Rebuilding the Church
This week, our Executive Director Sister Mary Scullion gave a talk to the Archdiocesan Professional Society. We print here an excerpt of that talk, in which she challenges persons of faith and conscience to rebuild a church founded on truth and on a commitment to justice for those who suffer.
Many of us were deeply encouraged when our new pope took the name Francis, which sent a powerful signal. The poor man of Assisi after whom he took the name heard God’s call to “rebuild the church.” But that is not a responsibility of the pope alone: It is a call for all of us, a task we must all undertake. I believe the church in our day needs to be rebuilt.
In part, it has been deeply marred by the sexual abuse scandals, and we all must hope and pray and actively work for healing. But I believe more broadly that the witness of the church in the world needs revitalization in many areas. The church we must rebuild is a church founded on truth. It is not simply a truth contained in doctrines and theological propositions. That truth must be a faith that is active in the world. The deepest truths of our faith are made incarnate in the work of binding up wounds, reaching out to the outcast, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, liberating the captive, preaching good news to the poor, and working for justice At the heart of Catholic social teaching is the assertion that every person is made in the image and likeness of God and therefore must be treated with dignity. When we understand how poverty and homelessness are dehumanizing and degrading, we realize that as Catholics we must defend human dignity by working against poverty and homelessness.
In our mission statement at Project HOME we state that all our work is rooted in our spiritual conviction of the dignity of each person. Though we are not a Catholic or religious organization, the stamp of Catholic social teachings and the Catholic Worker movement are evident in our core values and our daily work. We believe, much in line with Catholic social teaching, that ensuring that everyone had access to a decent home, employment and income, health care and education is a way of upholding their essential dignity. We have also had to fight for basic human and civil rights of homeless persons when they were being blocked out of neighborhoods or threatened with being arrested for simply being homeless. Catholic social teaching has also consistently asserted that how we treat our most vulnerable sisters and brothers is a test of our society’s moral worth. This is based on Jesus’ truly revolutionary teaching in Matthew 25, where he identifies himself with the hungry, the homeless, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner.
The Catholic Worker movement has been especially prophetic in calling us to this critical dimension of our faith. What is overwhelmingly clear in Catholic social teaching is that indifference to the plight of poor persons is not an option. It is also clear that our response to the crises of homelessness and poverty cannot be limited to charity, as important as that is. We have to consider systemic and structural realities of our political and economic systems, and how they either aggravate suffering or move us toward greater justice. But perhaps the core of any meaningful response to our suffering sisters and brothers is in relationships and community.
One of the core problems in trying to respond effectively to the crisis of poverty is that we often don’t see those who are poor. So much of our society is designed to segregate those who are materially secure from those who are struggling to get by. Societal forces have converged to create inner-city ghettos, trapping whole communities in isolation and marginalization. Many cities in the United States have passed legislation to police homeless persons out of downtowns. Meanwhile, many Americans can easily become victims of suburban blinders, safe in our comfortable and functioning lives, separated from our sisters and brothers who are poor. In the absence of authentic human contact and relationship, we succumb to myths about the poor. Consciously or unconsciously, we come to accept that they are the victims of their own irresponsibility. We start to believe that men and women in poverty are morally flawed, and that their social circumstances are the consequences of character defects. Stereotypes of the poor as lazy, unproductive, criminal, or addicted go unchallenged. Perhaps even worse, those who are poor can become invisible to us.
A critical challenge for us is to see those who are poor. This is at the heart of the powerful witness of Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, both of whose work was rooted in intimate relationships and community with God’s suffering and struggling children. We need to take off the blinders so we can put a human face on the men, women, and children who live amid social deprivation and marginalization. We need to enter into flesh and blood relationships, so we can truly know men, women, and children who are often rendered invisible. Again, charity is important, but we cannot allow ourselves to believe that writing a check from a safe distance is sufficient to help move this country toward a more just and compassionate economy. At Project HOME, we assert as our core vision, “None of us is home until all of us are home.” Again, while we are not a religious organization, this idea echoes the words of Pedro Arrupe, who said, “If there is hunger anywhere in the world, then our celebration of the Eucharist is somehow incomplete everywhere in the world.”
As Catholics, we do not respond charitably to those who are poor and oppressed because it gives us a good feeling or it lets us feel especially holy. We don’t do it out of a sense of moral duty or to fulfill any ecclesial obligations. We are drawn toward mercy, compassion, and justice, because, in the mystery of the Gospel, we recognize that our common humanity is at stake. We become most fully human when we enter the mystery of suffering and, with God’s grace, tap into the miracles of healing and transformation. I believe this mystery is central to our task of rebuilding the church today. I believe this is the powerful vision of our new pope, and we should all pray for his ministry and leadership in forging a church of and for the poor. But again, all of us must shoulder the burden and calling of rebuilding the church.
We rebuild the church when we step outside of the safe enclaves of our lives and enter into real community with our poor and suffering sisters and brothers. We rebuild the church when we draw from our Catholic social teachings to nurture a wiser and deeper vision of the common good. We rebuild the church when we reweave bonds of community and nurture a social ethos of mutual care and support. We rebuild the church when we challenge the idols of materialism and consumerism that enslave and dehumanize us all. We rebuild the church when we support public policies that foster an economy that works for all Americans and that move us toward real justice. We also rebuild the church when we live as a people of hope. In our work at Project HOME, we dare to make the hopeful assertion that we can end homelessness. This hope is grounded in reality: the reality of concrete solutions that have proven themselves for many years; and the reality of a community of persons from all walks of life who come together with a common vision of justice and compassion. That community is a source of tremendous power. But that community must grow if we are to make greater progress. I invite you to be part of that community of hope. And I thank you for your willingness to be part of a church that lives truthfully, hopefully, justly, and lovingly in the midst of our society. Surely, we will experience what the prophet Isaiah so beautifully envisioned, that our light breaks forth like the dawn – and that light will pierce the darkness of our wounded world.
