 My name's Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies. This is the first of the three major lectures of the semester that we host. This is the annual Bellarmine lecture, which has been given on this campus for probably as long as the university has existed. And it's almost always been a lecture given by a distinguished Jesuit scholar. And today is no exception. Before we get to that, I just want to make a little commercial for one event. I'm not going to stretch your minds or anything. But if you are a person who is free to attend events at 4.30 in the afternoon, on March the 4th, we have a little panel, a panel on the question. Catholic Belonging, Why Do I Stay? And we have three speakers who all represent, in their different ways, liminal, marginal people who might be challenged to stay, but they are staying. So that'll be about an hour and a quarter at 4.30. And it's not in here. It's in the lovely, comfortable room in the lower level of the library. You'd all be welcome, free of charge, and maybe even a cup of coffee. So everything else that we're doing this semester is on the bookmark or on the flyer that's on the table that Mary is presiding over at the back of the room. So if you want more information, pick them up back there. So this evening, then, our Bellarmine lecture, William A. Clarke, SJ, built to his friends, is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, specializes in systematic theology, especially ecclesiology, and particularly parish life and issues affecting local church communities. His academic pedigree is a good one. He started out at Williams College in rural Massachusetts. Loyola University, Chicago, and his doctorate is from the Western Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And he's been teaching at Holy Cross since 2001. But before that, he did lots of other things that sort of explain his trajectory and why he's come to talk about this here today. So he worked for a while in a parish in Jamaica, not Jamaica, Boston, but the Jamaica. And he's also worked in a number of parishes in this country. In fact, he wrote his dissertation, his doctoral dissertation on as a study of the Dorchester Church in which he had worked. And that was called Authority, Intimacy, and Local Church, the local community as foundational for the universal church. And he was asked by an interviewer wants to describe his focus. And this is what he said, or some of what he said. He said, my big interest, theologically, academically, has been what happens in the local community in terms of an authoritative voice within the tradition. One of the spurs to that in my own thinking was the experience in Jamaica of seeing how much, perhaps without even realizing it, people took it on themselves as a local community to reinterpret and to re-express the faith that was given to them. The thing that I would like to be able to do in theology, he said, is to find room for that kind of grassroots faith expression in terms of acknowledging the kind of authority that that has, that this is a genuine expression of religious faith. I think that that is very much in the background of what we are going to hear about today as we hear our talk, Going to Church. Can Catholic parishes rise again? Please join me in welcoming Father Bill Clark. Good evening. I'm very glad to hear those words that I spoke some time or other to some interviewer or other. I'm gonna have to ask you to give me the background of that. And I'm particularly glad to hear that I'm still on this track, that it still makes sense. I'm glad to hear that. Yes, so the idea of thinking about the theology of parish, I think must have occurred to me at about the age of five while I was sitting in the pews with my parents and my sister at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Fairfield, Maine. And that church now is a private residence. I still can't quite believe that there's a family living in the church building itself, but there is. And the parish has been absorbed along with six other parishes into a parish that's called Corpus Christi in Waterville, Maine. That background is something to keep in mind because the question about Catholic parishes, whether it's do they still matter? Or as Paul put it, which I think was an earlier addition of the topic, can parishes rise again? It's because of this background of things that seem to be falling apart in some way. Are they really, I guess, is part of the question here? So yeah, I want to talk about this very basic unit of church today and what is the foundation of it from a theological point of view? So why is this a question to ask at this time? I've started to explain this already actually. To go to church for American Catholics is pretty much always to go to a parish church. The parish is a permanent local community of the church and it's a fundamental structure of the church. There are a lot of people who would not agree with me when I say that because from a canonical point of view you start with the bishop, but I'm speaking from the point of view of people who are Catholic and who experience church. If there were no parish churches, there wouldn't be that initial experience for many people. For most people, I would go so far as to say. And I want to say that that local church experience embodies essential aspects of what it is to be part of the people of God. This is not just an accidental structure or something that is somehow set out as a convenience. But anyone who has had any experience of the Catholic church in recent decades also knows that there are severe contemporary challenges facing these local institutions. And I'm not going to, I mean, we can talk more about this in question and answer. There's room for more than one entire lecture on just any one of these topics. But the challenges are about population. Sometimes that's about just people moving around as has happened in the United States. A lot of migration from the northeast to the south, southeast and southwest. But also the sense that many people have that wasn't part of the Catholic cultural experience in past decades that you can kind of pick your own parish and go where you find life. That's what most people these days would expect you should be able to do. But I know people in Maine, there's a town called Bideford in Maine where I have done quite a lot of pastoral work. It's not my hometown, but in the southern part of Maine. The street in Bideford that marks the two Catholic parishes is Hill Street. And I know people from a generation that just never crossed Hill Street. At least not when it came to deciding where to go to church. So this sense of independence is another part of the change in population. And of course, migrations of all different kinds, economic and political. Leadership, all sorts of difficulties there, shifting values and a sense of perhaps not so much agreement anymore about what leadership should look like. And certainly not where it's coming from. Who is any longer coming forward to for ordination and who would like to come forth and can't. So there's lots of leadership questions. Along with all of that, resources and people moving around means that money is moving around and so on. And beneath all of that, in the last 20 years at least, the questions of trust and unity that are coming out of our experiences of scandals, scandals of abuse, but even more, perhaps more shockingly in recent years, scandals of leadership covering up the abuse and the polarization that has come from lots of different places. All of that is impacting our experience of parish in tremendous ways. And a lot of people are simply no longer there. If you look at many of the large urban churches in the Northeast, you can see that they were built for much larger crowds than they usually experience today. And from my point of view, one of the biggest problems in the face of all of these challenges is that we have not developed a unified theological conversation. It's not really unified is not exactly the right word. Coherent is what I really mean. That we can't have an ongoing conversation about what a parish is, what the role of a parish is, what the significance of a parish is, that the polarization and the scandals and the other challenges pull us in different directions. And it's been difficult to develop a particular viewpoint on parish from a theological perspective. So the most basic question is still, what is a parish? And so we'll take a look at that for a few minutes here. Parish is certainly a canonical reality. And I talk with a number of theologians and canon lawyers and many of these folks that I have in mind right now have a bit more of a traditional bent than I do personally. And they want to emphasize that the parish is a creature of canon law. There would be no parishes from this point of view if it weren't for the fact that they are established in canon law. Two particular places where parishes is mentioned. In canon 374, the discussion is primarily about the role of a bishop. And this particular canon says that every diocese or other particular church is to be divided into distinct parts or parishes. In canon law, the word local, the term local church, refers to dioceses and things like dioceses that are presided over by bishops. And the parishes in this canon are called parts of that larger unit. But when we get to canon 515, which is the part of canon law that's actually talking about parishes per se as an institution, get a different approach. That a parish is a certain community of the Christian faithful. And that word community, canon law as we have it now was revised and published in 1983. There was a previous version of canon law that came from 1917. And the word community did not occur in that first edition of canon law with regard to parish. But here a parish is described as a certain community of the Christian faithful, stably constituted in a particular church that means in a diocese or local church like a diocese whose pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor. The Latin words are used here because it gets a little confusing. In American English, we usually say pastor when we mean parish priest. The word paraclus means parish priest. But so that's why in English this sounds a bit redundant. Pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor as its proper pastor. Entrusted to a parish priest as its proper spiritual leader, perhaps we could say. Under the authority of the diocese and bishop. That's the official definition of a parish. And from my point of view, the particularly important word there is community but that it's a stable community, that there's pastoral care going on there, that it's connected to the diocese. These are all things of great importance too and we'll see how those fit in as we move along. But from my perspective, a much more important thing about the parish is that it's a pastoral reality. And from this point of view, I would wanna point out that it's not canon law that creates parishes. Parishes arise from the very beginning of the history of the church. They are part of the earliest mission work of the apostles. And so it's the preaching of what in the ancient church is called the karygma, the basic proclamation of the gospel, which can be summed up in a lot of ways but the simplest way I think is just Jesus is Lord. From the time the apostles went out from Jerusalem to begin their ministry of proclaiming the gospel, that proclamation brought people together. It brought people who were responsive to the proclamation together into communities of believers. Communities that have as their major characteristic people being in communion with one another. That is a deep and interpersonal form of communication at that local level. But not just with other ordinary believers but they had local leaders. And the apostles who had announced the gospel in the first place were part of the picture even when they didn't stay around. And then the real communion, the foundation of it all was with Christ in the Holy Spirit as it is today. And that of course is all embodied in the sacraments and particularly the Eucharist in the church. So this is a reality that has been in place from the very beginning of the church and what it leads to is groups of people who have lived their Christian faith in a particular way. And they've lived it with each other. And that establishes a tradition that they have embraced and lived and passed on. And that began in the first century and we're now 2000 years later I couldn't have consulted the internet to find out how many generations that is but it's a lot, you can say that much. A parish is a lived experience of faith. That's the bottom line from my perspective here. The canonical stuff is not unimportant but it's a way to codify a way to sort of concretize something that already has its most important existence in this pastoral reality. Now there are alternatives of course to parishes and there are lots of different ways that if you're looking for a religion fix, you can get it. Even different ways in which you can experience community. There are specialized chapels. I was thinking in writing that first note about the chapel at a nursing home where actually as it turned out both of my grandmothers and my mother passed away in that nursing home. It's the place where when they closed my parish at home a sizable number of people gravitated toward that chapel. I can still find them there on a Sunday if I show up in my hometown. So there are places like that that draw people and there are communities that form. The thing is that there's no stable basis for those kinds of communities. They're there and they're great for a while and then people move on in one way or another. That is true in a different sense for each of the things that I've listed here which are alternatives from a personal point of view for connecting with the church and they're all quite legitimate. But they lead to the question why bother with parishes? And that really is a question that I wanna continue to address as I move along here. Parish is an institutional commitment of the church. It's a way in which the church can express and stay concretely in an embodied way connected to things that are essential to the church. So the one in the many, that is many believers, one faith, many members, one body and those many are one. The image that brings that out most concretely, most clearly in the New Testament is this from 1 Corinthians. You are Christ's body. Also the universal in the local. When I started talking about parish ecclesiology, that is the theological study of the church in the parish, that was something that I had to do some convincing of people about. Ecclesiology ordinarily in Catholic theology is something that's concerned with the church universal. And I wanted to focus in particular on this very local expression of church community. One of the things that the parish accomplishes for the church is to give this concrete place where the universal church can be seen. It's not just a concept. It's being lived. It's embodied in this place. So in, excuse me. In the constitution on the church in Vatican II, Lume Gentium, there is this quotation. In these communities, Christ is present. And in virtue of his presence, there is brought together one holy Catholic and apostolic church. Those are called the four marks of the church. The idea that the universal church is present there. Parish allows the church to experience stable community and commitment. That's the gathering of the people into the parish church. And then also from that gathering, the outward flowing going forth outreach, which is the bringing of the gospel message outward from those who have been celebrating it into the world. Francis issued one of his first papal documents, Evangelii Gaudium in 2013. And has this quotation there. The church, which goes forth, is a community of missionary disciples. That's an important term. We're gonna come back to that. Missionary disciples who take the first step, who are involved and supportive, who bear fruit and rejoice. The church that goes forth. So all of these things are embodied in the parish in an institutional way so that the church always has a way of expressing these essential traits that pertain to the church everywhere. Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Christi Fidelis Lege, actually it was an exhortation after a bishop's synod. The ecclesial community, while always having a universal dimension, finds its most immediate and visible expression in the parish. It is there that the church is seen locally. In a certain sense, it's the church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters. Because I'm an academic, I can pick that quotation apart a little bit, but I'm not gonna do that right now. I like it for a lot of reasons. It has a couple of points that I would just find things to discuss about, but I'm not gonna do that right now. The point right now is that John Paul is holding up for us this idea that the parish embodies locally the church universal. The church in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters. So this is my summary, my take on what a parish is. And this is sort of in the background of everything else that I'll say now. The parish is a basic unit of the church. Thank you, useful. That basic unit is descended from New Testament era communities that we read about in the Bible that like the Corinthians, for example, that Paul wrote to. So is the diocese. Some of my canon lawyer friends would immediately say, no, no, it's not the parish. It's the diocese that's descended from those New Testament era communities. Why I say that we have to find some of the roots of parish in those communities is that there we have face-to-face community. I'm gonna say more about that in just a moment after this next point. The Greek word is parochia. And it's used in different ways. It means something like the house next door. Or something that's outside the house. Something that's outside the main community. And it was used to designate a group, a settlement of alien sojourners. A community of people who were just passing through. And because it was used that way and it was used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in that way, early Christian communities latched onto it as a perfect description, they thought, of their status in the world. A community that's here, that's embedded in the world in a lot of ways and yet knows that this is not its final stopping place. That it's on the move, it's going somewhere else. So that's the root meaning and there's a lot that comes from that. There'll be more about this as we move along. This basic unit of the church provides some essential ecclesial components, essential things about the church that have to have a place to be embodied. One of those is face to face community. That the church is not just an idea. It's not just an institution out there or over there in Rome or whatever. But people that I meet on a regular basis and that I have the possibility of forming some kind of an intimate bond with. The parish is a living connection among all the different pieces of the church. The clerical leadership, the faithful and their Christian lifestyles. The possibility of forming a community that is communion in all of those ways that I was alluding to a few minutes ago. The possibility even of what is local and familiar encountering what is universal and diverse. That when there is a local community that is part of this much larger worldwide organization, there is the tension and the invitation always to remember that there are Catholics in lots of other places who are different than we in this parish, whatever this parish might be. So all of this animates the body of Christ. It gives the church sensitivity to individuals and diversity and possibilities. Flexibility because the parish can't be exactly the same in different times and places because of the people who make it up. And all of that gives some reality to this notion of communion. It's not simply a bunch of people getting together who get along anyway, but people who find that communion because of their entering into expression of faith together. So from all of that, there's a practical presence of the church in the world, a witness to what the church believes and the possibility of being present to the world in a way that intervenes. It makes a mark. The church doesn't remain simply, again, an idea, an abstraction, or an irrelevance because of these concrete local communities. So if that's the parish, the church living in our midst, want to move into speaking about some theological perspectives to help us understand how this information about what the parish is, can give us a sense of a more robust church. So my perspectives are coming primarily from a type of theology called the theology of the people. The room in the picture here is a room for the youth of the parish that Pope Francis was once the pastor of. In the suburb of Buenos Aires called San Miguel. It's a place where I really felt a sense of the church being in the midst of something very real where people are struggling to get by and yet finding lots of ways and means and reasons for celebrating together. So how should we think about parishes today? Vatican II in this other document called the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, says that the church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the gospel. So the church is always looking for a way to understand its mission that's relevant to the time and place where it finds itself. And since the church is all over the place and goes back 2000 years, that implies that there has to be this constant ongoing questioning, asking what's happening now? Where is God showing himself now? Where is the spirit at work now? And how can we as a community of believers respond to that? All those challenges that I talked about at the very beginning are getting a variety of different responses from different people all over. There's a lot of structural reorganization going on, not just here in the Northeast and in other places that are experiencing decline in the kind of parish life that we were used to for about a century and a half in the United States. And we're seeing things instead like clustering, voluntary cooperation among separate parishes because they don't have enough resources, they share resources together. But also over the last 20 years, closures, mergers of parishes, parish church buildings being sold or knocked down in the worst case scenarios. These all involve legal procedures on the part of the church. In Massachusetts and elsewhere now in the Archdiocese of Boston, they are trying this approach called collaborative parishes. These are a number of separate parishes that share one pastor. They get to keep some of their distinctiveness, but they work together with one pastor at the helm. But there, in addition to those restructurings, there are also some new models, kinds of parishes that we hadn't seen in the United States before. So there are a couple of books, for example, that have spawned movements for different kinds of parish renewal. So Rebuilt is one, I was trying to publish an edited book with a bunch of different articles about a project on parishes that I had been involved with in Chicago. And I offered it to one publisher who said, yeah, it's interesting, but could you make it a little more like Rebuilt? Rebuilt sold lots of copies and it made a fortune for its publisher. So every publisher was kind of looking for that to happen again. One place where it did almost happen again was Divine Renovation, which is another book very much in the same genre as Rebuilt by a priest in Nova Scotia. Both of these are taking a model that worked in a particular place and sharing it to see how it might go elsewhere. And by all accounts, sometimes it works really, really well and other times it doesn't quite fit, but those are out there. There are Catholic mega parishes emerging. This is happening in the South in some places because there are lots of Catholics and lots of people who wanna go to church, but still not so many priests and because they're still in a kind of a building phase, the resources are still getting sorted out, but there is one parish, this is kind of in my mind, this is the Uber example of this. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there is a parish with 40,000 parishioners and they are going, they are booming and great things are happening there. They have taken their cues from the Saddleback churches, which is an evangelical mega church movement. And then the third thing that I listed here is there's a fellow in Germany who wrote an article called the Future Proof Parish. I know this fellow fairly well. I don't agree with much of what he said in this article, but it's about how to anticipate what your congregation is going to need from a cultural point of view, pay a great deal of attention to communication and then kind of get ahead of the need. It's a lot like marketing. And he refers unfortunately in this article to customers and that sort of thing and this is what puts me off a little bit. I don't completely disagree with the idea that we should get better at communication, but so there are some new models. And then the last one that I listed here, I could have put this under new models as well, but it really is moving away from the whole idea of parish. This is something that's happening in the Anglican church in Britain. And my German friends are also experimenting with things that are like it. And basically move out from the parish churches, encounter people on the streets, go to where the people are, and give them experiences of faith in those places. Which is wonderful, but I always wonder what then happens when it really works and you turn somebody on and they're interested in faith and they want some support and to continue with this, they need, guess what, a parish. So these things are not solving the problem, but they certainly are exploring some very interesting and important dimensions along the way. This idea of theology of the people is an Argentinian contribution. I take it to be to this conversation about the signs of the times and how to read where the church needs to be today. It's local theology for the 21st century as I see it. Just listed here a few of the major figures. Priests in Argentina named Lucio Jera and Rafael Tejo, both of whom are deceased now, in 1969, just after the beginning of the movement that eventually comes to be referred to as liberation theology in Argentina was issued this declaration called the San Miguel Declaration, actually issued in the same town, the same area that I was speaking of before when I showed you the picture. And these ideas about theology get echoed in documents from other conferences of the Latin American bishops, one that took place in Puebla, Mexico in 1979, or more recently in Brazil, Aparacita in 2007. That one was the committee that wrote the document in Aparacita was chaired by Cardinal Bergoglio, who just a few years later became Pope Francis. So we'll see in a moment that the Pope has brought a lot of these ideas of the theology of the people forward to the universal church. So theology of the people is also called a theology of culture. And this is where it differs from classic liberation theology, which is more about economy, the idea of how the people are exploited and so forth that that has to be tackled, whereas the theology of the people focuses on the culture of the people and what that can bring to the church itself. It's a response and a reinterpretation in some ways of liberation theology. It sees the people and we'll talk in a moment about exactly what that means, the people, but instead of just being recipients of the gospel, the mission of the church and so forth, the people are understood as agents of that gospel. They are the ones who live the gospel in the local churches. And the culture of the people is revelatory. It's a place to meet God. So this is very much a response to that wish that I expressed in the interview that Paul quoted at the very beginning that we find a way to talk theologically about the authority of this local community. It's not embedded only in the leadership, but in the entire membership of that local community. And so what it leads us to ultimately is thinking from the peripheries, bringing in people who are not usually listened to, who don't even have a voice in other places, but in the church they can find their voice. So all of that's now being presented by Pope Francis to the church in the world at large. Here are just some random samples of things that he's said that very much rely on this idea of the theology of the people. Evangelizers take on the smell of the sheep and the sheep are willing to hear their voice. That's from Evangelii Gaudium that I quoted earlier. And another one from the same document a little bit later. All the baptized, whatever their position in the church, or their level of instruction in the faith are agents of evangelization. And it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients. So one of the things that I heard about in that parish where I showed you the picture of the youth room, that is the parish that the Pope was once the pastor of. And there every year they do a parish census. And I just missed actually observing this. It happened the week before I arrived. But the pastor described it to me. It's mostly the young people in the parish sent out into this neighborhood to go to every home. And they do it over a period of about a week, but they do it all at once, all together. Everybody's working at the same time. And they meet all of these people who may or may not come to church, talk to them about church and the practicalities of the parish, but also about their own situation, their own understanding of faith. And all of that is kind of brought back in a big celebration of what they've uncovered back at the church. And then in one of his very first press conferences, the Pope said, how I would like a church that is poor and for the poor. So who are the people? There are, I'm quoting here a theologian from Venezuela who has written this book, Pope Francis and the Theology of the People, Raphael Luciani. He says that the Pope talks about the people in three different ways. The people as poor, the people as nation and the people as faithful. And I've kind of reinterpreted those a little bit as a social view of who the people are, a cultural political view of who they are and a spiritual view of who they are. And I had put this little summary together and then just last week, the Pope came out with his response to the Amazon Synod in this document, Carida, Amazonia. And exactly this is visible in the structure of that document about the Amazon. He talks about four different dreams. The first one is a social dream. I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced. And then he speaks about two other dreams in succession, a cultural dream and an ecological dream. So this is about the human and the natural environment of this people. I dream of an Amazon region that can preserve its distinctive cultural riches where the beauty of our humanity shines forth in so many varied ways. And I dream of an Amazon region that can jealously preserve its overwhelming natural beauty and the super abundant life teaming in its rivers and forests. So moving from that, the Pope talks about what this means for the church. I dream of Christian communities capable of generous commitment, incarnate in the Amazon region and giving the church new faces with Amazonian features. This is a picture that was also published by America Media online and I think in the magazine as well of a ceremony in the Amazon. So the people of God is the church. That's something that Lumen Gentium said back in the time of Vatican II. And reminded us that everyone in the church has this mutual call to Christ's threefold office. That the church as a whole is priest, prophet and king because Jesus is those things. And the Pope talks about synodality. This doesn't come directly from Lumen Gentium but this is his idea of the organization of the church. It's an ancient notion that the church gathers together in order to discuss the issues that are in front of it. And that is to happen on every different level. In the ancient church, the people very often gathered together and chose their bishop. That happened in a number of different ways but the people were involved. And the bishops would gather to talk about specific theological issues that came up and so forth. But at every level, there was this sense of communion and community in the faith. The people as subjects in history, this is the cultural and political part, these are the ones who are, this is to talk then about a concrete society, a group of people in the here and now, recipients of the church's mission but also its agents. If we're going to think that way, then that requires the whole church to trust each other. That it's not just people who have a particular office that deserve to be listened to and deserve trust within the community. And it's also the trust not only of the people's faith, which is what we call census fidelium, the sense of the faithful, but the work of the spirit himself within the church, which we've always called census fidei, that the spirit gives to the whole church an unfailing sense of Christian faith, what it is to follow Christ. And then finally, the poor, that third category, is the key to understanding the people because as Luciani puts it, this is the preferential, sociocultural location of the church. In other words, to see the world from that peripheral point of view, to see it as it looks when God sees everyone, instead of as it looks to us who have a focus on the center, on where the power is. Within that notion of a community, the Pope offers these four principles for building common good and peace and a way of understanding how a synodal church could operate. Just going to touch on these briefly, they've become fairly famous since he published Evangelii Gaudium in 2013. But the principles are time is greater than space, that is to say work with a focus on slow process rather than immediate results. Unity prevails over conflict. So rather than just pressing our own little point and being willing to knock anyone out of the way who's not holding on to that point, that the value be the unity itself even when that requires us to move through conflict. Realities are more important than ideas. In other words, look where people are actually standing, where they actually live, what's really going on before you start imposing an ideology on them. And then the whole is greater than the part, but by that he doesn't mean ignore the parts. He means see the parts as they make up the whole. So instead of looking at a sphere as the image, he recommends to talk about this thing called a polyhedron. If you've ever seen a geodesic dome, it's a type of a polyhedron. Flat surfaces that interconnect to make something that looks like a sphere. Everyone with its distinctive shape. So what does all of that then come down to with regard to the people themselves? These are some of the ladies at that parish in Buenos Aires. The parish is not just an ecclesial institution. It's a community of believers. So again, I speak here about Parochia. The parish, the church being present in the midst of the people, even while it's a distinctive, separate community. And we see this in the New Testament. The local communities tried to keep to themselves in some ways, resolve their disputes internally, but also they remembered that Jesus said you are the light of the world. So the parish is a community of proclamation where the love of God is lived and made known. A community of missionary disciples, which is Francis' favorite phrase for this community. The parish is a community shaped by the poor. So if we look with Jesus' lens at the world, then we see, as he says, it's the poor that possessed the kingdom of God. It's the meek that inherit the land. So why do we pay attention only to those with power, only to those in the center? And basic Catholic social principles can help a parish community to understand how to turn that into how to be shaped by the presence of the poor. Human dignity is about receiving and hearing everyone, especially the marginalized. Common good is about measuring love and justice by those who are the weakest. How are we doing as far as loving one another? How are we doing as far as having just structures? Look at the people who are in the worst position and then you'll understand. Solidarity, that is everyone is part of a ministry of accompaniment. No one walks alone. And subsidiarity, recognizing and claiming that this little community here in this little place has its own authority in the church. It doesn't mean it has all the authority. It means it has a voice. Parish has a community that reads the signs of the times so that the parish doesn't ignore the fact that its members belong to a bunch of other communities. It's not the only community, but it's neither subordinate to those nor does it dominate over them, nor does it help people to escape from all of those other communities. It's a point of contact where people can gather to understand what it means to be Christian in the midst of a secular world, a point of contact. And in that place, there is welcome and there is empowerment because there are no exclusions because there is an ongoing sharing of daily life and experience. And when the church is present, then Christ also is present. And that presence is something that the community can help to enlighten for each of its members. To understand where Christ is present and to see where the challenges come from and how it is that we miss that presence from one to the other. And the parish is a place for lived reflection, not just fidelity in the traditional sense of that word, just being there to, as they used to say very cynically to pray, pay, and obey. People are there to live their faith and to live it together. If the parish is truly the church in the midst of the people, then the way that it has, that this community of faith, the way that it has of speaking and living, the gospel, has to be something that can grasp and challenge the members of the community. And so if that's happening, if the parish is telling its story, telling the story of the gospel in a way that engages people, then all of these things are happening for the whole community. They're proclaiming the reign of God. They're understanding what it is to be missionary disciples. They are struggling with all those practical challenges of finding the presence of Christ in the world. And they are embodying in their way of living faith together all of this Christian activity, what it is to be disciples in the world. The parish is a pilgrim church, not just a rock of faith that sits there unmoving, but rather because of all of that activity, which is in itself theology, speaking about God and living faith in God, the people are doing theology in their parishes. And if that's happening, if it's available to the people and grasped by them, if it's spoken and lived and developed by the people, then the church is on the move. It's not just sitting there. It's not just waiting for the end of the world. It is engaged and moving forward. So all of this listening is happening among various people. Those who have been invested with power have to pour that out. And others get empowered. The word kinosus means that self donation, that pouring out of oneself. And so I'm suggesting that once this process of understanding that to speak about God together and to live our faith in God together is theology. Once that process gets going, then the listening and the self giving and the empowering are just continual products of that way of being church. And even those who had no voice come forward with a voice. So the parish is a pilgrim community that lives the faith that it proclaims. It is a community of theological voice and mission. And I think that that really is the foundational meaning of a poor church for the poor. Church that does not try to possess its members, but instead empowers them. That's the whole church's mission. It's the parish's mission because parishes can make it real. They embody it and they can do that and still retain their identity as a people set apart. There are different ways of experiencing this, different understandings of what exactly this would mean on the ground. Argentinians are not gonna live at the way that New Englanders do or the way that Filipinos do. And so that involves recognizing that the spirit remains at work in all of the different gifts that the community expresses and that there is a responsibility and a challenge with taking this up. It's not easy work. I'm not presenting something that we just, we flip a switch and do it. It's a vision for the parishes. So what is that vision for right now for this moment that can begin here? That the vision not be imposed from leadership down. That there be structures built up that enable constant mutual listening and that would include getting rid of authoritarian silencing and dismantling of different things that we were, I was speaking with a group of people earlier about the phenomenon of the new pastor who arrives and makes sure that whatever the old pastor did is quickly dismantled. That doesn't happen all the time, but it certainly does happen. And that is contrary to this vision that I'm talking about here. That there be no silent majority or self-righteous minority, but everything be part of the sharing and the conversation and no marginalized or neglected persons. And then I put as a sub point there that all the little silly customs and superstitious practices of the various groups in the parish are not to be unappreciated. There's a big emphasis in theology of the people on popular devotion. And that was one of the things that disturbed a lot of the classic liberation theologians because they thought that it was one of those kind of Marx's idea of the opiate of the peoples praying to statues and all of that sort of thing. Theology of the people understands that as an expression of the faith culture of particular people. And so that's to be received in the same way as everything else and listened to and discerned and understood as a gift from the spirit. So that patiently the parish builds up a shared vision and an outward mission that can take them anywhere the spirit wants to lead them. So next Sunday, for those of you who are still connected to parishes, what matters? Being there, paying attention to God's people as it gathers to hear and to share and to go out again. Reflecting on what these gifts are and what might still need to be built up and what you personally can contribute and where. And then finally, making sure that you're in the place where you can attend to some of these duties at least right now. Not gonna read through the bibliography but these are all, this is more or less a random collection of things that have been helpful to me and I've mentioned some of them in the presentation. I didn't put any foreign language things there but there's a lot in Spanish about the theology of the people, so. Time for me to stop. So how do we, next Sunday, start incorporating the theology of the people to evangelization in our neighborhoods and particularly the people who are not coming that we would hope would come? Obviously there's a lot of practical detail that has to be worked out in your context, clearly. But I think the most important thing about evangelization from this point of view is to recognize that the spirit's ahead of you and you need to listen for the spirit as much as you speak about and bring the spirit to others. And that really is the first step in this mutual listening that I've been talking about all along. If people are brought into the community by a process that has included not just them being preached at but listened to for the gifts of the spirit that they already know about and for what they might be able to bring into the community themselves and even just for you to understand how the message could be honed and targeted in a way that you haven't done. But I would say listening as much as preaching is key to this kind of evangelization. If I could ask a question. Father, you teach at a Jesuit school and here you are at a Jesuit school. And I've observed this phenomenon of, we have a Sunday morning liturgy where people from the community come, maybe some of you are in this room. And we also have students we send out who go forth from the wonderful experience they have in campus ministry here and they go to a local parish when they settle in Pittsburgh or whatever. And they die. And so what they do is they try to find the nearest Jesuit college where they can run away and continue to go to the liturgy that they loved. So sometimes I wanna stand up at that liturgy and I wanna say, oh for God's sake, go back to the parishes in Fairfield County. They need you because in some ways we sort of siphon off from there. And here's what struck me about it when you were talking was just this. You said culture is revelatory and you refer to the need to cultivate the authority of the local community. Are we giving that authority away by moving into a place that's preset and that will kind of continue to feed us in a pattern we know, rather than exercising it at the local parish? Excellent question. And of course I have the complete answer just here in my hip pocket. But no, I think it's the $10,000 question. I mean because you're putting your finger on the work of all of this. It's easy to get starry eyed about it and I do that. But when it comes down to actually making it happen, going out and doing the evangelizing for example, there is serious demand and challenge in approaching parish this way. And it's tricky because clearly I'm all about commitment to a particular group of people that can get to know one another and work together and that takes time. But I would also wanna say that if you are fed in other places, then being fed to bring that back to the community that you're trying to commit yourself to is not a bad thing as long as you remember what you're doing. The biggest problem would be bouncing from one nice experience to the next as if the point is for me to feel good about my own personal spirituality. That's great but it says much more about 21st American culture than it says about Christianity. And that's also why the talk about spiritual customers and in that future proof parish leaves me a little queasy because it's not always gonna be easy to be part of a Christian community even the ones that have great music. And the thing about sticking around is that it can be costly. But if we look at what Jesus did and the apostles did and the saints did and the saints are still doing, what we see is being in there for the long haul, for the slog. And as I said, the consolation prize is that I'm convinced that if there's, you know, if you can find nourishment somewhere that is going to benefit your main community, then that's great. At dinner we were talking about retreat houses and the experience of going to a place and mixing with people from all different sorts of communities and really getting an uplift from that and seeing the church in a new way. If you go back to your community and carry some of that with you, then that's not just a selfish action. You're bringing something into your new community. That's how the network of communities needs to work. That's how we're not just individual congregations doing our thing. That's that overall communion of the church that I was talking about before. So the answer to the question is not simple, but it's a very important question. And I think that, you know, keeping in mind that we have a job to do in our more permanent community is the most important way to look at this particular question. Perhaps my view of parish life is too narrow, but I think that at least in my experience, I feel there's such a tremendous need for growth within the parish and individual people. And I don't think, and I belong to a very active parish and a good parish, so I'm not talking about my parish, but I don't necessarily sense that the parish is the place where people are going to grow. And when I mean growth, I'm talking about who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? Are we getting that from our parish in the sense of we can grow in that as Christians and be converted? Conversion is so important. There are many Catholics who don't even understand scripture. And look at our Protestant and evangelical brothers and sisters who know so much about it. That doesn't mean that they're better Christians for it, but at least they have an understanding of the history not necessarily of the church, but even, or I shouldn't separate them, but especially Jesus. My point is sometimes I see the church separating itself too much from culture and looking down on culture that there's nothing good about culture, everything's secular. But in reality, I think we really grow as people through ups and downs in this messy culture that we live in. So the church is there, pre-Vatican too, for obligation, devotion, certainly a lot of security in community. And community is wonderful, but community doesn't necessarily stand for growth. And I just wanna say like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, the charismatic renewal was very influential in bringing people, helping people to grow in the church and understand what it means to be a Christian. There was a lot of scripture, there were a lot of things that were very different that we would not have been exposed to otherwise. And yet generally the church looked down on that movement in many ways. It was too demonstrative, too much like holy rollers, whatever, but there was so much growth there. And just one last thing, the church and the poor, and I know that Pope Francis talks about this all the time and how that is so important in the church, but there's an also, in my view, what about those poor in spirit? And I don't mean in a positive way, I mean in a very, you know, negative way in the sense that there are people beside the poor, in my view, and the homeless, the marginal are gonna be the first in eternal life. What about the rest of us who need growth in the spirit to know Lord the Lord? I don't know if I made myself clear. There's a lot to respond to there, but I think that in general what you're talking about is the need for the kind of understanding of what a parish is, or something like the kind of understanding that I was talking about. I agree with you that a lot of what we're faced with right now is in those ruts that you're describing, and that's why I think we need a change. We need a vision that is about a much more expansive and a community that supports itself in the growth. It's not a matter of waiting for somebody else to start teaching me, but for us to claim the authority to share with one another in a way that teaches all of us. With regard to the poor, again, that could be another whole lecture, but the point is not that group over there that needs our help. That is not the point at all. The point is that if we are seeing the world from the margins, then our entire view of what humanity is, what God sees when he looks at the world, changes. So it's not about privileging somebody who has an income lower than X number of dollars a year. That is not it. It's about that openness all the way out to the margins that understands what Jesus meant when he tried to turn the vision completely upside down and say, you know, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. This is an upside down view of the world as we usually experience it, and that's what we're called to. It's not just an outreach ministry. It's something that changes the way that we understand who we are, all poor and empty at God's feet, because we can see it concretely in the people who have been excluded all around us. Thanks for a great talk. Could you just say a little bit more about the connection between the finals two slides? I really appreciate this one that's kind of like, it's like even you as an individual, like an attitude you can do that can bear some fruit. And then this one is kind of like about, a little bit more about what will at least be generated by pastoral leadership in the parish. And I'm thinking about like what it does next Sunday. It has to look, I mean, one slide, line of it is kind of like different kinds of training and attitudes or priests coming in, maybe the tone of bishop sets. And maybe another is like a church which would not only be the priest deciding to do something and like some of those things you had earlier with divine renovation, a Bible study course or something. So in terms of like, if there was a parish priest in this audience and they were like, yeah, my church needs something and I wanna know what I can do next Sunday. What would be like the first kind of couple more most practical things at that level? But I do think, would you agree? Like, I mean, if there is, you mentioned the example of a parish priest coming in and like changing the good works and some churches were involved in being involved in the community organizing and interfaith community organizing and a new person kind of be a point and come in and like now we're not doing that anymore. And something that was so vibrant and grassroots can grind to a halt. Yeah, yeah. No, I think, you know, from the point of view of a pastor looking at this, there's, especially with regard to that first point something that, there was a priest who did a lot of teaching about pastoring, Phil Myrnian in the, I used to ask this in New York who's passed away, but he used to say, don't change anything for a year when you arrive. And I think that looking at a vision like this could help to order your priorities and to know what kind of steps to avoid. But it very clearly, after you get beyond point one, it's not something that any priest can do by himself. It's gotta be the whole community. So it's about animating the community in a particular direction. And my point is that even when the leadership is not on board, right? This is something that the community together or elements within the community can begin to do. When you have the kind of awareness that you were talking about of what's missing and the experience that many of us have had of, when there was lots of prayer and lots of Bible and knowing that, being in the parish, at least to make it clear that this is something we should have. This is something we should be doing. And if it can only go as far as being mentioned more often than the pastor likes to hear it, that's something, right? That's a start. I know it's frustrating and it's a very slow process. There's no question about that. We'd love to just be able to change it all immediately. Unfortunately, dealing with lots of different kinds of people and lots of different levels of experience and official power and so forth. So it's not simple, but yeah. I think there's something for everybody in the what do you do next Sunday? Okay, so there's one last question and it's mine. So I notice that, this is a great presentation, but I noticed that the word Eucharist was almost absent. It flitted by one of the second last slides. And I was thinking about that, becoming sometimes you focus on Eucharist you're talking about, you're focused on the priesthood and then we're not really talking about the people. On the other hand, when Eucharist is less available to people, then we do start focusing on the laity. And I was struck by the fact that the origins of liberation theology and to some degree, I think the theology of the people lies in communities where the Eucharist was less available than we might normally expect it to be. So is the message here then that we'd be better off with less Eucharist? Thanks for that question. No, that is an excellent way of putting it. And yeah, now that you mention it, I wish that I had mentioned the Eucharist a little bit more frequently, but it serves to bring up exactly the point that you're making and you're absolutely right that in many of the places where this kind of theology first started to grow, the difficulty has been that the sacraments are not as available, they're not to be taken for granted, especially by the marginalized. And so we have already sitting here in this room a different view from most of the people who put a lot into developing these perspectives with the theology of the people. I don't think that it means that we're better off with less Eucharist. However, if the Eucharist is always presented as somebody else's possession that's being given to us as a gift, then when you have a lot of it, then you can just begin to take it for granted. It doesn't really have anything to do with me, I just walk up and put my hands out and I get it and I can keep doing that because the priest is always there. When that stops happening, then you'd have to think about it a little bit more. What is this and why am I longing for it when I don't have it? What's my role in this? What is my part in a Eucharistic community even if I'm not the one who is presiding at the Eucharist? And what's my part in the Eucharist that's being celebrated over there? Or in North America if I'm sitting in Honduras or some place, what's my part in those Eucharists? Maybe even more importantly, how often do we think those of us who go to Eucharist very frequently? What is our part here and now having this Eucharist and taking it for granted largely in the communities elsewhere in the world that are not having Eucharist today and cannot because the structures are not such that everybody has this privilege. If we thought about that a little bit more, we might be understanding a bit more readily what this business of seeing from the margins is all about. And I think that it changes the perspectives very much. If we have that vision, then the practical answer to the question about Eucharist can begin to emerge from everybody paying attention to what's really going on. Yeah, there's a lot more to say, I'll stop. Great answer to our rotten question. Thank you. So another round of applause for Valle Clarke. Thank you very much.