Books
Listen to the other half of the Catholic story
My ties to Asia go back almost 40 years. It was in June 1963, as
an idealistic 19-year-old, I first stepped onto Asian soil. I had just
completed my first year at Stanford University. The dean of freshmen invited
two dozen freshmen to join him to work as volunteers for the summer in Asia.
That summer I ended up teaching English to young Chinese refugees, the sons and
daughters of parents who had fled China, crossing into the British-controlled
New Territories during years leading up to China’s brutal Mao-inspired
Cultural Revolution.
When I graduated from Stanford University in 1966 the Vietnam War
was raging. I was deeply troubled by the U.S. involvement and felt the best way
to come to terms with Vietnam was to volunteer as a civilian to work with war
refugees. So I joined a Mennonite, Brethren and Quaker-inspired nonprofit
organization, contracted to the Agency for International Development, called
International Voluntary Services. After a month of intensive language training,
I was assigned to assist refugees outside a small coastal town, a provincial
capital in Central Vietnam, Tuy Hoa. I lived there and worked for two years,
witnessing the war close up. I saw the iron fist under the velvet glove of U.S.
foreign policy.
Since my first trip to Asia I have returned more than a dozen
times. In all I lived in Vietnam for nearly five years. My Vietnam War
experience led me into journalism and on to Asian studies. Eventually, having
returned again to Vietnam, I met a Vietnamese social worker, a Catholic convert
who had grown up in the Mekong Delta town of Can Tho. Her name was To Kim Hoa.
One year later we married.
The seeds of this book can be traced to a National Catholic
Reporter project in which I worked with veteran journalist Gary MacEoin, to
whom the book is dedicated. In early 1998, we jointly wrote several articles in
preparation for a spring synod on Asia. I attended that month-long gathering
and reencountered up close the depth of the emerging Asian Catholic vision of
church.
It took months of research before I began to see the enormous
importance of the Asian pastoral vision not only for Asia, but also for the
entire church and the wider world family in the 21st century. It can be said
that the Asian pastoral vision is the first post-Western model of Catholicism
to emerge in our times. I mean “post-Western” in the sense that this
model grows out of East and West, taking the insights of both, and is
applicable universally.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Western women began telling me,
“You don’t get it.” What they were saying to us was that until
men saw the story -- the history -- through women’s eyes, only half the
story was being told, and we were all disabled as a result. Similarly, the
Asians are politely saying to the West, “You don’t get it.” That
is, what we think of as the Catholic church story is only half the story. It is
not a catholic story. It is a Western story. They are saying that until the
Catholic church listens to and integrates the spiritual visions of the
non-Western Catholic communities, the church will not be universal in the
fullest sense of the word. You either “get it” or you don’t. If
we don’t, we will not fully celebrate the gifts being offered to us by the
Spirit.
Furthermore, the Asian pastoral vision, being pluralistic in the
sense that it truly celebrates diversity, becomes more fitting to the
postmodern mind, which instinctively recognizes the strengths and challenges of
pluralism.
The Asian pastoral vision is essentially nonviolent. It finally
lays down the armor of days of old, the armor found in the Crusades and in the
conquering colonialists. It changes the priority and vocabulary of conversion.
It does not stress numbers; instead, we hear talk of witness, which becomes the
means of evangelization. We hear talk of dialogue with other faiths -- not for
the purpose of conversion, but to work on service and justice projects and to
learn how the mystical hand of God is operating in other religions. The rest is
left to the Spirit.
And why is this important? Sadly, religious warfare continues to
be rampant around the globe. Yet religions have the ability to inspire and lift
souls beyond the banalities and selfishness we so commonly see. The type of
religious leadership -- and the quality of inter-religious cooperation -- that
emerges in the years ahead matters greatly. It could very well determine
whether this century will see humanity turn toward peaceful resolution of
conflict and whether life on the planet will continue as we know it.
The Asian pastoral vision is a hopeful vision at a time when we
all need hope. It is a positive vision built on the insight that theology is
local and grows out of the reflections and experiences of particular people in
particular times. This insight, in turn, rests on another, that the Spirit is
alive in the world and is discernible in our lives and our communities. The
Spirit guides and graces all, and if we listen, discern, stay open, stay
prayerful, stay committed, we will find our ways.
What follows are excerpts from Pentecost in Asia, A New Way of
Being Church (Orbis Books). I hope it moves readers to open their hearts to
some graceful and grace-filled peoples who have much to share with us if we are
willing to listen.
-- Thomas C. Fox
National Catholic Reporter, September 20,
2002
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