[Dialogue] Vatican II Influences on OE-ICA

[John Cock]

Thank you, Maureen, for this insightful look at RC orders and your saga of
self-support in Italy. Sounds like ya'll influenced them, also.
 
John

  _____  

From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of
maureen at imaginaltraining.com
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 3:58 PM
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Dialogue] Vatican II Influences on OE-ICA



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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