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Press Release - NFPC Convention 2004
April 22, 2004
U.S. Priests Recommit to Mission of Healing, Wholeness, Kingdom Building
“It is a great blessing that we share a crisis of hope.” This seemingly paradoxical proclamation by keynote speaker Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, OP, began the keynote for the 2004 Annual Convention of the National Federation of Priests Councils at Atlanta’s Sheraton Colony Square Hotel held April 19-22. Over 250 priests representing 100 priest councils in the U.S. gathered around the theme, “The Center and Source of Our Call to Mission,” seeking to refocus priests as they continue to face the repercussions of the sex abuse crisis on the essential mission of the Church.
Fr. Radcliffe, a noted preacher, author, scholar and teacher of scripture and doctrine at Oxford, used the image of the Last Supper as both “the foundational story of our faith and the place where the disciples lost all hope of the fulfillment of their dream of the kingdom. With this event and the ensuing loss of their leader, the disciples had no story to tell of the future.” According to Fr. Radcliffe, “Our sacrament of hope comes at a time when there was a reason to believe there was no hope.”
He claims that the gospels would not have been written were it not for both the crisis of the crucifixion and the failure of the expected Parousia to happen. “As Christians we should have no fear of crisis, for our history is marked by periodic renewal by crisis.” He notes three areas of acute crisis in today’s church: The gap between the universal church and the lives of our parishioners; the acute polarization of the church; and the sex abuse scandal.
Fr. Radcliffe calls for priests to see themselves as midwives, working to bring the world of the Gospel to birth in the place we minister. We work in a tension of representing a universal church offering teachings which reflect a truth, while trying to minister to people we love who find some of these teachings unrealistic, impractical, and confounding. Fr. Radcliffe refers to this gap as an abyss in which the priest works in that tension, feeling that pain, yet willing to nurture the rebirth which can emerge from that tension. He strongly emphasized the need for fraternal support in this tension.
Fr. Radcliffe also referred to a polarization in the church which is characterized by a deep mutual suspicion among many factions claiming “the truth.” “As a church, we’ve always been fighting, but what’s new is that we talk about each other rather than to each other.” He claims the Last Supper as a clue to resolution, that although the disciples were not of one heart and mind, they were still bound by a sacramental unity. “Our vocation is to gather in conversation those who do not agree… to create spaces in our parishes, deaneries, dioceses to promote meaningful dialogue.” For priests, Fr. Radcliffe notes, courage and humility are required for the necessary truth telling of the Gospel message. “Nothing undermines our ministry more than timidly proclaiming the truth of the Gospel.”
In regards to the sexual abuse crisis, Fr. Radcliffe argues that it is not as bad as the crisis of betrayal and denial of the Last Supper, the crisis from which the church was born. People came to take Jesus’ body to exercise brute power, but Jesus transformed that moment by giving his body for the good of all. “This is my body and give it to you. Can this be our response?” The challenge: Jesus’ holiness wed him to the people in their sinfulness, overturning the Old Testament concept of holiness, i.e., one’s separation from impurity, imperfection, sin, death. Can we reject clericalism and embrace the holiness of Jesus which actively embraced, reconciled and restored included sinners and outcasts?
In a talk titled, “Seized and Caught by the Spirit: the Disturbing Ministry of Jesus,” Rev. Anthony Gittins, a Spiritan priest, anthropologist and professor of missiology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, called for reclaiming a church marked by true servant leadership. “In a time when we have fallen from grace… there is precious opportunity for radical repentance… and, within that, radical conversion, conversion that costs not less than everything. And within this moment, hope is a nonnegotiable. Hope is the future tense of faith.”
Fr. Gittins makes the analogy that sailors latch themselves down in a storm. In the Gospel, Jesus calls Peter out of the boat in the midst of a storm. Peter responded, not out of reaction, but out of faith. “Jesus was God’s own disturbing presence.” Our task is to be the same, to continue to call others in the midst of crisis to a conversion that disturbs. From that point, those Christ calls through us are co-missioned to a life never the same as it was prior to the encounter with Christ.
As priests, however, Fr. Gittins says, we must be willing to meet the cost of discipleship, embracing lives not based in power, but “in piety and humble service to and with the people of God.” A few ways he characterizes a church of piety: “The church of piety can undertake such ministry as to invite and co-mission; the church of power is incapable of doing so. The church of piety is built by those who breach the walls that separate, and restore broken unity, who discover collaboration, and who relish inclusive table-fellowship rather than being waited upon. The church of piety does not only build vertically but horizontally on a strong and sure foundation of trust. The church of piety is vulnerable to the transcendent, boundary-breaking and centrifugal, turning itself inside out (the missionary principle) and refuses to become inverted, focused on itself. It is truly human because it is the only way it can be truly Godly.” He calls for a priesthood marked by a reorientation embracing a spirit of “ministerium” over “magisterium,” of “prophet” over “priest,” of “martyr” over “manager,” of “mission” over “maintenance.”
Rev. Stephen Bevans then challenged the group to claim a “missionary imagination” as he reflected on the movement in the church to reclaim mission as the church’s very reason for existence. Fr. Bevans, a priest of the Divine Word and professor of theology and director of the Master of Arts program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, emphasized the great need for imagination in our moving forward. Quoting author Wendy Wright, “What we dream together unleashes us for love.” He notes the Vatican II shift from a priesthood that is sacral or cultic to a priesthood that is more presbyteral and ministerial. “We need to see holy orders as “holy ordering” as a service of ordering the church’s prophetic task in calling forth, challenging, developing, serving, witnessing, in forming the church to be its best self.”
Fr. Bevans suggests the Sunday liturgy needing to be celebrated ‘inside out,’ i.e., in a way that not only praises God, that not only manifests bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ, but that equally gathers us, re-members us (those gathered, and all creation) as the body and blood of Christ, and then missions us forth. Ultimately it is to proclaim, “The Mass is never ended. Let us go forth in peace to serve the Lord and one another.” Priests need to adopt a “missionary imagination” that forms parishes to be “a taste of the kingdom, to look beyond themselves while building themselves up within, to be ‘contrast communities’ witnessing against the ‘isms’ of the popular culture.”
In his president’s address, Fr. Robert Silva, a priest of the Stockton, California diocese, emphasized the need to be about reconciling and restoration. “The ministry of reconciliation is a constitutive part of priestly ministry.” First and foremost is our continuing care for the victims of abuse and our vigilance in protecting children. We also need to exercise concern for our offending brothers, “helping them search for ways to reconcile, heal and move ahead in their lives.” But he emphasizes that this ministry of reconciliation needs to extend itself to the marginalized in our presbyterates and parishes, to find ways to bridge cultural and racial differences, ideological and theological differences. We must see “the ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.S. presbyterate as Spirit-driven” and to work more and more to develop as “a communion of priests… to become the reality the church that we are inviting the people to become.” To do so, he says, will entail “a lot of dying, a lot of living, a lot of loving.”
On Wednesday, a panel of speakers including Dr. Carmen Cervantes, executive director of Instituto Fe y Vida, Fr. Don Sterling, past president of the National. Black Clergy Caucus, Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, senior vice president for Mission and Values at Catholic Healthcare Partners, and Fr. Michael Ryan, rector of the Cathedral of St. James in Seattle, shared views on issues such as the decreasing number of priests, the theological diversity among priests, equipping priests for evangelization in a post-John Jay church, visioning new parishes involving deacons and laity, integrating foreign born priests, and implementing the bishops’ June 2002 Dallas plan.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Episcopal Liaison to the NFPC, joined Rev. Clete Kiley, executive secretary of the US Bishops’ Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry, and president Bob Silva to hear concerns of delegates in regards to issues such as priest-bishop relationships, the shortage of priests, celibacy, the selection of non-pastoral bishops, and the need for dialogue. Archbishop Dolan emphasized the great concern bishops have in regards to the pastoral care of their priests.
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.:Click here for the 2004 Convention Report (speeches, pictures and more):.
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