paulisttalk.org

My head, I presume like the heads of my brother Paulists and our
Paulist Associates and guests, had to operate on many levels at our
Convocation in Washington, DC, at the end of June.  In between the
endless greetings and exchanges of information (and jokes) that goes
along with socializing, we experienced wonderful liturgies—including
the ordination of Fr. Steven Bell—and various gatherings around meals
and social times.

The talks, however, by John Allen, R. Scott Appleby, Fr. Ron
Rolheiser and David O’Brien received a lot of my attention.  In some
ways, all of them were about how the global Church and the US Church
hang between paradigms—the one developed after the Second Vatican
Council, and the one that slowly evolved during the papacy of John
Paul II.  In an ecclesial universe now cooler, less changing and less
open to change, seeking signs of identity and stability, and rapidly
being exposed to forces that challenge the modern, what about us
Paulists? Where do we fit in?  What do we do with the emergence of
evangelicalism (as distinct from evangelization), with its emphases on
fundamentalisms, the emotional, or the non-institutional?

Several components we have received from Fr. Hecker seemed quite
appropriate: the importance of personal experience, the priority of
the Holy Spirit, and the insistence that God’s grace was not inimical
to our actual, American world, reverberated in the talks.  What is the
distinct service that the Paulist charism can offer the modern Church
and the modern world?

Although much of the Catholic universe is “southern” in the sense of
being non-European (and, therefore, not emphasizing the rational or
theology), we Paulists are not planted there.  We are planted in
“North America” which, in our lingo, distinctly means the modern
cultures of the United States and Canada.  We are planted in a world
seemingly desirous of the modern, the secular, the scientific.  But we
are planted in this world as missionaries, men uniquely charged to
articulate and bring the Gospel, in the Catholic tradition, to this
North American culture.

The talks amounted, then, to this, as far as I could digest them: we
Paulists are called to expose the mystical in the modern world. We are
called to engage in modernity (and not flee it, though fleeing it has
many temptations), but with a commitment of transcendence, one that
arises from the presence, the guidance and the power of the Holy
Spirit, the Sacred, embedded (however hidden) in today’s experience.
We are called to expose this thread of transcendence from the faith we
have as Catholics, with an ever progressive call to conversion, to
unity, to reconciliation, to the Kingdom of God.

However we Paulists might want to think of ourselves, we have our
legacy, our inheritance from Hecker, and the scope of the goal of our
mission laid out before us. That is who we are, and that is who we can
credibly be in the emerging 21st Century Church of North America.