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 THE CATHOLIC PARISH: Hope for a Changing World, by Robert J. Hater. Paulist Press.
248 pp. $18.95.
Reviewed by JEFFREY SCHEELER, O.F.M.,
former pastor of St. Monica-St. George
Parish in Cincinnati, Ohio, and provincial
vicar for the Franciscan Province of St.
John the Baptist.
“TODAY’S PARISHES ARE at a crossroad,”
writes Robert Hater. How do
parishes, which are the most common
way the majority of people experience
“Church,” respond to the challenges
of modern life and culture and become
“excellent parishes” that offer hope in
a fast-paced and changing
world?
The Catholic Parish is a
theologically grounded,
highly organized, yet very
readable response to that
question. Father Hater presents
complex issues in an
understandable way.
He has suggestions for
the many facets of parish
life, including liturgy, finances,
catechetics, outreach,
sports, management,
etc. In fact, each chapter ends with
numerous practical suggestions that
parishes could try to enliven and enrich
their parish life.
Hater maintains that pastoral ministry
must respond to people’s real
needs, and he grounds all parish ministry
in the ministry of evangelization.
He often, quite rightly, highlights the
need for Catholic parishes to be centers
of hospitality, where people feel wanted
and welcomed, and points out how
our Protestant brothers and sisters often
do this so much better than Catholics
do. Many Protestant churches are filled
with ex-Catholics who have felt more
welcomed there.
Hater also reminds readers of the
reality that many in today’s society are
“seekers,” those who are looking for
answers among the shifting sands of
contemporary society. The fast pace of
our society creates people who are
excited about the “new,” but its superficiality
also leaves them searching for
deeper meaning. Catholic liturgy generally
presumes a committed congregation,
while many in the Church
might not feel so committed. Many
fundamentalist mega-churches presume
that members are seekers and
respond accordingly. Hater acknowledges
that the fundamentals of our
liturgy cannot change, but we do need
to be aware of who is in fact in the
congregation if we want to reach them.
I also appreciated his
insight that liturgy needs a
balance of both structure
and spontaneity. Today, he
says, many liturgies are
very structured. If this is
overdone, it can lead to a
rigid formalism which
misses the transcendent
dimension.
Readers of this book will
also become more aware
of recent Church and
USCCB documents, as well
as significant recent publications about
parish life, because Hater consistently
backs up his point with quotations
from these works. Hater also tries to
ground his points with stories or comments
by priests or pastoral ministers,
but sometimes these came off as a bit
stilted to this reader.
I found the last three chapters to be
the most helpful personally. In these
Hater reminds us that a parish’s unique
vision takes shape in a given culture,
which exercises a pervasive influence
on parishes. A parish must “manage
its vision, by articulating its fundamental
orientation, style and mission.”
In addition to attending to a mission
statement, “a parish must establish a
concrete plan to implement the mission.” He ends with questions built
around the 18 common traits of Excellent
Catholic Parishes, by Paul Wilkes
(Paulist Press).
This book might serve as a good
overview for new parishioners or to
the newly initiated. Members of parish
committees might find that it gives
them a bigger picture of the many
dimensions of parish life and ministry.
It might prove useful for a parish team
to read and discuss together.
You can order THE CATHOLIC PARISH: Hope for a Changing World from St.
Francis Bookshop.
DISTURBING THE PEACE: The Story
of Father Roy Bourgeois and the
Movement to Close the School of the
Americas, by James Hodge and Linda
Cooper. Orbis Books. 244 pp. $20.
Reviewed by MICHAEL J. DALEY, a writer
and teacher at St. Xavier High School in
Cincinnati, Ohio. He recently coedited
(with William Madges) Vatican II: Forty
Personal Stories, available through
Twenty-Third Publications.
IN HIS NOW-FAMOUS letter from the
Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King,
Jr., contrasted the experience of the
early Church with the one that existed
in his day. He lamented that, far from
being agents of change (thermostats)
like the first Christians, too many
accepted and acted according to the
social norms of the day (thermometers).
This image of what the Church
and disciples of Jesus are called to be
was never far from my mind as I read
Disturbing the Peace, by James Hodge
and Linda Cooper.
Even for a thermostat like Father Roy
Bourgeois, however, the change in temperature
was gradual. Born in the bayous
of Louisiana, Bourgeois joined the
Navy after college. He felt it was his
patriotic duty in 1965 to volunteer for
Vietnam. It was there that Bourgeois
discovered not the glory of battle but
the brutality of war through contact
with an orphanage outside
Saigon. His attempts to ease
the sufferings of the children
there also reawakened
thoughts of the priesthood.
Fresh from his tour of
duty, Bourgeois joined the
Maryknoll Order in the
fall of 1966. This first-year
seminarian’s hawkish views
were challenged when he
found out that a noted
peace activist, Jesuit Father
Daniel Berrigan, was to speak to his
class. He protested and was given permission
to not attend Berrigan’s talk. By
the time of his ordination in May of
1972, though, Bourgeois had become a
social-justice advocate himself.
Maryknoll sent Bourgeois to La Paz,
Bolivia. (In language school one of the
first persons he would meet was Ita
Ford, a Maryknoll sister who would
eventually suffer martyrdom for her
justice work in El Salvador.) During his
stay, Bourgeois helped establish small
Christian communities, literacy training
programs, a health clinic and a
trade school.
As requested by the local bishop, he
also began his “subversive” activity ministering
to university students, factory
workers and labor-union leaders. It
made him a marked man. After almost
being killed by government officials,
Bourgeois had to leave Bolivia in 1977.
Over the next few years, Bourgeois
involved himself in a host of activities
to raise awareness about the suffering
going on in Latin America.
After the deaths of fellow Maryknoll
women religious and Archbishop Oscar
Romero in 1980, Bourgeois’s attention
turned to El Salvador. His link with Fort
Benning, in Columbus, Georgia, and
the School of the Americas began in 1983 when he found
that 525 Salvadoran soldiers were being
sent there for training. Shortly thereafter,
he started his indefatigable fight to
close the school.
Over time, Bourgeois and others
would discover that throughout Latin
America what connected countless
cases of human-rights abuse, torture
and murder was that many of the people
charged with carrying out these
acts were trained at the
School of the Americas. In
fact, the school was known
in Latin America as the “School of the Assassins.”
Through our nation’s
training of Latin American
soldiers at the School of the
Americas, we have not been
innocent bystanders in this
oppression but active participants.
As much as we
may not want to hear it,
Bourgeois tells the real story about this
school.
You can order DISTURBING THE PEACE: The Story
of Father Roy Bourgeois and the
Movement to Close the School of the
Americas from St.
Francis Bookshop.
HABITS OF DEVOTION: Catholic Religious
Practice in Twentieth-Century
America, edited by James M. O’Toole.
Cornell University Press. 289 pp.
$39.95, hardcover; $19.95, paperback.
Reviewed by RACHELLE LINNER, a librarian
and writer who lives in Boston.
PART OF THE Cushwa Center Studies of
Catholicism in Twentieth-Century
America, Habits of Devotion offers a
vivid and nuanced portrait of the recent
religious history of American Catholics.
Essays on public and private prayer,
Marian devotions, Confession and the
Eucharist explore the changes that led
to and occurred after Vatican II.
The authors, all respected academics,
have produced uniformly well-written
scholarly essays accessible to the lay
reader, and the skillful editing of James
O’Toole has given us a book free of thematic
or factual repetition.
Popular writing about Catholic devotional
spirituality can suffer from sentimentality,
superficiality or polemics.
Habits of Devotion is a good antidote
to that affliction. It provides solid factual
information about religious practices
and explores the theological, social
and political context within which
devotions developed and changed.
In a strong opening essay, “The
Catholic Community at Prayer, 1926-1976,” Joseph Chinnici, O.F.M., rejects
the recent tradition that “describes the
1960s in terms of a time before and a time
after the Second Vatican Council. To
some extent, such a periodization,
emphasizing as it does ‘revolutionary
change,’ has left the community with
an unusable past....In the contemporary
context, such a view has been
fueled by the politico-ecclesial polarizations
still present in the community
between ‘restorationists’ and ‘progressives.’
The present work seeks to examine
the changing patterns of prayer and
practice from a longer perspective.”
The substance and style of religious
practices were shaped by many factors,
which could include theology, institutional
and pastoral needs that ranged
from maintaining a Catholic identity in
Protestant America or responding to
secularism and atheistic Communism,
to maintaining boundaries between
clergy and an increasingly educated,
affluent and professionally successful
Catholic laity.
Paula Kane’s essay on Marian devotions
from 1940 to the present illustrates
how complex these developments
and interpretations are. Marian devotions
strengthened the distinctiveness
of Catholic identity and functioned as
a “boundary against the other Christian
churches.” During the Cold War the
Virgin Mary was enlisted both to fight
against Communism (“the
woman the Reds fear most”)
and to foster a “submissive
model” of feminine spirituality:
“surrender to God’s
will, self-sacrifice, spiritual
victimhood....”
Kane analyzes the polarization
of Marian imagery
in the post-Vatican II period
when efforts “to reclaim
Mary as a progressive symbol”
have met with only
partial success. A growing
conservative Mariology has developed
strong apocalyptic overtones.
O’Toole’s “In the Court of Conscience:
American Catholics and Confession,
1900-1975” offers an excellent
understanding of the theology and
practice of this sacrament that was
“central to Catholic practice” for 150
years: “This was a moral universe in
which even the most ordinary believers
had dozens of opportunities every
day to sever their connection with God,
perhaps completely. Confession offered
the chance to undo that damage and
set things right again.”
O’Toole explores why
this “important marker of
denominational identity”
would disappear almost
completely in the 1970s and
suggests one reason was the
changed self-image and increased
sense of autonomy
(“gone was an automatic
deference to priestly authority...”)
lay Catholics experienced
after Vatican II.
In “Let Us Go to the
Altar,” Margaret McGuinness narrates
the arc of change in the theology and
practice of the Mass, as seen through
changes in eucharistic etiquette, the
severity of the fast, extraliturgical devotions
(Benediction, Forty Hours, and
Nocturnal and Perpetual Adoration of
the Blessed Sacrament) and the frequency
with which the faithful
received Communion. It was a remarkable
century of change from Pope Pius
X’s 1905 proclamation on the desirability
of frequent Communion to the
adoption of Communion in the hand
in the early 1970s.
A recurring theme in these essays is
the relationship between continuity
and change, “the long period of gestation,
for the presence in the soil of the
Church’s experience of many different
elements that suddenly came together
and became outwardly manifest in
their connectedness.”
The great contribution of Habits of
Devotion is that it restores the lived tradition
of American Catholicism to a
community that needs to regain the
use of its past. It would be folly to
ignore such a respectful and timely gift.
You can order HABITS OF DEVOTION: Catholic Religious
Practice in Twentieth-Century
America from St. Francis Bookshop.
AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!”: Amusing
and Thought-Provoking Parallels
Between the Bible and Baseball, by
Gary Graf. Photographs by Jack Zehrt.
Liguori/Triumph. 180 pp. $19.95.
Reviewed by P.J. MURPHY, an avid sports
fan who lives in Dublin, Ohio. In addition
to graduating from the College of Mount St.
Joseph with a degree in English, he recently
completed his M.A. in journalism and communications
at The Ohio State University.
BASEBALL AND THE BIBLE? What
could a game filled with million-dollar
contracts and steroid-abuse allegations
possibly have in common with the
Bible? In And God Said, “Play Ball!”
Gary Graf shows that they have a lot in
common through life lessons they both
teach and the great sense of hope they
both evoke.
For many American Catholics, faith
and baseball are staples of their lives.
Most can vividly describe the church
they grew up in, as well as the ballpark
of their favorite local team.
By showing parallels between
Catholicism and
baseball, Graf enables us to
earn a deeper appreciation
for each.
This appreciation comes
from the seemingly effortless
flow from Bible stories
paired with the stories of
some of baseball’s greatest
players. At first glance, the
Bible story of Joseph, son
of Jacob, might seem to
have little in common with the baseball
career of Joe DiMaggio, but it turns out
both had their highs and lows.
While some of the parallels were
written with his tongue planted firmly
in his cheek, he does do a good job at
gleaning the greater good in these
observations. It might seem funny to
compare God illuminating the cosmos
with Franklin Delano Roosevelt turning
on the lights for the first Major
League Baseball night game in 1935
but, as one reads on, the comparison
Graf is really trying to make becomes
more apparent. God gave us illumination
(or understanding) and it is there
for us to discover.
Even though baseball players such as
Randy Johnson and Jamie Moyer were
given amazing talent to pitch a baseball,
they did not develop their Hall of
Fame careers until they saw the light of
certain nuances of pitching or gained
an understanding of their talents. The
amusing comparisons, although seemingly
far-flung, draw you into each
chapter (or inning, as Graf calls them).
The deeper meaning Graf is getting
at will keep you reading. The author
also touches on the social significance
of both Catholicism and baseball
opening up to diverse backgrounds.
Christ preached to gentiles and Jackie
Robinson broke the color barrier in
Major League Baseball.
While these acts of inclusion were
initially met with trepidation, they
were watershed moments for Catholicism
and baseball respectively, bringing
them acceptance and acclaim. The facts
that Catholics make up roughly a fifth
of the world’s population and that baseball
is now an Olympic sport only support
Graf’s observation.
Graf offers the disclaimer
that he is not a biblical
scholar, which only enhances
the book’s appeal.
The conversational tone
the author takes in laying
out his thoughts and observations
will help anyone
from a high school student
in a religion class to a seasoned
theologian relate to
what he is trying to say.
Graf’s knowledge of baseball
history is also impressive. While he
writes about familiar names such as
Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Pete Rose
and Barry Bonds, he also reaches back
to the tale of Abner Doubleday.
Christ’s message instills hope in every
Catholic; every baseball fan sprouts new
hope as the World Series winds up in
October—at least until spring training
starts. This book will keep your baseball
hopes alive through the winter and
encourage your faith.
You can order AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!”: Amusing
and Thought-Provoking Parallels
Between the Bible and Baseball from St.
Francis Bookshop.
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