Mainline Churches and Social Change

I’ll be using your posts in class tonight, so my comments here are just a way to preface that time together (they’re also short because I spent about two hours in emails and phone conversations with your sites last week—didn’t realize how much I needed that time). Anyway, I sorted your writings for this week into three categories that I’ve simply labeled “community,” “government,” and “today.” For the first one, community, three statements emerged that I thought spoke to the tensions described in both the Fisher and Thuesen articles. Carla wrote that Catholics tend to hold community as an ideal and, as a result, to focus less on “the individual’s personal improvement.” I did not get the sense that anyone would disagree with that, though Crystal raised one important question: “who’s in the community?” As someone who is not Catholic, she has been led to question how serious and meaningful the Catholic commitment to community can be if she can’t be accepted into it. And Joe went a step further, questioning whether we can continue to value community in the same ways we always have if, in fact, those groups are more interested in preserving their identity than they are in real social change.

The second category was easy: government. There were traces throughout the postings of the tensions that we see daily on CNN and elsewhere, tensions about the proper role of government in the social sphere. Joe and Kelli seemed more inclined to question the value of national government and politics in areas of life better left to smaller, more local entities. Ed noted (with surprise) that, despite all the assumptions to the contrary, Dorothy Day would agree with some of the points Joe and Kelli were making. Good evidence that Catholic Social teaching is both a) different than we assume and b) a genuine alternative to some existing ideologies.

Finally, the last category involved issues you raised that seemed particularly important “today.” It is good to have a long tradition of social teaching in Catholicism and elsewhere but, as Liz points out, this world is not the same as it was just 10 years ago. Poverty and neglect in Dubuque is not the same as poverty and neglect in Darfur; it never has been, the difference is that now we know it to be true. And finally Meghan takes us back to the question of community when she writes about all the “fractures” that exist in organized religion. But she calls attention to the fact that, even when a faith like Catholicism has a strong center in a place like Rome and a figure like the Pope, it still cannot claim to be unified. That speaks to the age in which we live; it also suggests that we need to start presenting and promoting unity in new ways.