad about this judgement, for "this is not an indictment of their spirituality." Why? "Because (we) may possibly have a high degree of theological love for 路(our) fellow men but are unable to show it."

By separating out these few sentences from the bishops' doc路ument, I do not intend to demean the work itself because I feel it has made a tremendous contribution to priestly life. I wish

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only to illustrate a point. The Bishops spent a good many dollars to find out that we were "screwed up." But in my opinion it is precisely the saint who can admit that he is indeed "screwed up" yet says: "I am beautiful and loveable." And so the bishops who spent all that money to affirm the fact of our disarray, should spend a few dollars to tell us that we are beautiful and loveable. Then we would have more priests on the road to sanctity; and never has the Church needed saints more.

How can I be comfortable with the fact that I have not "put it all together?" The only way is through my brother. I must enter into the revelatory process with him; I must be able to reveal who I am in order to uncover the unbelievable power of God which enables him to affirm me as I am. Once I can say "yes" to his affirmation, then I am indeed healed; I am on the road to becoming whole, to becoming a saint. This is the ordinary process in the Christian life by which God communicates the incredible good news that I am not merely "screwed up" but loveable and beautiful too. I cannot experience this fact, however, until I enter upon that way which Pope Paul describes for modern man as the Christian life--the life of dialogue to which he says the child is invited and through which the mystic finds full outlet.

The greatest power that we have is our unconditional power to affirm one another. There is no greater power this side of heaven; and in fact it is the greatest way of sharing the power of God himself. Failure to ,exercise that power is, in my estimation, the most horrible sin that man is capable of committing.

The exercise of that power is indeed the continuation of the Incarnation. This is my vision of the Christian life and of sanctity.

THE SEVENTH STAGE

Don Eugene Boyle, the¡ famous Trappist author, once described what he considered to be the greatest heresy in the Catholic Church. It was the monk somehow intimating to those outside the monastery that they were called to meditation and not contemplation, that they were not called to mystical stages of union with God. In doing so we allowed the devil to put up the unbelievable screen which permitted men to say: "The

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battle described by the Saints, the da.rk nights of John of the Cross are not for me. The asceticism required to lead this intense life, of prayer is not for me because I am merely a good laborer in the field."

That heresy, if indeed it was such, is no longer present in the Chm:ch. Everyone is summoned to the mountaintop; all are called to contemplation and union, even its mystical sta.ges.

The possibilities of that summons become exciting when we learn to translate the vision of John of the Cross into language familiar to modern man.

In my own studies I began to explore the possibility of a stage be,yond the sixth one that I described earlier. Was there something beyond the mere internalization we ha¡ve spoken of, the radical commitment to follow Christ? I analysed again the concept of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I searched the Scrip:.. tures and then I came upon that text where Christ tells us, as he did the Apostles: "You must become children in order to enter the Kingdom." We all recall how puzzled the Apostles were by his words.

All my life I had been fascinated by that text. As I began to explore it, I tried to reca.pture some of my own thoughts and life as a child. I travelled back to Southern Massachusetts, to the small town where I grew up, a town by the name of Scituate, right on the coast. I even took a tape recorder. As I retraced the steps of my childhood, I carried with me in the back of my mind all I had learned, but especially my memory of the greatest spiritual synthesis of modern time, Ecclesiam Suam; Pope Paul's first encyclical. In it he recommends "dialogue" as a descriptive method of tral}smitting to modern man. the great heritage of the mystics. He talks about the aspects. of dialogue, its spontaneity and trust. It recalled the words of Cardinal Newman that " ... priests no longer trust the secrets of their hearts to one another."

Dialogue involves the art of listening, of being able to move with those characteristics which are so associated with children. It was this thought that accompanied me as I stopped my car and got out where the seawall opened to the ocean.

Once again I stood on the beach of my boyhood. I could recall so vividly how many times I had been there as a small boy. I used to write crazy things in the sand because I could still

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dream; and I would watch the tide come and take my thoughts across the sea. I began to walk the beach, just letting myself move. Finally I stood on the jetty at the entrance of the harbor where so often so many years ago I would sit for hours and dream. I dreamt of how one day I would become a great missionary, of how I would sail across that ocean to conquer foreign lands for Christ.

I rewalked the roads on which I had played until I stood on a lawn overlooking the bay where I grew up. There was a sign: "For Sale;" it was the house in which I had lived my boyhood. As I stood there I recalled the vivid moments of my childhood. They were moment when I played with my father and mother, sharing the secrets of my heart. I recalled how spontaneous. I was, how open, able to give and to receive, how comfortable in the land of touch. And then began my taste of sin. We do not call it "sin" today, we call it "culture."

My father said one day; "You can no longer hug me. You can no longer kiss me. You are a young man now and you must shake hands, because that is what American men do." And so he taught his five sons. When one of his 'friends was coming, he would sometimes practice to make sure that we did not give them what he called a "clam shake." And to demonstrate he would squeeze our hands to the point of almost crushing them.

It was not long before I realized that I no longer shared secrets with him; I could not do so comfortably. Perhaps that comfortable sharing was one of the qualities that must be recaptured in the Seventh Stage.

THE JOURNEY BACK

In his Dark Night St. John of the Cross speaks of the terrible "night of the sens:es." Perhaps what he was describing was really the pain of becoming "like little children," with their ability to let the unbelievable beauty within them flow through their senses. Our senses must somehow be stripped and cleansed so that God can touch us and we can receive him-through our senses. We must move through an agonizing night if we are to ¡finally come to accept the unbelievable power of our brothers who affirm us, who say to us: "I love you. I accept you for who you are." We do not reject their affirmation by self-

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denigration: "Oh! But if you only knew this, you would not support me." To do this is to destroy the communion and the power they offer from God himself. For it was St. Paul who said that wherever we experience the forgiveness and love of our brothers, we have experienced the f01¡giveness and love of God. We may then liken the spiritual life to a journey back in our history to recapture those qualities which we all once possessed. For various reasons-"culture" original sin, sin in the world, my personal sin-we long ago began the destruction of our childlike qualities. Now we must pay a price to regain them. That is the invitation of the mystic in the history of the Catholic Church.

In my opinion Stage Seven can be described as being in the Land of Play. "Prayer is more like play than work. The overintense worker can neither play, nor can he pray." Those beautiful words of Pope Paul capture the teachings of all the masters of the spiritual life. We need to slow down, to return, to regain that basic trust and help of each other so that we can indeed play once again. We must once again learn to be spontaneous and open so that we can give and receive, so that we can listen not just to the words but the hearts of others. Then we will be able to affhm and believe the affirmation of others.

When we can honestly say that we are "all screwed up but beautiful," then indeed we are on the road to sanctity.

As I criss-cross the country in my work, one of my greatest experiences has been the diocesan priest; and I believe I have met as many as anyone. I have spoken to them about spirituality and encouraged them to build a "priestly community," where they can feel the need to come together, to share, to take risks, to regain trust in one another. Here they can experience the unbelievable powers they have to affitm one another, to tap their respective talents, and grow together so that they can bring the Good News to all the world.

I have never met a priest without good will; I have never met a priest who did not want to grow, who was uninterested in the spiritual life. I have met some of the greatest men I have ever known. But I have also met many who ache, who cry in their hearta for community, for affirmation, acceptance and support.

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The priest is called to be a minister of hope and healing, but as the old saw goes: "Nemo dat quod non habet."-"No one gives what he does not possess." We can preach Christ and his love; but until we have leaped beyond notional assent, stood naked and said with all our being "I believe," we will never heal another; we will never be ministers of hope. Neither can we be "other Christa" without one another. It has not been done, nor can it.

I have one message for the priests of this country. I believe they are not "just screwed up;" rather they are beautiful, loveable, extraordinary men who are called to the heights of union with Christ. They are called to the Land of Play.

We can reach it together; and when we have done so we can excite the world and turn it to Christ.

DO WE REALLY BELIEVE?

\\'hen I was a young Trappist, I was sent to South America, to our new foundation in Chile. I was in charge of the farm and so I used to go into Santiago. It was the early "60's" when Allende was on the scene and the tht路eat of socialism and communism was so prevalent. It was the first time I had seen and felt the presence of a living communist. I was shaken to my roots. Many times, on returning to the monastery, I would climb the hill behind it and look out over the valley at the Andes Mountains. "What do they have?" I asked myself. The communists were willing to 路pay any price to bring about their vision of hope and meaning fot路 all men. One day on that hilltop I asked myself the question: "Do I really believe that there is a God? Do I really believe that Jesus Christ is his son? Do I really believe that I continue his Incarnation, that the Trinity dwells within me? Do I really and truly believe that I can move that incredibly majestic mountain that stands before me?" I stood there, seemingy fm路 a long time; finally I said: "I believe."

Centuries ago a few men and women came together because they had said "Yes" not just to the dignity of man but to Jesus Christ. They said: "Yes, he is the answer. He is the son of God." Few in number but with a radical, total commitment, they changed the history of the Church and the world.

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I believe that there is more talent among our priests than perhaps ever before in history. All that we need is to know that we can change the world. I know that the reader will pass on this message of hope from a clam digger whom God's providence has led through an incredible sequence of events.

The fact that people everywhere in this country want to hear this message indicates to me that the Church has swung the corner. We are on the verge of the greatest renewal in the history of the Catholic Church.

John J. Pilch

• Reflections on hope zn the Scriptures "I ji1·m/y trust and anticipate that I ·•hall never be p'ltt to shame for my hopes."

St. Paul. Phil. 1:20 In 1878, Naphtali Herz Imber wrote a poem, Ha-Tikwah, ("The Hope") upon learning that a Jewish settlement had been established in a desolate area of Palestine. He saw this little village as the promising beginning of the fulfillment of a centuries old dream.

As long as deep in the heart, the soul of a Jew yearns, and toward the East an eye looks to Zion, our hope (tikwatenu) is not yet lostthe hope (ha-tikwah) of two thousand yearsto be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. (Encyclopedia Judaica) That same year, Samuel Cohen, a refugee from Moldavia, came to Palestine, settled in Rishon le-Zion, and set this poem to a melody consciously based on a Moldavian-Rumanian folk-song, Carul cu Boi ("Cart and Oxen," which is also the leit-motif of Smetana's tone poem, The M o/ilau.). The anthem was adopted by the Zionist movement as its own in 1933 at its 18th Congress in Prague. Presently it is the "unofficial" (because not formally accepted by the Knesset) national anthem of the modern state of Israel.

The root of the Hebrew word for hope used in this poem is qwh. It is the one normally used in the Jewish scriptures to 185

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give the sense of waiting and looking forward to something or someone, The specific form of the noun used here, tikwah, is found especially in Job and Proverbs with particular reference to worldly happiness and good fortune. What greater worldly happiness and good fortune could be imagined than being a "free people in our land?'' Would this not be the centuries-long-awaited fulfillment of the promises made by God to Abraham? ("I will give to you and to your descendtants after you the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession; and 1 will be their God." Gen 17 :8P) Small wonder then that the establishment of the modern state of Israel on May 15, 1958 would bring such joy to the hearts of Jews overywhere, and the continued well being of that state would be their incessant concern.

MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS

The road to the actual possession of the land had been long, arduous, and filled with frustration. There were indeed times when hope was given up. "Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost and we are cut off." (Ez 37 :11) "I tell myself my future is lost, all that I hope for from the Lord." (Lam 3 :18) The historical experience of a magnificent era under King David who united the nation and helped it become a power on the world-scene was given a certain dimension of permanence in the oracle pronounced by Nathan the prophet to the king: "Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me; your throne shall stand firm forever." (2 Sam 7 :16) Imagine the disappointment when shortly after David's death, in the reign of Solomon dissension grew and resulted in a split kingdom upon his demise. This "internal" division was followed by Assyrian engulfment of the Northern Kingdom (Israel) in 721 BC, and the Babylonian conquest of the Southern Kingdom (Judah) in 587 BC. Babylonian domination was successively replaced by Persian, Greek, and then Roman rule, while Israel's hopes based on the promise to Abraham and to David slowly eroded. When would events take a turn for the better? Who would take charge?

The Jewish scriptures, tanak (an acronym composed of the first letters of the names of the three parts of the bible: Torah,

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Nebiim, Kethubim) record the yearning and hope of the Jews from the period of the exile down to approximately the first century before the common era to be a free people in their own land. One of the major expressions of this hope is located in what later became known as messianism. If God indeed made those promises to Abraham and David (and that was never in doubt), then God would keep his promises. Someday, somehow, He would raise an heir to the throne of David who would vanquish Israel's enemies, remove oppressors, and restore sovereignty to the nation.

Alongside this desire for a "political" redeemer-figure, there existed an awareness that perhaps the delayed fulfillment of God's promises was due to Israel's unworthiness. She had frequently failed to be faithful to her basic obligation: "For I, the LORD, am your God; and you shall make and keep yourselves holy, because I am holy" (Lev 11:44; also 19:2 20 :7). Most embarassingly it turned out to be the priests themselves who became the greatest failures. In Maccabean times the hereditary office of high priest disappeared as it was forced to yield to a system of bribery in which the non-believing political ruler (e.g., Antiochus Epiphanes) bestowed the office of high priest upon the highest bidder (e.g., Jason). Thus, for some Jews, a priestly messiah became a strong object of hope, for if Israel could once again be holy, God might restore her to free existence in the land.

RABBINIC SPECULATION

Centuries of frustrated hopes together with the growing awareness that Jewish behavior was not entirely according to Tomh led pious Jewish thinkers of the early centuries of the common era to urge greater efforts toward holiness. The history of the Pharisaic movement is a history of this concern.

This essentially lay group tried to fill the breach made by the priests. It was believed, of course, that the messiah, when he came, would himself perfectly fulfill Torah, teach it to all nations and cause them all to observe it.

But if all nations were to observe Tm¡ah, it would be necessary for Israel to lead the way. Thus, for instance, Rabbi Simeon ben Johai (c. 150 AD) was convinced that th~ re-

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demption of Israel would come about when all Israelites have really kept the Sabbath for two Sabbaths (bShab. 118b). But since redemption seemed to be nowhere in sight, there was one very obvious conclusion: man simply can't be counted upon to do his part in hastening the coming of the messiah. This apparently inescapable conclusion caused the schools of Hillel and Shammai to argue for two years whether it was good for man to have been created, or better not to have been created.

The final decision agreed upon by both schools was that it were better if man had NOT been created! (bErub., 13b Baraita) In any case, after the defeat of Simon ben Kosiba (-Bar Kochba in christian documents) in 135 AD (whose messianic claims were officially endorsed by Rabbi Aqiba) , messianic activism died down as the Jew gradually became a minority in his own land, and future generations lived in hope while they speculatively calculated the time of the coming of the messiah.

HOPE AND THE LAND

The development thus far tries to be a fair-even if simplified-picture of hope in Judaism. Only Jewish sources were consulted. (Interestingly among these sources, the Jewish Encyclopedia, has a rather small article on "hope," while its up-dated counterpart, the Encyclopedia Judaica, has no article on hope but rather an article on "Ha-Tikwan," the national anthem!) Even the persistent reference to tanak is a personal effort to avoid the unfeeling christian designation ("old") of the Jews one and only testament! Not-so-distant Jewish ancestry, early childhood in Brooklyn Jewish circles, and graduate studies in Judaica sharpen the author's sensitivities in this regard. The fact seems to be that at least some Jews see modern day Israel as the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham. Yet the readers of this journal (presumably mainly christian) will ask : is that all there is 7 Assuredly not, but if the national anthem has caught the thrust of Jewish hope, one must take another look at tanak.

And it is clear that tanak does indeed single out the land and a numerous posterity as two chief objects of hope. (Gen. 12 :1ff) In fact both items are distinctly recognized as blessings ( Gen

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49 :25) and gifts (13 :15) from God in fidelity to his promises.

And here is the rub: A promise depends nothing upon the recipient; it hinges exclusively on the will of the one who makes the promise. Hope in the promise of God, then, cannot gain anything from human endeavor. It must rest firmly in confident expectation upon God himself. And tanak enumerates myriads of things that should not be hoped for, or things and persons in which man should not place his hope.

FALSE HOPES

It fell particularly to Jeremiah to play the unpopular role of smashing misplaced hopes in order to show that the only proper resting place for confidence is God himself. "Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings; who seeks his strength in flesh and whose heart turns away from the LORD." (17 :5) While this sentiment sounds harsh in our interpersonal and community-oriented ag¡e, the prophet's poetic parallel to this statement underscores his real point: "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD." ( 17 :7) Placing one's hope in anyone or anything other than God is futile and foolish. "The just shall look on with awe; then they shall laugh at him (i.e., the wicked man) : 'This is the man who made not God the source of his strength, but put his trust in g1¡eat wealth and his strength in harmful plots.' " (Ps 52:8-9; also 49:6-12; Prov 11 :28; Jer 48:7; Job 31 :24).

"They saw that the people dwelling there (in Laish) lived securely after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and trusting (=with hope), with no lack of natural resources" Jgs 18 :7), but this numbing self-assurance only them made all the easier prey to the tribe of Dan whose hope was in God. "The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, has said: See! I will punish Amon of Thebes, and Egypt, her gods and her kings, Pharaoh and those who trust in him" (Jer 46:25; also Is 20:5; 31:1-3; 36: 6-9 ; Lam 4 : 17) . The history of Israel as reflected in her prophetic literature indicates how frequently she entered into alliances with foreign powers in an effort to insure what God alone would give in his own good time: freedom in the land.

"Here are the Assyrians, a vast force, priding themselves

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on horse and rider, boasting of the power of their infantry, trusting in shield and spear, bow a:1d sling. They do not know that 'You, the LORD, crush warfare; LORD is your name'," (Jdt 9:7-8, though not in the H<.brew canon; se~ also Is 30 :16), indicating that hope resting in weapons and arm stockpiles amounts to nothing from God's perspective.

Neither should man put much stock in himself. "Though I (God) say to the virtuous man that he shall surely live, if he then presumes on his virtue and does wrong, none of his virtuous deeds shall be remembered; because of the wrong he has done, he shall surely die" (Ez 33 :13). "Trust not in extortion; in plunder take no empty pride; though wealth abound, set not your heart upon it" (Ps 62 :11). "Trust not in deceitful words" (Jer 7 :4a). Thus, neither righteousness, nor wickedness, nor lies avail a man aught in hope, even if his hoâ&#x20AC;˘Âˇosco7Je strongly urges it: "But upon you shall come evil ... Let the astrologers stand forth to save you, the stargazer who forecasts at each new moon what would happen to you" (Is 49:11 and 13).

Perhaps most stunning of all are the censures of hope placed in one's religious inheritance. Habakkuk ridicules idols: "Woe to him who says to wood, 'Awake!' to dumb stone, 'Arise!' Can such a thing give oracles?" (2 :19). But even the temple is not spared "I will do to this house named after me, in which you trust, and to this place which I gave you and your fathers, just as I did to Shiloh. I will cast you away from me, as I cast away all your brethren, all the offspring of Ephraim" (Jer 7:14-15).

What rings clearly through all these admonitions is not so much that hope for a land where the Israelites could live in freedom is wrong, but the reminder that the realization of this and related hopes could be achieved only by God and not simply through human efforts.

GOD: HOPE OF ISRAEL!

All the items in this select enumeration are simply the negative way of expressing the strong positive statements that tanak offers on hope. Jeremiah puts it most forcefully: "0 hope of Israel, God! (rnikweh yismel, Yhwh; 17:13; also 14:8

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and 50 :7). So basic is this belief that the very word used to describe God as hope (personified, as it were) is used by Jeremiah as a peculiar epithet of Him: mikweh.

This idea is repeated frequently in tanak under a variety of images. God is the "Rock ... a faithful God, without deceit" (Dt 32:4; 15, 18; Is 30 :29) ; a st¡ronghold against lifethreatening forces: "If you repent ... in my presence shall you stand" (Jer 16:19; Ps 71). God is also the shield (Ps 3:3; 47:10; Prov 3 :5) protecting from harm; a refuge (Ps 46 :1; 93 :2) from attacks. To the desert-dweller he is the "shade ... the sun shall not harm you by day nor the moon by night" (literally Ps 121:5; figuratively Ps 57:1; 91 :1). He is the fountain of living wateT for everyone! (Is 55 :1-2).

What a contrast to false-hopes.

The basis for this variously expressed hope in God is at least two-fold. To begin with, He who created this world and sustains it will surely care for his creature, man. As Gutmacher expresses it (Jewish Encyclopedia), "hope is kindled by the firm belief that the Lord, creator of the world, controls all things for the special happiness of ¡man." To assure himself of this, particularly in discouraging periods, the Jew looks to the past (e.g., the exodus) and then trusts confidently in the fulfillment of God's promises for the future.

A second and related basis for hope in God is the fact that he did make promises throughout tanak and sooner or later (hopefully sooner!) He must keep them. Note well, a promise is not a covenant. A promise is one-sided and depends on the fidelity of the one making it. A covenant is two-sided and is broken when one partner is unfaithful. Thus the fact that God made free promises to Abraham and David is the fi1¡m basis for hope in these self-same promises. (Paul develops this idea in Roman 9-11 where he presents his explanation of how Israel's redemption will take place.)

DEFINITION

In view of all that has been said, therefore, it would appear that tanak understands hope chiefly as the "confident expectation of God's protection and blessing-which guarantees future well-being-as the fulfillment of the promises." The nature of

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God as trustworthy explains the "confident" expectation, which in turn explains why unexpected shifts in human fortune do not destroy hope but cause one to consider, whenever he has not confused secular with religious hopes, or has otherwise misunrlerstood a given situation. At the same time, confident expectation does not do away with anxiety, for man unlike God cannot foresee all contingencies.

The future-dimension of hope in tanak stems from the fact that when those scriptures were written any real fulfillment of Israel's hope was not yet achieved. And this demanded an important corollary: patient endurance. In his own good time God would fulfill his promises. Until then, all man could do is wait.

A great development of Jewish hope is reflected in a body of literature which never became part of tanak (nor of the christian scriptures for that matter) but which flourished in the period extending from 200 BC to lOOAD. This literature (sometimes called apocalyptic) springs from a deep experience of futility and frustration and indicates that hope does not really diminish, but rather takes on new dimensions: for instance, the expectation of immanent fulfillment. Gutmacher observes: "Nor was hope of a brighter future ever entirely lost by the people; especially did it increase after the Maccabean uprising. Whenever any incongruity appeared between their actual condition and the belief that the Israelites were favored by Providence, refuge was taken in the hope of the establishment of the kingdom of God." The dreams of the book of Daniel testify to this. And the interesting calculation of days in Dan 12 :11-13 expresses the feelings of impatience.

For some Jews, the sentiments of apocalyptic literature did not find fulfillment in their historical experiences (e.g., those who sided with ben Kosiba), and throughout the centuries these simply waited in patient endurance for the advent of the messianic age. For other Jews, many ideas in this literature persuaded them that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised messiah (even in view of his apparent failure and ignominious death) and further believed that he showed their hopes to be misplaced: "My Kingdom," Jesus said to Pilate, "is not of this world" (Jn 18 :36). His followers thus slowly gave up the struggle to achieve free existence in the land, and genera-

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tions of christians have yearned instead for the dwelling in heaven, a sentiment in contrast to that expressed in the poem at the beginning of this essay.

This difference of opinion is a critical difference and no judgment is made here one way or the other. It lies outside the scope of this essay, but should rightfully be a basic item on the agenda of any Jewish-christian dialogue that intends to promote mutual understanding and respect among Jews and Christians. Within this essay, the christian position facilitates the move to the christian scriptures.

JESUS OUR HOPE

Jeremiah, who called God the hope of Israel, finds an echo in Paul who affirms that he is an apostle of Christ Jesus "by command of God our savior and Christ Jesus our hope" (1 Tim 1:1). Jesus can be called "our hope" because he is the perfect revelation of the Father who is the ultimate resting place of hope. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father'' (Jn 14 :9). To all who in singleminded loyalty place their hope in God alone, Jesus promises salvation and a place in God's kingdom. "None of those who cry out 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven" (Mt 7 :21ff).

In the christian scriptures Jesus is recognized as the expected messiah who, in very unexpected fashion, brings to fulfillment the hopes of his compatriots. The entire message of Jesus is one of hope, for his good news is the announcement that the long-awaited reign of God is already at wot¡k in him.

"If it is by the Spirit of God that I expel demons, then the reign of God has overtaken you" (Mt 12 :28). (Ironically, there is no explicit teaching on hope nor motivation to hope in the synoptic gospels. But as the discussion indicates, absence of vocabulary does not prove absence of the idea.)

Even so, there is still a future dimension to this kingdom. a "not yet" aspect, a final development which will take place only at the very end of time. In the meantime, followers of Jesus must open the kingdom and its hope to the nations: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations ... Teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you" (Mt 28 :19).

•

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PAUL

This latter m1sswnary charge of Jesus reflects the universalist hopes of the period. As indicated above, already the rabbis believed that the messiah, when he came, would teach all nations torah and cause them to observe it. Paul the Pharisee sha1·ed this view and very likely saw himself as a JewiBh missionary to the Gentiles ("If I am still preaching circumcision, why do the attacks on me continue? Gal 5:11) since it was also believed that the day of universal salvation was nigh. When in the course of his travels and experiences it dawned on him that Jesus had announced this very fact in his own life and work, Paul the Pharisee became a Cln·ist-ian missionary of the Gentiles ( Schoops).

In the light of this insight (apokalypsis, Gal 1 :llff), Paul developed the new christian understanding of hope. To begin with, he realized how the "works oriented" concern of the Pharisees was not entirely faithful to the tradition of Abraham's response to God's promise. "Hoping against hope.

Abraham believed, and so became the father of many nations, just as it was once told him" (Rom 4 :18). Though his situation looked hopeless from a human perspective, Abraham "never questioned or doubted God's promise; rather he was strengthened in faith and gave glory to God, fully persuaded that God would do whatever he had promised" (Rom 4 :20).

Thus did Paul restore the tanak perspective.

But going further, he asserted that the fulfillment of this promise took place in Jesus. "This (=Christ's death) has happened so that through Christ Jesus the blessing bestowed on Abraham might descend on the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, thereby making it possible for us to receive the promised Spirit through faith" (Gal 3 :14). The consequences for Paul were clear: "I became a minister of this church through the commission God gave me to preach among you his word in its fullness, the mystery hidden from ages and generations past but now revealed to his holy ones. God has willed to make known to them the glory beyond price which this mystery brings to the Gentiles-mystery of Christ in you, your hope of glory" (Col 1 :25-27). Thus the object of christian hope is glory (in Greek, doxa. translating the Hebrew, kabod, which

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is a synonym for God insofar as He allows man to recognize him, or for God's presence insofar as He allows it to be felt) : "we boast of our hope for the glory of God" (Rom 5 :3).

What this means in the life of the believers is variously designated by Paul. "It is in the spirit that we eagerly await the (ultimate) justification we hope for, and only faith can yield it" (Gal 5 :5). In Romans, he adds this: "Now that we have been justified by his blood, it is all the more certain that we shall be s!Lved by him from God's wrath" (5:9). (Notice how Paul moves between the "already now" and "still not yet" dimensions of hope, in reflection of the typical apocalyptic belief that the present reality in some way provides the basis for future hope--Brownlee).

But salvation also has a positive expression; "much mort> shall those who receive the overflowing grace and gift of justice live and reign through the one man, Jesus Christ" (Rom 5:17; 1 Cor 15:22; Tit 1:2; 3 :7). And this life must be everlasting. for "if our hopes in Christ are limited to this life only, we are the most pitiable of men" (1 Cor 15 :19).

This b1ief enumeration of objects of hope found in Paul clearly indicates the eschatological character of christian hope as it speaks of the final fulfillment of the promises already now "realized" (see John) in Christ. This makes christian hope so objectively certain that it is virtually synonymous with the destiny pi"Omised by God, the inheritance to which God's people are called (Eph 1 :18).

POWER TO HOPE

There is yet another distinctive dimension to christian hope which Paul places in bold relief. Concluding his letter to the Romans, he writes, "So may God, the source of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that through the power of the Holy Spirit you may h!Lve hope in !Lbund!Lnce" (15 :13).

The significance of the Spirit's role in hope is further elaborated by Paul elsewhere: "When you heard the glad tidings of salvation, the word of truth, and believed in it, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit who had been promised. He is the pledge (arrabon, guarantee) of our inheritance, the first payment against the full redemption of a people God has made his

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own, to praise his glory" (Eph 1:14; see also 2 Cod 1:22; 5:5; Rom 8 :23). This is but another way of emphasizing the certainty of christian hope.

The exegete-theologian, C.F.D. Maule goes so far as to claim that "without the experience of the Spirit, there is no distinctively christian experience of hope." A christian who is experiencing the power of the Spirit cannot help but include in his hope the expression of that power in every activity, in every segment of society: he is committed to be an architect of happiness for others. It is probably not too extreme to say that christian hope must take concrete shape in christian action especially in the political and social arenas. These are but the natural conclusions to be drawn from the Spirit's guarantee that there is a future!

PATIENT ENDURANCE

No wonder that Paul can say: "I firmly trust and anticipate that I shall never be put to shame for my hopes" (Phil 1 :20).

Yet, lest a believer become too self-assured, Paul casts this eonviction in still another guise: "We boast of our hope for the glory of God. But not only that-we even boast of our afflictions. We know that affliction makes for endurance, and endurance for tested virtue, and tested virtue for hope. And this hope will not leave us disappointed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 2 :2-5). It is not a stoic exhortation to self-mastery that Paul urges here, but rather an appreciation for the fortifying experience of God's love given by the Spirit which helps the believer to cope with all sufferings. No matter how adverse the conditions, God will not fail in his promises.

But the believer must also do his part: "If we are children (of God), we are heirs as well: heirs of God, heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so as to be glorified with him" (Rom 8 :17). It is not a question of actively seeking out suffering or devising mortifications, sacrifices, and varieties of pain in imitation of Jesus. Life has its own concomitant pains. But christian salvation, which can be understood as ]JUtting christian meaning into life, can add further pain, for

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more often than not, this forces a re-examination of one's beliefs and principles and demands a complete reversal of values.

Witness Paul: "But those things I used to consider gain I have now appraised as loss in the light of Christ ... I have accounted all else as rubbish (skyba/a, a "scatological" Greek word) so that Christ may be my wealth ... Thus do I hope that I may arrive at resurrection from the dead" (Phil 3:8 & 11).

Paul is so confident that he "groans" at the delay in fulfillment of his hopes. And while death brings grief to the man of little faith, Paul in anticipation of its liberating role taunts: "0 death, where is your victory? 0 death, where is your sting?" (1 Cor 15 :55). Admittedly, this is a difficult, perhaps even heroic posture. But Paul is relentless in his persuasion: "In hope we were saved. But hope is not hope if its object is seen; how is it possible to hope for what he sees? and hoping for what we cannot see means awaiting it with patient endurance" (Rom 8 :24-25). (For the still faint-hearted, Paul reverts to battle-imagery and calls "hope to salvation" a "helmet." That should make patient endurance easier to handle 1 Thes 5 :9.)

CORRECTIVE NOTE

It has been unfair to Paul to concentrate so narrowly on hope in his writings to the exclusion of faith and love. In the new testament it is Paul who established this triad in its clarity and who viewed these as diverse aspects of a single but complex spiritual attitude becoming to the believer. Observe his comments to the Thessalonian community who suffered harassment after he departed: "We are constantly mindful before our God ancl Father of the way you are proving your faith, and laboring in love, and showing constancy of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thes 1 :3). So intertwined and essential to christian life are these three that he also consiners them to be the only things of duration: "There are in the enn three things that last: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor 13 :13). Bultmann explains: "Hope is not concerned with the realization of a human dream of the future, but with confidence which, directed away from the world to God, waits patiently for God's gift, and when it is

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received, does not rest in possession, but in the assurance that God will maintain what he has given."

CONCLUSION

The personal nature of this reflective meandering through the sacred writings of the Judaeo-christian tradition explains its unusual treatment of tanak as well as its concentration on Paul. Limitations of time and pressures of concurrent concerns suggested this to be the best course. If the reader is reminded (as was the author) that "the sufferings of the present (are) as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us" (Rom 8 :18) the effort will have been worthwhile.

M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll

The Experience of Women Religious In The Ministry of The Church " ... You have all clothed yow·self in Christ, and there a1·e no more distinctions behveen Jew and Greek. slave and {1·ee, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus." St. Paul. Gals. 3:27-28 VATICAN COUNCIL II AND WOMEN

The title of this article attests at once to a growth in the Church's self-realization and an openness for new understanding based upon experience. The term 'Ministry' was rarely used in the Second Vatican Council, and then only to refer to the work of bishops, priests and deacons, those duly authorized to conduct Christian worship, preach the Gospel, and administer the sacraments. It is only in the post-conciliar period that the notion of ministry has been expanded.

Undoubtedly the Council Decrees served to a great degree as a consciousness-raising experience especially for women in religion, making them more aware of their intimate relationship with the Church as full-time workers. They studied the spirit of their founders and read the Scriptures as the Council bade them. They found indeed by experience that "in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks with them." The New Testament disclosed far reaching implications of Jesus' decision to come into this world through the free choice of a woman, and in the gifts revealed in women for bringing him and his message to others.

Many Sisters considered carefully: "that through them, to believers and non-believers alike, the Church truly wishes to 199

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give an increasingly clearer revelation of Christ. Through them Christ should be shown contemplating on the mountain, announcing God's kingdom to the multitude, healing the sick and the maimed, turning sinners to wholesome fruit, blessing children, doing good to all, and always obeying the will of the Father who sent Him" (Constitution on the Church, #45).

They learned to vibrate with "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted." They became conscious of the needs of persons challenging all the potential of Church and society. Changing social conditions are reflected in the alienation of youth from the Church, an increased number of friendless shut-ins and elderly in high rises and nursing homes, a lack of decent housing for the poor, racism and the consequent neglect of minorities in quality education, housing, and civic service; the unprecedented moral confusion affecting personal lives and social legislation; the growth of crime associated with drugs and alcoholism; the deepening gulf between rich and poor nations and poor within our own country; anrt numerous other ills.

Because they found their own sense of worth enhanced by the Council's teaching on "the full spiritual dignity of the person" (ibid. #23), the Sisters responded wholeheartedly to the message that: "The Church not only communicates divine life to men, but in some way casts the reflected light of that life over the entire earth. This she does most of all by her healing and elevating impact on the dignity of the person, by the way in which she strengthens the seams of human society and imbues the everyday activity of men with a deeper meaning and importance. Thus, through her individual members and her whole community, the Church believes she can contribute greatly toward making the family of man and its history more human." (ibid. #40) The deeper the Sisters penetrated into the Council Decrees and the Scriptures, the more they wished to be open to the unity of persons which forms the Body of Christ and the more they realized the need each person has for the other if this unity is to be achieved. Studies in their own congregational histories impressed many Sisters with the broad apostolic thrust of their founders. They realized that these are God's

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people who suffer, that the Church must be present to them, teaching, encouraging, reassuring, helping and working to remove fundamental causes of these miseries.

Inspired with the new insight that they too are the Church Sisters, one by one and in small groups in the last five years, sought out the needs of the Church, of society, and of persons, studied their own gifts and expertise, responded-to promptings of the Spirit within them, and entered into new works.

PARISH MINISTRY

Some of these works brought Sisters ve1¡y close to what is traditionally the official ministry of the Church, where they served as associate pastor or as members of the pastoral team.

Innumerable instances of this ministry came to light, even in dioceses which have taken no official notice of it.

Such a ministry does not see every parish providing for all needs from nursery through schools and clinics to continuing education classes and Golden Age Clubs. But it does embrace a responsibility to help each parishioner to locate precisely those services which will meet his particular need. The parish remains the focus for satisfying the basic liturgical and sacramental needs. It promotes cooperative efforts of parishes and the regionalization of facilities like schools, catechetical centers and social services. Furthermore, it maximizes utilization of community resources, and galvanizes the parishioners into appropriate action to improve the physical and social environment, and to provide the effective services for the well being of the whole neighborhood.

Pastors alert to the needs of our day and to the potential of such ministry welcomed Sisters into practically all tasks of the parish except the administration of cel"l;ain sacraments and the presidency of the liturgy. Many Sisters, designated extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, enrich innumerable lives of the elderly and shut-ins by frequent distribution of Holy Communion. One parish of two co-pastors has four Siste1¡s working in the areas of the liturgy, of coordinating neighborhood education, hospital visiting, home visiting for the purpose of giving and receiving information, discovering needs and resources, educating, healing and praying, distributing Communion, counselling, developing fellowship, making referrals to so-

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cia! services and coordinating the free legal-aid service.

These parish roles tend especially in large parishes to become quite specialized-to the elderly, family life, the youth, children, the poor, the alienated or the handicapped-whereas in small and rural parishes the pastoral associate might become "all things to all men." Areas of service include listening, crisis intervention, ministry to the terminally ill, family conflict resolution, census taking, direction of religious education, stimulation of parish community and prayer groups, as well as liturgical assistance. As the level of trust rises, Sisters find themselves representing the pastor at parish, ecumenical and clergy association meetings when he is unable to attend, and participating fully in policy-planning sessions for the parish.

An innovative form of pastoral ministry practiced by one Sister (with a layman) is the Little Parish Program. This program divides the parish into neighborhoods, bringing about ten families together under their own developed leadership for instruction, worship and projects of concern of the larger community.

THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION COORDINATOR

The largest area of development for Sisters in parishes is that of religious education coordinator. A typical role description is as follows: "I work mainly with adults, serving as principal of parochial part-time students, teaching and coordinating the volunteer teachers of religion; helping the religion teachers in the parochial school, coordinating a pre-school program and training the mother-teachers of the children, organizing liturgies and religious activities, and conducting a Bible study club."

Programs for the elderly in housing units under diocesan direction or in their homes under parish ministry are providing a challenge to Sisters who therein combine prayer groups, personal counselling, community enterprises, referral systems and liturgical participation. Many of these parish ministries are in poor, socially mixed, migrant and deprived areas. There is very great development of them in Latin America and even in some parts of the Philippines. One Sister described her work there as follows: "Bishops have included me in CFM (Christian Family Movement), Cursillo team work, married couples' retreats, Family Enrichment Series, Sex Education for Adolescents and

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for Adults, and interpersonal relations workshops, in addition to regular counselling and testing in schools."

Sisters are being employed by parishes for community organization work, and are offering "Service for Change" weekends to parish groups. These aim to provide a heightened awareness of injustice and racism in American society, and to arouse a commitment to action for change. They seek to stimulate action and support between urban and suburban parishes.

A specialized form of the pastoral ministry being pursued by women Religious is the work of Las Hermanas. Seeing the des1Jerate need which Spanish-speaking Catholics have for Christian concern and for professional talents in the areas of Church ministry and social services, they endeavor to bring spiritual solace and human betterment to this neglected minority group, both in parish team work and as part of the ministry to migrants.

Emphasis is on the Chicano Interparish Ministry, where teams of priests, Brothers and Sisters cooperate in health work, religious education, housing, legal aid, and clinics. In this ministry, like that to blacks and other minority groups, lack of money, discrimination, racism and lack of understanding by white Anglo communities are frustrating.

Closely related to the pastoral apostolate is the ministry of prayer. In retreat work and houses of prayer Sisters are gaining confidence that they have a dimension of spiritual leadership to offer to other Religious, to the laity and to the priests. The stimulus to this effort comes frequently from houses of prayer, which invite others to join in prayer, offer Scripture courses, help people to pray, and give retreats. Frequently these houses of prayer are supported by dioceses or even by parishes as well as by Religious congregations. There is growing recognition that prayer has been one of the needs not being adequately met by the Church.

Teams composed of men and women Religious are combining retreat work with parish renewal. In one case the methodology used is deep sharing of Scripture and spontaneous prayer in a neighborhood setting such that it wi II be viable after the renewal is over. The charismatic renewal, which combines the practice of communal prayer, study of

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Scripture and deep experience of the peace of the Holy Spirit, has enlisted the talents of many Sisters and priests and has revivified parishes and neighborhoods.

In the ministry of prayer the contemplative Sisters have much to offer. These Sisters must perforce overcome the objections of those in the Church who confuse contemplation with cloister and the Church as hierarchy with the Church as People of God. It is this latter Church which is seeking a deeper prayer dimension and asking contemplatives to teach prayer, to share prayer, to cooperate in retreats. To them it seems tragic that so many young people are drifting to Eastern religious practices while the great Catholic contemplative tradition remains inaccessible. Contemplative Sisters who wish to deepen their own contemplative prayer but also proclaim it to others should be trusted to find the ways to perform this service as much as contemplative orders of men have been.

PASTORAL, ADMINISTRATIVE MINISTRIES

Another direct pastoral care being undertaken by the Sister is within the hospital, where she is identified as a pastoral associate to work with the chaplain in his ministerial duties, or as actual chaplain. A Sister chaplain describes her role thus: "Primarily we see ourselves as caring persons relating as Church to the sick and dying patient. Through our care, God cares for them. Even if we meet a patient only once, we try to make that a meaningful experience. Thus we help people, and ourselves, to be in touch with their (our) own feelings and experiences."

Campus ministry has become a serious undertaking for women Religious at both Catholic and state colleges and universities. The intellectual apostolate, personal counselling, concern for the alienated, liturgical understanding and development of concern for justice and peace all can be embraced within thjs ministry. A Sister writes thus of her involvement in this ministry at a state university: "I preach homilies at the weekend Masses, help give Communion, take part in communal Penance services, (obviously not hearing confessions) help prepare students for marriage, teach inquiry classes and generally direct those religious activities at the Catholic Student Center which relate to educational and social programs.

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I'm engaged in counselling, liturgy planning, administration and study-all of which makes for a presence on the campus."

Dioceses are also opening up some administrative offices to women Religious, like superintendents of schools, directors of the social action component of Catholic Charities, full- time coordinators of Sisters' councils and vicars or associate vicars for Religious. In this way Sisters are present to and gain a voice in chancery offices.

One diocese employs a Sister as legislative assistant to influence legislation on the state level in the areas of the social services, housing, welfare reform, crime in all aspects, child care and health provisions for the poor and elderly. Another diocese has established a Sister in the Ministry of Advocacy, which tries to discern the sources of injustice and oppression, and which works for systematic and institutional changes.

State conferences of bishops are utilizing the special gifts of Sisters at the state capitols in administrative posts concerned with similar human welfare needs.

In all these ministries women must deal directly with the clergy, because their work impinges upon the sacramental life of the Church or its administrative organization.

Amazingly enough, only a few of these positions were developed by a planning agency at the chancery or by a far seeing pastor; most of them came forth from the initiative of the Sisters who sought and found willing pastors and/or dioceses. Several Sisters' councils have initiated referral set-vices for pastoral work, sometimes in conjunction with an association of priests. Generally among Sisters there is complaint about the lack of leadership from priests and bishops in the area of ministry open to them. In several dioceses, where as many as 500 letters have been sent by Sisters' councils to pastors asking about summer ministry, as few as nine or ten replies have been received.

ATTITUDES CHANGING

Except for those areas where there was a precipitous closing of parochial and diocesan schools, only a few congregations have actively urged their Sisters to accept new ministt¡ies and prepared them for those ministries. The greatest possibility of transfer of work has been from formal classroom education

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to the religious education program. Most communities, however, seem willing to allow the Sister who seeks out a new apostolate to follow it; and they give her moral support.

Many congregations seem handicapped to do more by their previous commitments, by a habit of awaiting initiative from the diocese, and by a loyalty to the schools.

That attitudes are changing is evident from the great numbers of educational and training programs not only in religious education but particularly in pastoral ministry which are being offered. Several publications this year are carrying a special section detailing numerous summer training programs. The Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry centered at Notre Dame gathers information on all aspects of social ministry functioning under the Church's auspices, circulates it largely through Link and attempts to offer support---professional, psychological, personal and theological-to those involved in social ministry.

An interesting development alongside the movement of Sisters into new ministries is the growth of a new sense of ministry in the accepted apostolic roles (school and hospital).

Both kinds of institutions are being revalued as a point of entry to people: in schools, to the parish and civic community as well as to children and youth; in hospitals to the public at critical moments in personal and family life and to political officialdom. In both spheres high standards of quality performance are recognized as basic. But a new sense of faithvision is growing, a need to see these enterprises be as innovative as possible in order to emphasize the human dimension and promote the work of God's kingdom.

In this work the Black Sisters' Conference through theiJ¡ DESIGN Laboratory research and experiments are making an impressive contribution. The rebirth of confidence in the educational ministry requires a closing of the moat between the convent and the rectory. In both schools and hospitals this apostolic aim is sorely tried by the virulence of the ChurchState myth and the move by the state into areas of activity which challenge the Christian ethic. As the Christian mission in school and hospital is the more drastically challenged, the woman Religious is realizing new powers within herself to achieve goals for her institution which promote personal free-

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dom, value clarification and the formation of a Christian conscience.

THE STATE AND THE WORKS OF MERCY

I

~

Many ministries of Sisters related to the corporal and even some of the spiritual works of mercy are being fulfilled apart from the official structures of the Church, with support generally from federal or state sources or from Protestant and ecumenical groups. In some programs the presence of the Church is able to be combined with government funding of programs for the poor. Largely through the influence of one Sister, Religious congregations, parishes, and dioceses have begun to be deeply involved in the provision of adequate housing and the struggle with public officials which this entails.

In this field Sisters are eager to contribute to the creation of more human modes of living by the{r ministry of "soft management.''

Programs for the elderly, socialized lunches, meals-onwheels, civic community endeavors enable Sisters to convey the Christian message of concern, presence and mutual love. New forms of ministry among the Blacks, support of the farm workers' organizations for the promotion of human rightsall have attracted Sisters' energies. Education, health and counselling work among the American Indians; education and building of community among the deaf, the mentally reretarded, the emotionally disturbed; rehabilitation programs for the drug addict and alcoholic, coordinating Model Cities and United Family Service programs, the education of prisoners and rectification of the judicial-prison system, teaching in inner-city public schools for minority groups-all of these are other fields wherein Sisters are witnessing to their faith in God's concern for the poorest.

Within these areas many women Religious are filling positions intluential in policy making, planning and bringing change at the sources of misery rather than dealing only with its amelioration. They include, for instance, lawyers, doctors and professors. They serve as executive directors of an Independent Precinct Organization, a Half-Way House for Women Offenders. a Boycott for United Farm Workers, a National Housing and Human Development Alliance, a Group Home

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for predelinquent teenager girls, a ministry to families of prisoners. An enterprising group of Sisters from several congregations has undertaken NETWORK to educate and sensitize American Sisters to social justice and its dependence upon proper legislation at all levels.

Sisters are to be found in ecumenically directed activities, working directly for programs in other Christian Churches, for the National Council of Churches and Church Women United, or conducting local enterprises under ecumenical ministry programs. These take such forms as direct work with youth, community centers and emergency help agencies, lobbying for welfare reform at the state legislature and running for public office.

Leadership in Jewish-Christian enterprises and in religious interracial justice has been assumed by Sisters. One Sister sums up all this activity by saying: "We have some good people concerned about shaping the future instead of being shaped by it-and that's really exciting!"

"I DOUBT THEY KNOW WHO I AM"

These apostolic endeavors of the Sisters are not under the sponsorship of the Church, and are not always supported by the bishop or priests of the area. Indeed there is evidence in some cases of such a lack of communication as to constitute a chasm. One Sister involved in a very meaningful prison apostolate and living in a parish convent writes: "As far as diocesan or parish officials go, I doubt they know who I am."

This remark underlines the alienation felt by many Sisterg who, in order to devote themselves to those suffering most from inequities in our society, are working outside all areas of the Church. Certainly there is an obligation on the religious congregation, and also on the bishops and clergy, to support, with understanding, appreciation and even material help, Religious involved in such work. Some women Religious, it is true, embrace these fields because they have lost all confidence in being able to work with the clergy in ecclesiastical structures. There they have too often been made to feel unwanted, useless or dangerous.

Attempts to evaluate the situation of women Religious with respect to ministry are very difficult. On the one hand there

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have been great success stories of women who have worked so well with men in the Church that a marvelous witness of mature cooperation has been given. In these cases an element of richness has been added to the service of the parish and community as well as to the personal spiritual growth of Sisters, priests and lay staff. This happy situation requires, as an absolute prerequisite, team work and a basic acceptance and respect for one another among all members of the team.

There must be a process wherein frequent consultation and staff meetings are a normal procedure. An inestimable help is regular staff liturgy, wherein all the personnel within the context of the liturgy discern Gospel values and study the nature of their ministry, how they may personally be blocking or promoting it, and what the needs of their people call for_ Some women Religious in chancery positions as well as in parishes are able through their competence and dedication to gain the respect of the staff and then influence them to the rooting of their work together in shared prayer. In one diocese the bishop has established a common residence for his social action, having priests, deacon, a married couple and four Sisters live with or in close proximity to him. There are patterns of teamwork among parishes, e.g. an affluent, a poor, and a middle-class one, where priests and Sisters who share this joint ministry meet for a rich liturgy once a week and integrate the thrust of the parishes.

Another bishop makes his home-office building open-house headquarters for the priests, Sisters and lay persons involved in diocesan outreach. In these ways understandings develop, spiritual motivation supports ever more generous giving and projects are continuously generated and effected. Such situations build maturity and enhance self-respect and mutual support. Undoubtedly they demand from each person involved "daily little deaths to bring new forms of life to being" as men and women strive in utterly new ways and adepted life styles to set free the power of the Spirit. Recognition of what is being accomplished in so short a time arouses hope.

MORE INSTABILITY IN THESE MINISTRIES

On the other hand there are instances where Sisters made the transfer from classroom to religious education or allied

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parish ministry, only to find themselves thoroughly discouraged at the end of a few years. Vocational instability appears more marked in these ministries, prop01iionately, than in the more traditional ones, though exact figures are elusive. This factor may of course point to the possibility that this choice of ministry for some represents already a vocational uncertainty.

Lack of success on the whole seems to stem from lack of adequate psychological preparation, job training, and/or personal maturity on the part of the Sisters; from a sometimes subtle but pervasive disapproval of the other Sisters in the community or congregation; from unreadiness of the people, from lack of available positions after training, and from inability of the clergy to accept teamwork and to cope with their own defensiveness towards women.

The clergy concerned and to a much greater extent the Sisters find that they must adopt a new life style. Sometimes the Sister is remote from her congregation and must live alone.

Her hours of service and the freedom and flexibility she needs may bring her into conflict with her community if she is living with Sisters from other congregations. The priests must open their tight circle to admit the Sister as a co-worker. For all, the new form of ministry requires a willingness to accept painful growth into greater emotional maturity.

Perhaps it is for these reasons that, even though the movement of women Religious into these ministries is still just a trickle, there seems to be "a surplus of trained and competent Sisters, unable to find pastors or bishops who will take advantage of their potential for good." Even dioceses where the bishop has been very open to this concept of women in ministry find a limited number of pastors open to Sisters in new roles. The pattern still prevalent in many dioceses, however, is that the bishop is conscious of only priests as the one source of personnel for all positions save those of teaching and health work. He tends to look at the needs of the people in the diocese only to the extent that he has the priests available to meet them. A more advanced stage occurs when the realization that a priest is not available for a particular work causes a search for a competent person, preferably male. Only several stages later do we have the diocese which looks at needs, looks

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at all available Church personnel, provides education or training and supports the needed work.

Basic questions like the following answered with honesty and vigor might well reinvigorate a diocese: 1. What are the Gospel needs of your parish, your institution? 2. WhaUwho are needed to meet these needs, be they spiritual renewal, educational thrusts, structural changes? 3. What is the role of women Religious and of other personnel in meeting these needs? what kind of person? what type of training program?

4. Given the above, what should be the apostolic mission/ ministry orientation or goals of each community? What priorities should be set as to the ministry a Sister could select?

THE MAN-WOMAN SITUATION IN THE CHUCR!{

Fundamental to much reluctance to plan, to look at needs, to attract new personnel is the man-woman situation in the Church. Herein lies probably the very greatest ministry for all of us: The reconciliation of men and women of what is God's design for women in His kingdom. The basic premise for this ministry is that we be serious about our lives before God, that we be willing to see ourselves as part of our culture and examine our whole culture in the light of Christ's precepts and example. For the whole Church this is the task Vatican II set itself, to study the contemporary stance of the Church in the light of God's revelation and of the "sign of the times."

One sign to which we were not adequately attuned in the Holy Spirit at the opening of the Council was the position of women.

Only ten years ago most women lacked the consciousness and the initiative to offer proposals on women to the Prepar. a tory Commission of the Council. Consequently, the Council said almost nothing about women, and what was said was in the context of civil society rather than the Church. Except for some speeches at the Synod in 1971, the hierarchy or the Church has not acknowledged any deficiency in its attitude toward women.

The purpose of God in creating implies that, through all the vicissitudes of history, man-every man, male and female -is to reflect the image of God. This potential is contained in the first Creation narrative: "God created man in the image

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of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them" (Gen 1 :27).

This theological intent immediately encountered (even in the second creation account) (Gen 2 :18-24) the quest of man not for God's design but for dominance. By the time God visited this world in the form of Jesus, dominance was expressing itself in the oppression of the slave by the free man and the woman by the male, and in the division of civic and religious society into tight categories for power.

Jesus was born and lived in a Jewish society which expressed this dominance of man over woman. Even the testimony of women could not be accepted. Women, with slaves and children, were regarded as minors, even at times as things.

Consequently, every attention to woman by Jesus as recorded in the Gospel must be seen as challenge to the status quo.

Jesus proclaimed underlying principles the implications of which would prey upon consciences only centuries later rather than immediate revolutionary acts (even though he was revolutionary enough to be put to death as an enemy to the State).

Thus it is that we find no concrete action against slavery, for instance. It took Western Christian man over 1,800 years to apply Jesus' principle to the social realities and realize that slavery was an unacceptable option. Yet, today, 100 years later, slavery seems unthinkable to us-thank God! JESUS AND WOMAN'S FREEDOM

In a similar way Jesus did not surround himself with female apostles. In order to gain a hearing for his word he adapted himself to the social demands of his times, and then planted seeds in his hearers of a better plan for the universe as they pondered and implemented his message. In the very events of his human incarnation Jesus upheld the personal dignity, the ¡ freedom of women. The cooperation of Mary was asked by the messenger of the Spirit before her mothering of Jesus was accomplished. Upon her faith and acquiescence was built the whole economy of redemption. The earliest known proclamation of Jesus was uttered by a woman, Elizabeth; Anna's voice was joined to Simeon's in announcing Jesus' mission in the temple. Women-young girls and even mothers-in-lawwere among those cured by Jesus' ministry. Women sinners had as much access to him and equal mercy from him as men

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sinners. That was the rub! Only woman was supposed to suffer penalties for sexual sin.

Jesus broke the code also by talking to a Samaritan woman; and then he let her become an apostle of his message to her people. Mary, the sister of Lazarus, was accepted by Jesus as one of his disciples to be taught when custom (and Martha) thought she should be busy in the kitchen taking care of all those men he had probably brought with him. Women performed nobly and courageously in Jesus' last hour.

How Christian, Gospel-reading men can think of courage and initiative as being "male" characte1¡istics while contemplating the different reactions of men and women disciples at the time of Jesus' passion, death and resurrection remains a mystery! The loving expectations of Jesus evoked from women an amazing fidelity and bravery. While the men huddled behind locked doors in mortal fear, the women ventured forth because there was a need, a service to be renderd. The most vital task of proclamation in the whole Scripture-the word that Jesus was risen fmm the dead-was confided to Mary Magdalen. To what extent was the Spirit forecasting the next 1,900 years when it was noted in the Scripture that the men paid no heed to the news because a woman had relayed it!

In New Testament times the Spirit was apparently as generous in gifts to women as to men; and both performed the ministries of preaching with wisdom, of instructing, of arousing to faith, of healing, of miracles, of prophecy, of discerning spirits, of tongues and of their interpretation (1 Cor 12:8-11).

As Paul says: "There are all sorts of service to be done" ( 1 Cor 12 :6). There were "prophets and teachers," and collectors and distributors of alms. The author of Acts 21 :10 writes of Paul and himself: "We came to Caesarea. Here we called on Philip the Evangelist, one of the Seven, and stayed with him. He had four virgin daughters who were prophets."

Acts 2:42-47 presents the early community of Jerusalem (men and women) united in the Spirit, venerating the Apostolic word, gathering for the Eucharist, steadfast in prayers and spontaneously sharing their goods. At the same time a keen¡ struggle was in process between the example of Jesus towards women and the predispositions of the culture. We see this struggle portrayed in the letters of St. Paul which

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abound in evidence of the close collr.boration of women in the ministry, and at the same time give warnings about the violations of local taboos. Unfortunately, it was the taboos which prevailed under less courageous leadership than a St. Paul -provided. And it is those verses which contain the taboos that have been endlessly-and uncriti~lly--dted while the example of Paul and other testimonies to ¡women's participation in Church ministry are passed over in silence. Yet as virgins, widows and deaconesses, women performed important roles in Church life and structures from the 1st through the 4th centuries.

These performed for women the same tasks which the deacon undertook for men, they became highly instructed in Sacred Scripture, participated in the conferral of Baptism, taught the catechumens, conducted the women's prayer services, provided hospitality, gave care to sick women, visited homes, ministered the Blessed Sacrament, counselled with the hierarchy, shared their wealth generously and enjoyed a position of great respect in the Church. We have from the fourth century the text of a full ordination ceremony for a deaconess.

(Sisters Today, pp. 216-7). In it are all the elements of the sacrament of ordination: the laying on of hands by the bishop in the presence of the clergy, the prayer for the Holy Spirit for the Holy Spirit for the ordained and the conferring of a competence in the Church. In Byzantium not only were the hands imposed on the deaconess, but after that she even received the stole and was given the chalice. The rites of ordination show us that there was a complete identity between the ordination of. deacons and deaconesses.

DISTORTED THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

At the same time misogynist elements even in the most gifted of the Church's theologians have blocked perception of Jesus' message concerning women. I note here only a few examples to indicate the distortion which has deflected the Church from a proper appreciation of the female as fully a human person. St. Jerome in commenting on Ephesians 3 :5 observes : "As long as woman is for birth and children she is as different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will

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cease to be a woman and will be called a man" (Pl. 25.567).

The secular equivalent to this judgment is the supposedly supreme compliment about a woman: "She thinks like a man!"

The identification by St. Augustine of original sin with sexual passion and Eve's part in it as woman the temptress has strongly influenced theological and ascetical manuals. St. Thomas found that in family life "woman is naturally subject to man because in man the power of reason predominates" (S.Th. 1.92. 1 and 2).

From the fifth century the cult ¡ of violence accompanied the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and structures for the protection-and the domination-of women became fixed in society and in the Church. The monastery, the only area of full-time Church service that remained for women, became totally cloistered. Within that cloister, it is true, women abbesses exercised governance and even ecclesiastical jurisdiction over parish priests and chaplains as well as over large convents. When in the 13th century the mendicant orders, Dominican and Franciscan, provided an actively apostolic life for men, women's communities remained cloistered. In the counter-Reformation era, when St. Ignatius was sending men into every phase of Church activity and into all lands, an English woman, Mary Ward, was persecuted and even imprisoned by Roman ecclesiastical authorities for trying to establish a similar Religious cong1¡egation for women. In the 17th century St. Francis de Sales was defeated in his attempt to establish a group of Religious women who would visit homes to minister to the sick and the needy, and had to accept that his "Visitation" Sisters would remain cloistered. In order to make possible the great charitable contributions of the Daughters of Charity, St. Vincent de Paul had to resort to a ruse and insist that no member of the community ever identify herself as a "Religious." During this 1,000-year period the Church, which in New Testament times had displayed a great fluidity of ministry involving both men and women, had become totally clerical, totally male.

WOMAN'S PLACE:

HOME OR CLOISTER

The 18th century still saw woman confined to home-her father's or her husband's---or cloister. Then the French Revo-

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lution, immigration to America, frontier life and industrialization wrought, in the Providence of God, what the Church had previously feared, i.e., a climate open to the ministrations of women in "active" works of mercy. Women Religious of great faith, independence of judgment and sheer courage travelled dangerously, endured hardships, in turn supported or challenged or suffered from bishops; but they built. They built lives, they built institutions, and they built faith.

It was the Code of Canon Law in the early 20th century which sacralized the superior position of man in marriage regulations, jurisdictional prerogatives, restrictions on women Religious and liturgical rubrics. It removed the last vestiges of jurisdictional powers of abbesses and fixed cloistral restrictions on active religious women. Through the centuries Religious communities of women might be described as a rivulet paralleling the great flow of the river. So long as it kept to its own channel, the rivulet was allowed opportunity to develop. The congregation might build and administer colleges, hospitals, schools, orphanages, its members be called upon to perform mighty deeds. It is when the rivulet tries to join, to influence the flow of the river that there is opposition.

The long cultural history of male dominance has left its mark imbedded deeply in law and even more deeply in the psychological makeup of men and women. In the United States the Equal Rights Amendment will eliminate the inequalities residual in the civil law. The Church also has under way a reform of Canon Law, being drawn up by an entirely male body. Because of the secrecy with which the studies are proceeding it is impossible to know whether consciousness of the oppressive position women occupy in the Church structures will influence the reform. The lack of channels of communication within the Church makes this situation exceedingly uncomfortable for the person who in loving Christ wants to love his Church and wishes it to be as credible as possible in the eyes of human society. Consequently, every effor-t to open communication upwards and downward within the Roman Catholic Church would seem imperative at this time.

More and more theologians who study carefully the biblical and historical situations are convinced that psychology and sociology have more to do with the Church's attitude toward

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women than does theology. If this is true it places a serious obligation on Catholic men and women to examine their relational values. A new consciousness has recently come to birth among women in our society, a realization that the deepest levels of our thought patterns, our concept of God, our prayer and our appreciation of numan nature have been male formed, male limited, and male domina.ted.

JESUS' DOMINANT QUALITIES 'FEMININE'

This long cultural experience appears to have rooted itself in the subconscious as arrogance in many males and self-denigration in many women. If men and women are to be witnesses to Christ in today's world, they must deal with this psychosocial underlay and its continuing reinforcements in contemporary structures and attitudes.

An essential help in the healing of psyches wounded in this manner is prayerful, deep reflection on the bearing and message of Jesus. In him the so-called feminine qualities of compassion, care (the hen gathering her chicks) self-sacrifice, love, tears, passiveness before the Spirit, longing for unity, reconciliation and forgiveness prevail at least as much as his so-called masculine traits of initiative, confrontation, courage, aggressive condemnation of enemies, leadership, independence of judgment. No wonder that Julian of Norwich could write: "So Jesus Christ who sets good against evil is our real Mother, God is as really our Mothet¡ as he is our Father" (Revelations of Divine Love, p. 167). Jesus is the complete human person, able to depart from and transcend the norms of his culture, to relate to men and women in a fully personal way and to provide opportunities for them to serve.

As Christians women have the same obligation and rights as men to work for the Kingdom of God, to serve and love and change the world. Both men and women are "sons of God," both must be at once energetic in living and proclaiming the Gospel and submissive before the judgment of his Word. The last judgment of both men and women is recorded as being not between so-called male virtues and female virtues, but between those who practice the works of mercy and those who do not: "I was hungry and you fed me ... (or) you did not." The freedom that must be sought in Women's Liberation

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is the "freedom of the sons of God," that capacity to feel oneself a person with a unique destiny and the power to help realize the Kingdom of God. It is the freedom to contemplate the message and life of Jesm;, and with the grace of his Spirit to live it.

Jesus spoke effectively against dominance, against being authoritarian. He said: "Anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant and anyone who wants to be first among you must be slave to all. For the Son of Man himself did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mk. 10 :43-45). His teaching on happiness contradicted all the tenets of dominance enumerated before or since: Happy are the poor in spirit, the merciful, the persecuted ... His classic command of love of God and love of neighbor included even the enemy as "neighbor."

Literally and symbolically Jesus ministered to all-those who were with him, a Peter who could not understand him, a Thomas who was doubtful of him and a Judas who was already plotting to destroy him. At his last supper, the evening before his passion, he performed a lowly service, a personal service, a service of perfect love even for such as these. Fully conscious of his Godhead, of being Jesus the Lord, he took on the servant-role, in an act so humiliating that it could not be required of a Jewish slave. He washed the feet of his disciples.

Through that service he offered redemption, the saving gesture to be completed in his passion, death and resurrection. Notably, Jesus then told those present at the Paschal Supper that they must imitate his example and "must wash one another's feet." Whoever would be involved in the ministry of Jesus must seriously ponder the meaning of this command and the depth of self-sacrifice that it symbolizes.

DOMINATION, OPPRESSION, EVIL EVERYWHERE

One of the prime contemporary ministries must be a healing of the man-woman situation in the Church and in society. The neighbor whose feet we women must wash is the male; and the neighbor whose feet the men must wash is the female. Psychological research assures us that we are capable of this task only to the extent that we are free human beings who have affec-

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tionately integrated our own sexuality and can approach this neighbor with genuine respect, love and humility. Otherwise we would be caught in the trap of obsequiousness and interior bitterness. What is required is attaining the Gospel value of freedom which is achieved through Christ's power within us.

He can enable us to love one another not as male and female but as human persons, to refuse to compete, and to learn ways of cooperation. We must help both man and woman to appreciate the fact that both of them have brains and a conscience.

The pattern of dominationjoppression must be shown to be evil everywhere: in government, international relations, economics, and the Church. Marina Bandeira, a Brazilian woman who works with Dom Helder Camara, declares: "Whenever, wherever, and at whatever level a woman accepts the roles of man-the-master and woman-the-submitted, she is strengthening the fabric of oppression." This approach to human healing must not be in te1ms of a power struggle in which women hope simply to supplant man in domination. The goal must be establishment of a new respect for the human person--every person of any race or color or sex. To attain this respect woman must free herself from the interiorized image of inferiority which centuries of acculturation have wrought. So indivisible is this freedom that, as Marina says, "Each woman who asserts her dignity as a human person is struggling side by side with the campesino of Latin America or any of the downtrodden peoples of Africa or Asia." We must refuse to oppress anyone, we must refuse to accept blind submission to anyone.

This ministry implies a value-revolution in which we, men and women, personally and as communities, dedicate ourselves to be a counterforce to all that demeans a person. Because our world-society and our nation, in war making and armaments, in garish affluence and consumerism, in neglect of the poor and inhuman court and prison situations, are demeaning personsfor these reasons our sense of Christian values may lead us into the arena of public policy. But, because values take root in individual hearts, and the process of belittlement occurs in the embarrassment of a person, our healing may be with individuals. To confront a person (especially a male) in order to win a point is not ministering; to confront him lovingly in order to help to "deliver him from evil" through confronting the

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same evil in ourselves is to promote the value-revolution, to increase freedom.

The performance of this ministry may be in a new milieu or in the old. The teacher, the principal, the counselor, the nurse have wonderful opportunities "to challenge their own patterns of oppression and submission and help to free others from them." Men and women who strive to form together a team for churchly ministry to the needs of their people have still more wonderful challenges thus presented. As they try to help individuals be their best selves, they must work, thoughtfully and ta.ctfully but courageously to help the Church become its best self.

PROSPECT POOR FOR CHURCH CHANGE

As of today the Church in its prescriptions is not taking women seriously. Policy making and administration remain linked to jurisdiction. And jurisdiction remains linked to ordination. Yet the United States Bishops' Committee on Pastoral Ministry has thus far taken a negative stance towards the ordination of women. On the other hand, the Bishops' Committee on the Permanent Diaconate recommended as follows: "The third critical question concerns the ordination of women as deacons. Many women, lay and religious, have offered to serve in the ordained ministry and question the justice of being excluded. Among deacon candidates themselves and leaders of training programs, there is growing conviction that women would strengthen the diaconal ministry immeasurably." (emphasis mine) The best recent evidence that the Vatican intends to continue in its established attitude towards women is the Motu Proprio of 1972. The intent of the document was to update and provide a needed renewal in former minor orders of the Church which had become almost totally anachronistic. While it maintained the clerical-lay distinction, the Motu Proprio reforming minor orders did open ministries to lay Christians. These ministries are no Ionge1¡ reserved to candidates for the sacrament of Orders. But the Order did limit to men those "lay Christians" who might be installed in the ministries.

The limitation runs counter to the practice in many countries, including the United States, where women as well as m~n

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are already acting as lectors, cantors, and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist. The Church in this country already had proof of the good being accomplished by the women in these roles. So, an NCCB staff worker immediately announced that women might continue to perform these services. However, they may not receive the public "installation" into these ministries because of the "venerable tradition" which limits this installation to men. Why are qualified women who desire the formal reception of ministerial roles in the Church a priori denied this possibility? Why can "venerable tradition" be changed to extend formerly clerical orders to laymen, but not be¡ changed to allow their extension also to women? The hopeful point is that the argument is being shifted from "divine order" to ~â&#x20AC;˘tradition."

The world's needs press upon us, and any attention to the position of women in the Church is justified only on two counts: That it be seen as part of the universal struggle against all oppression and that it really enhance the service men and women are able to give to the Church and the world.

If we pray thoughtfully for God 's will to be done and his Kingdom to come, if we promote consciousness and reconciliation within our own sphere of influence, we shall promote the renewal described by Rainer Maria Rilke: "The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed from all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings." We may then realize the dream of St. Paul: "All baptized in Christ, you have all clothed yourself in Christ, and their are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3 :27-28)

AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll, R.S.M. is general director of the Sisters of Mercy (Pittsburgh) and immediate past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Cesar Chavez, a migrant farm worker at the age of ten in the midst of the depression, is the organizer and president of the United Farm Workers of America.

Vincent Dwyer is a member of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance (Trappist) on a medical leave from St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Mass. A Doctor in ascetical and mystical theology, he is head of the Division of Human Development at St. Mary's College, Winona.

Thomas J. Grady, who is auxiliary bishop of Chicago and pastor of St. Joseph's parish, Libertyville, Ill., heads the Bishops' Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry.

Monika K. Hellwig is Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and author of What are the Theologians Saying? and The Ch1¡istian C.-eeds.

David J. O'Brien is Associate Professor of History at Holy Cross College, fotmer chah¡man of the Committee on the History of Catholicism in the U.S. (1970-73) and author of American Catholics and Social Reform and The Renewal of American Catholicism.

John J. Pilch holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a regular contributor to New Testament Abst.-acts, Cambridge, Mass.

Jack L. Stotts is a professor of theology at McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

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