Living with diversity
We’ve all, I think at one time or another, become conscious of how small our world has become. Often experiences of globalization come while reading a newspaper or watching an event unfold from halfway around the world on television. Over the past several months I’ve had a few personal experiences that drove that awareness home with new intensity.
Part of my professional life at the moment is made up of teaching business ethics, no, not an oxymoron, to undergraduates at a local university. Another segment includes delivering career transition / continuation workshops to individuals being ‘downsized’ by their current employer. A third, and by no means less important, is my activity with CORPUS and Church reform.
In the academic setting, at least one third of my students are foreign born, with a university being their first direct connection with our American culture and history. They’ve literally come from the Caribbean, Central or South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle and Far East, and Southeast Asia. In their early 20’s they’ve spent the greater portion of their lives in a world with different historical roots from the one in which they currently live.
Groups I meet on the corporate side are often more diverse. In a recent workshop, two thirds of the participants had originally come from former Soviet countries, Africa, India and Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the Caribbean. Two of the participants who had immigrated here for better employment opportunities were becoming displaced because their jobs were outsourced to India and Malaysia. Though this group was generally older than my college students, mostly 30 to mid-40 somethings, they share that lack of base historical connectivity with their younger counterparts.
A third significant experience was having the chance to represent CORPUS at an organizational meeting in Germany for the forming of a regional interest group within the International Federation of Married Catholic Priests, the North Atlantic Federation for a Renewed Priesthood. The participants came from Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, England, Canada and the US, and India. This was a truly humbling experience for me that provided the chance to catch only a glimpse of what it must be like to live in a foreign culture. As I listened to individual stories, I began to understand that while we all belong to the same Roman Church, our experiences of that Church often differ greatly on both sides of the ‘pond.’ As we grew in friendship we learned, however, that there was much we could offer each other specifically from our diversity.
Each of these instances reminded me how easy it has been for most of us, particularly inside the Church, to be caught in a world that is rapidly fading from existence. There was a time during which we were self-assured that we generally shared the same history and experience, and spoke the same language, culturally and religiously. If that time ever truly existed, it is rapidly becoming part of our memories.
Those of us over 40 also tend to forget that a significant portion of our Church was not alive to experience pre-Vatican II Catholicism. Time and again, when we scratch beneath the surface, we are brought to stark awareness how different our formation in faith has been. Just the same as in the society in which we live, as a faith community, we can no longer take for granted that we share the same history even if we share the same historical roots. Within the next two decades or so that Church of our past will truly have passed from lived experience.
Our American culture has become incredibly more diverse and pluralistic within the past forty years. There are elements within our society still unaware of how we are being pulled inevitably into a more global arena. We live, also, in a time when factions within our Church are trying desperately to cling to a past rapidly fading from existence. Maybe it has always been so in swing periods of societal change and shifts in cultural tectonic plates.
In many ways, I’m concerned that our grappling with reform and renewal issues is focused on our aging vision of Church that too is coming to a dramatic close. We are already experiencing the generation coming up less formally connected to parish and Church than we were. Even our own generation has become more disassociated with religious practice. To be of continued value to the Church of our future, we too need to become more consciously aware of how societal shifts are already impacting that Church.
The theme for our June conference highlights Reforming The Church: Renewing The Priesthood. There are steps that you and I can take to make this a reality. I’d like to see that theme reflected further in all of our organizational activities during the year ahead as we celebrate 30 years of CORPUS past and work for what is to come.
What are ways in which individually and together we can help our Church value diversity, plurality?
How does an inclusive sacramental priesthood provide value to the priesthood of believers?
What are some of the expanded implications of a reformed and renewed priesthood to society in general?
What does CORPUS have to offer a diverse American Catholic Church of the future? What does the American Catholic experience of priesthood have to offer our sister Churches throughout the world? And what do these other expressions of Catholicism have to offer to us?
What are the implications of ministry within a truly global Church?
How can CORPUS and Eastern Catholic Churches be of value to each other?
Can CORPUS help build bridges of understanding and faith commitment with other Christian communities and beyond?
Certainly this takes us beyond simply working for repatriation of those already ordained and married. This takes us beyond advocating for a celibate and non-celibate priesthood, beyond gender and marital status. Even with these goals accomplished, priesthood ministry will be always be in need of reform and renewal.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Peace and blessings,
Russ Ditzel, CORPUS President
Russ can be reached at crditzel@corpus.org
