Scouring the skyways for chances to
minister
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
When Chicagos National Center for the Laity polled its 5,000
members a year ago, the resounding call was for forums to
help lay people link their faith to their daily work.
The centers response was Monday into Sunday, an
April 15-18 conference that invited people from 80 nationwide groups in a dozen
states, each with a stake in making social justice and other Christian concerns
a constitutive part of the individuals working life.
As the meeting began, the power failed in the basement of
Chicagos Old St. Patricks Church. But as the candles were lit, the
stories came pouring out.
Chicago lawyers and Boston labor leaders, Texas campus ministers,
downtown parish pastors and seminary faculty grappled with what Laity Center
director Bill Droel called the need to explore themes and ideas for a
Catholic faith-and-work movement.
The criteria for the invitation-only conference was that each
organization was already spending time, money and energy each year specifically
on programs designed to link faith and work. The idea, said Droel, was to swap
stories and plot a way ahead.
Typical of the participants was Fr. John Forliti of St.
Olafs Parish in downtown Minneapolis. St Olafs spent $350,000 to
building a stairway and escalator connection to the citys five-miles of
enclosed skyways.
Office and retail workers, passersby and daily communicants, have
access not just to four Masses daily and a 15-minute daily centering-prayer
session, but programs from Ignatian retreats to a faith-and-breakfast session
in which speakers explain their attempts to bring their faith to the
workplace.
St. Olafs attracts 2,500 mainly younger people to its eight
weekend Masses. Forliti told NCR they usually are really hungry
about what it means to be Catholic. Somewhere along the way they either missed
the catechesis or they are young recruits. Others want to find meaning or to be
socially involved. Or theyre young lawyers weighing their Christian
commitment.
Marianist Sr. Grace Walle -- one of the speakers -- knows lawyers
like them. Shes a chaplain at St. Marys University Law School, San
Antonio. At the conference, I networked with people [from groups] like
Bread for the World, and with a lawyer for a pro bono legal clinic in
Chicago, she said.
What the center needs now, Walle suggested, is a
process step -- on what to do as a group and not just as individuals. I think
the centers not known at all -- not down here in San Antonio. But I felt
empowered. The witness of the people present made me come back and write [to
Droel], Im willing to help. Added Walle,
thats the sign of a good conference.
Walle was impressed by speakers like consultant Susan Mlot, who
helps companies establish labor-management partnerships. Mlots examples
for NCR: at Unilever and General Mills plants, labor and management
jointly devised new work, pay and governance systems.
At Kaiser Permanente, California, Mlot said, the partnership
worked together when new hospitals were built. Unions, management and
physicians were equally involved in designing how the hospitals would develop
and operate.
Sr. Donna Ryan of the Cathedral Center for Faith and Work in
downtown Kansas City, Mo., said she had attended a similar gathering five years
ago where participants were mostly priests and nuns. This year they were
mostly business men and women, she said. That shows they are taking
ownership of the movement.
One contentious issue was raised by broker Mike McGilliguddy at
the Monday to Sunday gathering, said organizer Droel: What is the
Christians responsibility as the rich-get-richer and the
poor-get-poorer.
St. Marys chaplain Walle agreed that McGilliguddy sparked
vigorous discussion by the mainly middle and upper-middle class attendees,
especially when he frankly admitted that his job required he sometimes
compromise his ideals. McGilliguddy said exploring the tension between those
ideals and workaday reality was the job of theology.
Opening speaker Jesuit Fr. William Byron, a writer and Georgetown
professor, also tackles business ethics topics as a member of the Woodstock
Business Conference. Byron said that Mass-going Catholics ought to take the the
Monday to Sunday conference title to heart.
Sundays offertory procession begins on Monday.
It reminds us, Byron told NCR, that while Christians
are to bring their Sunday faith to their Monday work, its also true they
are to bring their Monday work to their Sunday faith.
Droel said that one way ahead for a faith and work movement is to
further network those lay information centers that are trying
to educate young Catholics in the churchs social tradition. Perhaps we
can network those places in such a way that we enhance and improve the
possibilities of making that education more widely available, he said.
National Catholic Reporter, May 7,
1999
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