[Dialogue] Vatican II Influences on OE-ICA

[maureen at imaginaltraining.com]

Hi folks,



Lela Jahn sent me the recent exchange, and I thought I'd jump in.  This is interesting because I've been consulting with some Roman Catholic religious order leadership teams the past 5 years, and have had a lot of time to think about the roles of these teams and my own very short time on the Panchayat. Jon is laughing from heaven at being called a Catholic!  He took classes enough to marry one, a full two weeks, but was grandson of a Methodist preacher.



During Vatican II, the Church required for the first time that every religious order establish a central office in Rome, a Generalate.  This resulted in quite a real estate and construction boom, because all of those French and American and German orders who had had little or no work in Italy had to build a central office and find enough personnel able to function in an international environment to staff one.



Also as we know, the major change for religious orders of Vatican II was the shift to mission, in the spirit of the times and much the same emphasis we had in O:E.  For Roman catholic orders this was a major structural shift.  Many rewrote their constitutions and restructured entirely.  For people with very little education, who may have joined a congregation as a young teenager (and had previously done support roles like cleaning the convent, cooking, doing laundry, making altar breads) they now received an assignment to get out of the house and participate in mission.  For the better educated, it was great to be able to really apply their skills in the community, teaching, doing legal work with refugees, social work, etc.  Many did not have the skills or experience to successfully go out and do anything.  As years went by, there were great differences in how much attention various orders paid to educating and training their own.  So some thrived and some did not.  In both cases, many have left.



Further, the mission focus called for people to live where social need was, so religious went to live out in the community, outside of their convents and monasteries, sometimes on their own.  Some found the opportunity to develop a personla spiritual practice enormously nourishing; others need to join with colleagues to enrich their spirit life.



We in the O:E had an issue of self-support, because we were working as catlysts, and not establishing paying institutions like schools, orphanages, hospitals.   We were families who had to support not only all of our Order members, but also all of our children.  We increasingly accepted members who could not support themselves outside of their home country or community, and we increasingly expected parents to be able to provide sufficient self-support for their children.  Even for those who could setup a self-support business, our practice of moving people very frequently left many of us never in place long enough to get lucratively established.  For many people, their own national pension requirements required a certain number of years of salaried work in their own country.  Many let go of that for a period of time, but felt the need to go back to their homeland for the long term.



Rome in the '80s was an excellent place for ICA fund-raising. There were contacts all over town with Orders working in many of the places where we had projects, our missional emphasis was precisely what they admired, and they were very flush indeed.  We made some good contacts and raised a good bit of funding for projects, but self-support killed us.  There were 4 adults and 6 children.  Our colleagues, the Okusu's, freshly arrived from Ghana, joined a wave of African job seekers flooding into Italy. I worked as a secretary, setup a business editing and typing PhD theses for priests in the Vatican universities, taught LENS at the Dominican university, taught English and even disastrously tried renting out a floor of the religious house to boarders, but none of that was remotely enough. Soon the house was closed and the much better solution was to do fund-raising from the base in Brussels.  With that arrangement, years of lucrative funding came from Orders in Rome.



As I today watch Orders selling buildings to provide elderly care for their members who can no longer teach or whose government pension is inadequate, I am inclined to think the matter of creating effective systems of religious life remains a challenge for us all.



With warm regards,



Maureen



Imaginal Training

1750 Montgomery Street

San Francisco, CA 94111



+1 415 518 2866


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