Alumni Reunion Gathering - Capuchin Franciscans, Province of St

Alumni Reunion Gathering
F. ILLI PONTE RESTAURANT
Tuesday, 06 October 2009
Vincent Guarrera and wife
John Lynch and John Baptist Riordan
William Dawe, Thomas Faiola and Gerard Mulvey
Gordon Combs, Brian Cumy and wife, James O’Connell and wife
Francis Gasparik
James Stewart and Carmine Marotta
Gabriel Massaro, Art McKenna, Michael Quinn and Gerard Keppel
Philip Fabiano, Gordon Combs with Robert Winters
[Above] Dave Couturier with Joseph Guarino; [Below] John Conway with Mr. and Mrs. Peter Eschmann
[Above] James McGrath with Philip Bohan; [Below] George McCloskey with John Gallagher
[Below] Philip Fabiano, Bernard Smith, Raphael Iannone with Ken Navan
Paul Engel and John Hillock
Edward Dee and James McGrath
[A] Matthew Giles, Jennifer Demers, Michael Ramos; [B] Michael Greco, Suzanne Culhane
Alumni Reunion Gathering
F. ILLI PONTE RESTAURANT
Tuesday, 06 October 2009
That time has been replaced by an extremely challenging new era of realism
and diminishment. Fed by a precipitous drop in priestly and religious
vocations, we have witnessed in the last thirty years, a pastoral strategy that
has emphasized the closing, merging, yoking and twinning of Catholic
parishes and schools across the United States. There has been a change in the
balance of pastoral service from clerical to lay ministries. The majority of
ministry in the United States is done by lay people, overwhelmingly by
women, and the largest number of divinity degrees earned every year is
awarded to lay men and women, not clerics. The vocation shortage in
priesthood has been replaced (at least temporarily) by a vocational
renaissance among the laity, although this trend is threatened. Two things
jeopardize our new pastoral strategy of “doing more with less.” First, as I have
pointed out in a recent article on “Pastoral Planning and the Economic
Meltdown,” the structures and financing to sustain these new lay ministerial
careers have not kept pace with their development. We are trying to finance
our present lay ministerial structures with the same limited stipend economy
that kept diocesan priests and religious communities faithful to their vows
and promises of poverty. We live in a salaried world, but we are paying our
ministers wages that are unsustainable for parents who want to provide at
least the secure minimum for their children’s future.
But, our new pastoral strategy is more severely threatened by a crisis we
barely talk about. Lost in all the talk over the last fifty years of a “vocation
crisis” is the massive “crisis of discipleship” or “participation” that is
emptying our pews at a dangerous rate. Starting well before the Second
Vatican Council, the Catholic Church in America is seeing a dramatic loss in
the numbers of people who go to Church on any regular basis. For example, in
the Archdiocese of Boston during the 1970’s, 72% of Catholics went to Church
on a regular basis. Today that number stands at around 17%. We know where
things can go. France has been on a similar trajectory since the 1920’s. The
percentage of French Catholics who go to Church has dropped to a shocking
4.5%.
Clearly, to pull out of this spiral, we need a clear understanding of our task, a
commitment to our proper roles in the Church and the authority to make a
difference. So, what is our task? What are we to do? What is the next step?
The Next Steps-When we look to our leading theologians for help in
understanding the task of the moment, we don’t get a very hopeful picture.
Capuchin Planning:
Micro-loaning Gospel Opportunities
The Catholic theologian, David Tracy (who was baptized in Yonkers), says
that we will have a hard time stating what we are to do because we live in a
“nameless time.” We are, he states, in an immensely confusing era. We don’t
even have the language we need to speak about the confusing realities we
face.
David B. Couturier, O.F.M. Cap.
The Capuchin theologian and economist, Michael Crosby, suggests that the
Catholic Church is so addicted to its clerical power that, like any true addict, it
cannot feel pain anymore, its own or the pain it unknowingly afflicts on
others. Not much help there!
There is an inherent irony having a director of planning speaking to
an assembly of alumni. The trajectories of these two roles are
inherently different. It is natural and right for alumni to want to look
back, remember and recall. And it is the nature of pastoral planning to
look ahead and beyond the present moment to scope out
opportunities that may be cresting just over the horizon. But, I’d ask
you all to join me in the irony tonight as I try to describe the
challenges that Capuchin-Franciscans are likely to face and the part
that we can play together in meeting those challenges in a new and
hopefully enlivened way.
The new President of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Fr. Bryan
Massingale, goes further. He says that our experience of Church, as we have
known it, is dying. The Church that we grew up in is in its final death throes
and Catholics, unwilling and unable to accept this dying, are oscillating
between two different forms of denial: on the one hand, a simplistic nostalgia
for the good old Latin days, a supposedly “golden age of Catholicism” and, on
the other hand, a near total despair that anything new and significant can
happen again. The best we can do says Bryan, is offer one another palliative
care and wait patiently and spiritually for a new resurrected moment that
only God can provide.
The Recent History of the Church
Honestly, my picture is not as bleak. The problems are real. The challenges
facing the Church are significant and, in some places, quite dire. But, as a
Capuchin, I think we know what our task is and we are finding our way
through the thicket of concerns, without falling into a mindless nostalgia or a
rebellious despair.
This is a unique time in the history of the Catholic Church in America.
The days of our expansion are over. The 1850’s to the 1950’s saw an
astounding expansion of Catholic building all across this country. It
was fed by a religious zeal that wanted to put a Catholic parish and
parochial school in every language on almost every corner in America.
It was an amazingly zealous time and a marvelously successful one, at
that. We built the largest and most effective private school system the
world had ever seen. We built the largest and most successful private
health care network the world had ever known. We moved a
generation of Catholics up and out of disadvantage faster than any
previous initiative in the history of the world. It was no small feat and
we did it with singular devotion and united fervor.
Capuchin Identity-Capuchin-Franciscans have been thinking about our
identity and our ministries rather intensively over the last forty years. In fits
and starts and with some failures, we have come to a clearer understanding of
who we are and what we are to be and do for the Church in the 21st century.
Simply put, it is this. We are an international gospel brotherhood and our task
is to create opportunities for communion wherever there is isolation,
domination and deprivation.
We come to this because of our profound meditation on the Trinity, the
inner life of God which we describe as a “free communion of persons
without domination or deprivation.” We see a world today mired in
violent struggles of terrorism and polarization. We live in a time caught
in the never-ending spiral of aggressive consumerism that has replaced
our transcendent desire for the Infinite God with the commercial desires
for an infinite, but ultimately disappointing, array of goods. As
Capuchin-Franciscans we have the mission to announce an alternative
way of being and acting. We have come to proclaim that we are brothers
and sisters to one another under one good and gracious God, whatever
our race, creed, nationality, political or ethnic affiliation. We are here to
build a “fraternal economy” and a more relational world.
How are we to do that? How can you help us to do that?
Clearly, we cannot resurrect the grand building schemes of the early 19th
and 20th centuries. The days of the grand monastery churches, filled with
Fedora-covered bald spots and Chanel laced chapeaux, are over. But,
there must also be an alternative to the diminishment models that are
current today. We have to expect more than the cutting, splicing and do
more with less models of the late 20th century. We cannot pass on to our
children the polarized church of liberals and conservatives we have seen
emerge at the beginning of the 21st century. I see one other possibility
that might work.
When I was President of Franciscans International, our Franciscan NGO
at the United Nations, I worked with Franciscan colleagues on the rising
tide of extreme poverty in the world. We were witnessing whole regions
of countries decimated by mind-numbing destitution that was collapsing
political governments and agricultural systems. Despite good will and
the best of intentions, the world’s large relief programs and massive
infusions of international aid didn’t seem to work. They collapsed under
the weight of decrepit and dysfunctional bureaucracies and old habits of
graft and greed.
But, a new idea took hold in the 1980’s and 1990’s -- providing targeted
microloans especially to women in the poorest regions of the world to
spur entrepreneurship and social responsibility. With loans as small as
$100, women have bought goats, cows, chickens and cell phones, and,
from these humble beginnings, have built small businesses for
themselves, stabilized the economy of their families, lowered crime rates
in their regions, and built networks of similarly productive-minded
women. This idea, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, has spread
across the globe and has become an important step in the reduction of
the most severe forms of poverty in the world.
Micro-Loaning Gospel Opportunities-I want to use this image to describe
how we can approach our efforts to rebuild Catholic life on Franciscan
principles today.
We don’t need workers or donors who will build large institutions on which we
can graft bronze plaques with our names on them. That might service our pride
but I am not sure it will enliven our mission anymore.
What we need to do is identify and leverage entrepreneurial Catholic initiatives
that have the potential for rebuilding and solidifying communion, especially
among young Catholic families (those most threatened by the isolating
tendencies of our world today).
I am thinking of ways to microloan new CYFM initiatives that actually
empower and sustain those young adults who will really commit to new efforts
to evangelize and repopulate our local communities with other committed
young people.
I am thinking of ways to sponsor and microloan Capuchin parish programs
that effectively strengthen and deepen the life and work of Catholic families,
especially young ones, and reconnect them to their church communities.
I am thinking of ways to name, microloan (and leverage) any ministry that
targets isolation, domination and deprivation and replaces them with
sustainable programs that build communion. Where are the isolating moments
that cry for communion in our Catholic world right now? One need only look at
the devastating consequences of becoming ill in America today. One need only
walk with Catholics in the middle of separation and divorce. We have only to
pay closer attention to what’s happening to families out of work and out of
hope as a result of last year’s near total breakdown of the world’s financial
systems. We don’t need big programs and large bureaucracies. We need
focused and entrepreneurial efforts that empower communion and reconnect
people to their Catholic roots.
Capuchins have a clear mission today of bringing the world together. We do
not have the luxury of meeting that challenge with grand institutions, large
bank accounts and bulky bureaucracies. We have something more powerful,
the strength of our relationships and our commitment to a more fraternal
world. We need your help to identify those particular neuralgic points in parish
life and in ministerial programs that cripple families and communities in
isolation, domination and deprivation. We need your help in locating best
practices to engage young Catholics in the Church again because they know we
are committed to family life and to a world where all God’s children, whether
black or white, rich or poor, can sit at the common table of God’s creation and
work together for the common good. My brothers and sisters, thank you for
being with us and for us. Now, let’s be Capuchin and bring the world together!
David B. Couturier is presently the Director of
Pastoral Planning for the Archdiocese of Boston.
Previously, he has served as Dean of the School of
Theology and Associate Professor of Pastoral Studies
at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore.
He has served as Vicar Provincial of his Province and
President of Franciscans International, an NGO at
the UN. He is the author of two books, The Fraternal
Economy: A Pastoral Psychology of Franciscan
Economics (2007) and The Four Conversions: A
Spirituality of Transformation (2008).
David Couturier: davecout@aol.com
Alumni Reunion Gathering
F. ILLI PONTE RESTAURANT
Tuesday, 06 October 2009
The ‘Alumni Reunion Gathering’ is an annual
event sponsored by the Office of Mission and
Development. For more information contact:
Francis Gasparik, O.F.M. Cap at:
fgasparik@capuchin.org