What, then, is the goal, the vision of the Church that can guide a process of development and of restructuring? It can be stated as follows: The main goal of the pastoral efforts in the Church today is to build communities which make it possible for a person to live a Christian life. In the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul talks about the purpose of Christianity. Or, in other words, he talks about God's intention in sending Christ (Christianity is something God initiated and told men about, not something men thought up and proposed to God): "For he has made known to us in all his wisdom and insight, the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplished all things according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to life for the praise of his glory... So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners. But you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being a cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit" (Eph. 1:9-12, 2:19-22). Three ideas contained in this section of Paul's letter are of particular importance for consideration in pastoral planning: 1) God did and still does have a purpose for creation and redemption. And if we miss that purpose, we miss what we were made for. 2) God's purpose, in respect to the human race, is to create a people who are united with him, to create a unity of God and man, one body (including God), a temple (in whom God's Spirit dwells). 3) Man's purpose is to live for the praise of God's glory (or, as it is put in the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, sec. 24, "all men are called to one and the same goal, namely, God himself"). It is possible to see things from God's perspective in our pastoral work - possible, not because we are naturally capable of it without running the risk of serious distortion - but because God has revealed to us how he thinks, and what his purpose is. If we do not keep God's intention before our minds, we run the risk, to use a Pauline phrase, of "running in vain" (Gal.2:12). It is from God's purpose then, that the goal of pastoral work should be drawn. God's purpose is to build a people united with him (a people of God), a body of Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit. A Christian worker should have the same purpose as God's - to build something - to work to form a people who live for God. This should be the result of all pastoral work. Here an important distinction comes in. There is a difference between the goal of pastoral work and the goal of Christian life. The goal of Christian life is to "live for the praise of God's glory." The goal of pastoral work is to build a people of God. An individual's prayer life may be important to his life as a Christian, but it is not one of the activities of his pastoral work (unless, of course, his prayer is being specifically directed to building up the people of God). The goal of pastoral work is to form a people who will do all the things which Christians should do. This distinction has some practical importance in understanding what we are considering. Teaching biology may be a good thing, the kind of thing a Christian should do. But if a priest decides to teach biology, he is no longer doing pastoral work. (This is not to imply that he is automatically wrong in going into teaching biology - only that he is no longer doing pastoral work.) In other words, there are many activities which can be part of the Christian life which are not the work of someone engaged in pastoral work. The goal of pastoral work then, is to build a people who live for God, a body of Christ. Or, rephrased, the goal of pastoral work is to form communities which live for God, Christian communities. There is a reason (for the purpose of this book) for using the word "community" rather than the word "people." For a modern American, the word "community" makes clear that what is involved is a matter of social organization, a meaning which the word "people" carried in the ancient world but which it no longer does, or at least not so clearly. Even though a different word is used, the meaning is the same. If Christianity is going to change men, it is going to have to realign social relationships. To think of "Christianizing the world" exclusively in terms of getting certain principles accepted or certain values accepted, or even in terms of getting individuals to have a relationship with Christ, would be to miss one of the basic realities of human nature - that human beings do not function independently. They change in groups. The target has to be to form Christian communities, Christian social groupings. To understand, therefore, why the main goal of pastoral efforts in the Church today must be to build communities which make it possible for a person to live a Christian life, it is necessary to affirm three principles: 1) that a person's beliefs, attitudes, values and behavior patterns (and hence his Christianity) are formed to a great degree by his environment, and therefore, the normal person needs a Christian environment if he is going to live Christianity in a vital way, 2) that environmental factors are more basic than institutional factors in Christian growth and therefore, the primary pastoral concern should be in forming Christian environments rather than in reforming Christian institutions, and 3) that when society as a whole cannot be expected to accept Christianity, it is necessary to form communities within society to make Christian life possible. THE IMPORTANCE OF "ENVIRONMENT" (1) A person's beliefs, attitudes, values and behavior patterns (and hence his Christianity) are formed to a great degree by his environment, and therefore, the normal person needs a Christian environment if he is going to live Christianity in a vital way. "Environment" can be used in a broad sense to indicate all the factors in a human being's surroundings (climate, soil, atmospheric pressure, etc.). But in a narrower sense, it refers only to the social setting a human being finds himself in. If a person lives among people who accept Christianity, he lives in a Christian environment. If a person works with people involved in a great deal of conflict with one another, he has a turbulent work environment. If a person goes to school with people who use drugs frequently, he has a school environment that is characterized by heavy drug use. Environments form in many situations. A family is an environment, as is a group of friends. A school provides a place for environments to form, as does a parish or a business. The sisters in the convent, the teachers at the school, a gang of eighth-graders, and the men of the St. Vincent de Paul Society are all examples of environments that might exist within a parish. There are usually a number of environments in a person's life - his family, his work situation, the group of friends he spends time with, perhaps the people in a religious or civic organization of which he is a part. An environment is formed when a group of people interrelate or interact. The people on a bus do not form an environment because they do not interact. They are simply an aggregate. Often, the families in a neighborhood or an apartment house (especially in a big city or town with a large transient population) do not form an environment. They rarely talk to one another, do things for one another (or to one another), or get to know one another. They do not become involved with one another in any important part of their lives. An environment is a social situation that has some kind of stability. Three people who meet on the way to work and talk for a half hour do not form an environment. A group of people in a construction company who just happen to be together for an afternoon on a particular job do not form an environment. An environment is formed when people relate to each other in a consistent, regular way - when they live together or work together or play together or spend time together for any reason in an on-going way. The environments in our lives are the places where we have some involvement with the same people, daily or weekly or monthly. An environment then, could be defined as a stable social situation or a stable pattern of interaction between human beings. Later on, when the difference between an environment and an institution is considered, another element will be added to the definition. For the present purposes, the definition of an "environment" involves three elements 1) it is stable (involving an on-going grouping) 2) it is a pattern of interaction 3) it involves human beings. There are various degrees of interaction in an environment. Some environments are more intense than others - that is, they involve more interaction among the members. A family (usually) is a more intense environment than a ladies' guild. Some environments are more cohesive than others - that is, the members feel more drawn to one another. They spend more time with one another voluntarily; are more open to one another; and have more of an influence on one another. Some environments are more total than others, that is, they involve more aspects of a person's life. A cloistered convent is more total than a family (although the family could be more intense or more cohesive). There are also various levels of environments. There are levels according to size. Environments can be formed of a large number of people (the university environment, for example) or a small number of people (the family). There are also levels according to geography. Environments can be formed on a local level (in a neighborhood or a town), or on a regional or national or international level (there is an international environment formed by the Cursillo movement, as there is an international environment formed by devoted mountain climbers). Environments always have commonly accepted attitudes or values. What these are vary according to the environment. For instance, at a university today, certain academic values might be held (values which stress scholarship, for instance) and also perhaps certain political values (universities tend to be more opposed to the war in Vietnam) and social values (a man with long hair can feel much more accepted at the university than he can back home in the suburbs). Not everyone in an environment might agree with all of the attitudes or values which are characteristic of it, but these values are what are generally accepted and they set the tone. Hence, when a student comes to the university, he will more likely become liberal and wear his hair longer than he would at home. Environments have a great deal of effect on a person. To a great extent, what a man is, is determined by the environment he finds himself in. The fact that he grew up in a certain family marks him for the rest of his life. Knowing that he is a middle-class American rather than a Burmese peasant is enough to tell a great deal about him. It is not true, of course, to say that a person is completely determined by his environment because he has a certain degree of choice between the different environments he is in, and he has the choice about how he is going to relate to each environment. For many people, it is hard to grasp the strength of the influence of various environments. They tend to think that they, and other men, proceed mainly by gathering information, weighing it, and making decisions about what they are going to think and do. This is part of the way people function, but it is not the whole story. There are many everyday facts which demonstrate the effect of environments on people, facts which even people who know no sociology instinctively realize. A mother, for instance, is careful about the children her children hang around with. She knows that they will have an influence on her children and that her children will tend to act like them. We might remember the effect a certain group had upon us in our youth. Perhaps we went through a political change that came from hanging around certain friends. Part of the change, it is true came because we got new information. But a lot of it came from the fact that the people we were with saw certain ideas as being more important than others. We began to see perhaps that the war and the draft system were significant issues, or perhaps that we should be concerned about the Communist Party. Along with this, we began to realize that freedom or democracy or whatever it might be was worth working for. The example is political, but it could be in any number of areas - religious, social, economic. The power of environments over us is greater than we usually suppose. Often, we have a hard time holding out against them, even when we disagree. Young Catholics frequently go through this experience in high school, at universities or in military service. They are taught to believe that Christ is important and that certain sexual values are correct. Then they find themselves in the middle of environments in which the opposite is the common opinion (sometimes explicitly or sometimes simply because certain other values are held, like the overriding importance of money or status). Then they find themselves gradually tending to think in ways that presuppose Christ is not important, even though inside somewhere, they still think he is. Or they find themselves adopting certain sexual values or ways of acting, even though they feel guilty about them and, put in the right situation (a retreat, for instance), would readily accept the fact that they are wrong. Not every environment, it is true, has a strong effect on a person's life. If a person does not like a situation he is in or the people in it, he will be much less affected by it. Or if the environment is a weak one, that is, if the people have a low degree of interest in each other and in the situation as a whole and there is not much vitality to it, the people in it will not be very much affected by it (this is one reason why being in certain classes in school can have so little effect on the students or why people often are very little changed by their work environments). Or if a person has a strong environment in his life counteracting another environment (say, if he belongs to a strong religious group that counteracts the effect of being in an environment in which certain kinds of immorality or disbelief are accepted), he will not be as much affected by that environment. But, if a person does not have any environment in his life which is favoring something, he will have a hard time keeping that thing as part of his life. What I have been saying is that we depend on others for our beliefs, for what we think is important, for the ways in which we act. We take these things from those around us to a great degree. This is not bad. If someone had to think everything out for himself and decide upon everything himself, he would make very slow progress. He might reach the level of a caveman if he were fortunate. It is good that we are affected by our environments. But that only points up the need to realize the kind of effect that environments have upon us. In many ways we do. Instinctively, we know enough not to hang around with certain people if we want to keep our moral standards. And when we decide that we want to have something new in our lives (perhaps we want to become better Christians, or perhaps we want to develop new human relationships), we instinctively look for human beings who live the way we want to live or who can do the kinds of things we want to be able to do. We know we will pick up the new thing a lot easier by being a part of a group than by trying to "go it alone." Since environments are so important in human life, it is necessary to take them into account in pastoral work. This has been done to some degree in the past. Much effort has been expended in trying to keep Catholic students away from secular schools and to keep Catholics away from the YMCA and other environments which are not "Catholic." This effort made a certain degree of sense (given the fact that we wanted to keep people Catholic). But it was largely negative. The effort was to keep people out of "bad" environments. While it may still be important to keep people out of "bad" environments (though it is becoming harder and harder to do so in a world of such mobility and communications), it is much more important to provide people with the environments which will make it possible for them to live as Christians even if they have to be part of "bad" environments. This is primarily what is meant by taking environments into account in pastoral work. If a person is going to live as a Christian with very much vitality, it is necessary for him to be a part of a Christian environment. That does not mean that every environment in his life has to be Christian. But it does mean that some (at least one) environments in his life have to be Christian. And providing such environments should be one of the major tasks of any pastoral efforts. In order to understand what it might mean to say that a person needs to be part of an environment that is Christian, it is necessary to have a clear idea of what a "Christian environment" is. The most common misconception in this area is that if all the people are Christian then the environment is Christian too. If a school (or college or Newman Center or neighborhood or club, etc.) is made up of all Catholics, it is a Catholic school. But to say this is to misunderstand how an environment functions. Take the example of a corner tavern. Everyone who frequents that tavern may actually be fairly patriotic. But it would be a mistake to automatically assume, therefore, that the atmosphere of the tavern is patriotic or that it fosters patriotism. It might, but it might not. More likely, what is fostered at that tavern is, say, sports or sex, or whatever else people focus on when they are there. Patriotism may never enter into the patron's interaction at all. In other words, the kind of environment a particular environment is depends on how the people interact. If the people in a group are all patriots and yet never talk about it or indicate that it is important to them in any way, that environment is not patriotic and it does not foster patriotism. It may not be an anti-patriotic environment, and so it may not work against patriotism. But it is not "a patriotic environment." The realization that a Christian environment is more than an environment composed of Christians reveals a serious deficiency in the previous pastoral approach of the Church. It has often been assumed that simply being in a group that was all Catholic would be enough to make a person a good Catholic. Being in an all-Catholic group may have helped in the sense that the people in Catholic schools, for instance, usually were not against Catholicism or against Christian values, unlike people in some other environments. But very often Catholicism or Christianity was not fostered in the all-Catholic group. It was not a Christian environment, even though everyone in it was a Christian. For an environment to be a Christian environment, Christianity has to be part of the way people in that environment interact. They have to talk about it in a way that shows that they consider it important and accept it. They have to do things which show that it is of value to them (or let people know that they do these things). People have to be not only Christian. It has to be clear to the others that they are Christian, and the environment, as a whole, has to accept Christianity (not, of course, that every single person in it has to be Christian or accept Christianity any more than everyone at a university has to be liberal for it to be a liberal environment). For many people in the Church today, the only really Christian environment they have experienced was a Christian family (although many have not even experienced that). In some families, it is still the practice for the parents to talk to each other and to the children about Christ and the importance of following him. They pray together, go to Mass together, sometimes even read parts of scripture or some Christian book together and discuss it. Christianity is part of the way they interact, the basis of it. Such families are, however, getting rarer and rarer. Even rectories and convents are often not Christian environments in this sense (They are only Christian environments in the sense that everyone in them is engaged in Church work. But often there is no personal, that is, free, voluntary, and spontaneous interaction that centers on Christ). Here is a major problem which the Church faces. A Christian must have an environment in his life in which Christianity is openly accepted, talked about, and lived if he is going to be able to live a very vital Christian life. If he does not have this, his whole life as a Christian will be weak and might even die away. Yet fewer and fewer Catholics are finding such an environment. ENVIRONMENTAL AND INSTITUTIONAL APPROACHES 2) Environmental factors are more basic than institutional factors in Christian growth and therefore, the primary pastoral concern should be in forming Christian environments, rather than reforming Christian institutions. Today, when people consider pastoral action, their primary concern seems to be to change institutions. In the parish, for example, they think immediately of starting a parish council or getting a social action organization going or beginning a parent-educator program. This kind of change is valuable. But it is not so important as providing a Christian environment - and it is not the same thing as providing a Christian environment. An institution is a stable pattern of human interrelationship which is designed (or has evolved) to get some job done. General Motors Corporation is an institution, as is the city government, or a boy scout troop. Schools, businesses, parishes, political parties are all institutions. They are groupings of human beings which work together to get something accomplished. Although institutions and environments often go together, there is a difference between an institution and an environment. There are distinct patterns of human interrelationship with different laws governing them. An institution exists for the sake of some job. It is task-oriented or accomplishment-oriented. Environments do not "do" anything. They are relationship-oriented. They exist because people want to be together with other people. Or to be more accurate, environments exist because people need to be together with other people in order to function well. The main relationships in an institution are work relationships and they tend to be functional. The relationships in an environment are personal. People relate more directly as people and less according to a function they are performing. The basis of their relationship might be a common ideal or a common interest, but it is not a common job. That does not mean that there cannot be jobs or task-oriented work together on things, and there are jobs that members of families have to do. But these things are not the basis of their being together. Environmental relationships and institutional relationships often exist in the same human groupings. For instance, the university is an institution. But there is also an accompanying environment. Insofar as the university is an organized system for educating people, it is an institution. Because there is also a pattern of relationships among people who have come together, there is a university environment. Many activities that go on in the university environment are virtually untouched by the university as an institution (the drug traffic, for instance). Some of the most important factors in the university as an institution, exist in little or no connection with the university environment (the board of trustees, or the legislature sometimes). In short, even when institutions and environments go together, they are still distinct. Sometimes environments and institutions exist apart from one another. Some environments exist without an institution. Groups of friends can be strong environments which are sometimes fairly large and do not have institutions which bring them into existence as a group or maintain their life as a group. Some institutions exist without an environment. There is a mail order firm which sells pamphlets that is made up of people who do not work together and hence have only institutional relations. But it is rare to find an institution that either does not have an environment or does not function within one. A social grouping could be described as an institution when the institutional factors predominate; an environment, when the environmental factors predominate. For instance, a business corporation like GM is primarily an institution. It is an organization that is formed to perform an economic function. The people come together because of it, and no one is part of it who does not have an institutional function in its operations. There are a variety of environments in GM (groups of friends, for example), but they are not the primary factor in the grouping we call GM. A social club, on the other hand, is primarily environmental. It exists so that the members can get together and socialize. It is an institution too, but the institutional part of it exists only to further the environmental interrelationship. The university, however, is in-between. There are a great many people in the university environment (this varies, of course, from university to university) who are not part of the university as an institution, and many things happen within the university environment which are not related to the university as an institution (political groups, cultural groups, etc.). But the university has a task that it is trying to perform beyond just forming and servicing an environment. It is an organization which offers educational services. Families and communities are environments, not institutions. According to some definitions, the family is an institution in society, but not according to the one given above. Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a particular grouping is an environment or an institution. A parish, for instance, can be a real community that is an environment. Or it can simply be an institution, a religious organization providing certain services to its members. A person can be a part of an institution in a variety of ways. He can be forced into it (a prisoner or slave is), or paid (workers usually are at their jobs mainly for this reason), or he can choose it (volunteer organizations exist on this basis). But a person can be a part of an environment only by being willing to be. A person can be forced by circumstances to live with a group of people, but if none of them want to have anything to do with each other, they will not form a real environment. In work situations, very often, some of the workers do not take part in the environments that form among the workers because they do not choose to. The reason environments have such an effect on their members is that the members are in some way a voluntary part of them (they want to have something to do with this particular group of people), and therefore they are open to being influenced by them. They will adopt the beliefs, attitudes, values and behavior patterns of the group so they can be part of the group. And usually, the more the group means to them, the more the values they will accept in this group will become part of their lives outside the group. Environmental factors, then, are more basic than institutional factors in Christian growth, because an institution can get people to follow certain patterns of behavior. But it cannot touch their basic beliefs, attitudes, and values without some sort of environmental process. The university is an academic concern, and it succeeds in getting people to perform certain academic actions (study, write, etc.). But often it does not succeed in getting them committed to the values it is trying to foster. Usually there are environments within a university (groupings of students, for instance) in which academic concern is discouraged. Usually also, many, many students leave the university and leave behind study and all academic concern. It has not become part of their lives. It was just an activity the university demanded so that they could get a degree in order to make money. If, however, students who enter the university without any academic interests find friends at the university who have a real academic concern, they will develop an academic interest, and it will probably be with them for the rest of their lives. The same thing is true of many Church institutions today. An example are religious education programs. It is generally agreed that many of the older approaches to catechism were very ineffective from the point of view of educational methods. Today, on the other hand, there are many instructional programs which are excellent from the point of view of educational methods. Yet, catechism had a real impact in the Church 30 years ago and religious education has much less now. It had more impact because there was an environmental dynamic going which made people want to go along with the institutional efforts. More children came to catechism because Catholics thought it was important. And when they came, they were changed by the programs, more than they are now, because the class as a whole came thinking it was important and students were ready to accept what was said (even though perhaps they were not ready to like the process involved at all). In other words, the Church today can perfectly design a program that is interesting and successful in teaching people to live as Christians. And if all the Christians only live in environments which lead them to put little value on religion (or on living as Christians), the program will be a flop. The only hope is for the religious education program to be part of a wider program to form an environment which will motivate the students to want to be Christian and to want to learn about Christianity. Environments, on the other hand, can change people without relying on institutional help. For instance, there has been a change in sexual morality in the United States despite the fact that there has been little institutional support for it (in fact, many institutions in American society have been against it). The environmental dynamic has effected the change. Moreover, some of the most effective changes in Catholics have come in non-institutional ways (the "underground churches" or Pentecostal prayer groups, for instance). These changes are not necessarily anti-institutional (some are), but they have managed to spread rapidly and change people without any institutional help. What we have said does not argue that institutions are not important for the growth of Christianity. But it does mean that in something like Christianity, people are Christians, not because they are paid to be or coerced to be, but because they voluntarily choose to be. Institutions, therefore, must be looked at in a different way than, say, in industry or government. In Christianity, institutions have to be looked at as secondary, because the primary thing which changes people (makes them better or worse Christians) is the effect of environments, the free interaction of people which promotes or fails to promote Christianity. Institutions are effective only when they create or help such environments - or when they are based on such environments (like a Christian action group which draws upon an environment of real Christianity). In other words, institutional concerns are not irrelevant to Christian renewal; but they are secondary. The primary concern has to be in forming Christian environments. Institutions which foster this process (and draw upon it) are valuable. Those which do not, are not. In fact, the whole question of how to design or evaluate a Christian institution cannot be answered except by understanding the environmental dynamic of Christianity and seeing how the institution contributes to this dynamic. FORMING CHRISTIAN ENVIRONMENTS (COMMUNITIES) 3) When society as a whole cannot be expected to accept Christianity, then it is necessary to form communities within society to make Christian life possible. The main goal of pastoral work is to provide Christian environments, within which Christianity is openly expressed and accepted, within which a person can find the support he needs to be a Christian. The question that remains is the question of how such environments can be formed. Our society is not Christian. Even within our churches, Christian environments are not so easy to find. What can be done? The answer is that we need to form "Christian communities." A community is a type of environment - a strong, effective form of environment. In the next chapter the nature of "community" will be discussed, and the different meanings of the word will be distinguished. In this section, community is understood as a Christian environment. A historical perspective provides a way of seeing more clearly the pastoral situation of the Church today as regards environmental forces and community. In the first 300 years of Christian history, the Church had a very effective form of social organization for helping Christians to live as Christians. Those who became Christians then perceived Christianity as the most important thing that ever happened to the human race. They readily joined with other Christians for the purpose of living as Christians. The communities they joined were relatively small and tightly knit, with a high degree of morale and social cohesion. The result was that a person who lived in the Christian Church in the early centuries had a great deal of help in living as a strong Christian. He was part of an environment (a community) which was much stronger than any other environment he was part of, and it provided him strong support in being a Christian. Because of their strength and vitality, these communities attracted other men to Christianity. In the course of the fourth century, a major change occurred. The Roman emperors became Christians, and they made Christianity the state religion. The result was a revolution in the way Christianity was related to the environmental forces of the time. In a relatively short period, all of society became Christian (part of the Church). Christians no longer existed in strong communities within society. But being part of society and being Christian became the same thing. The Church became the religious institution for all of society and the state became the political institution for all of society. In other words, Christendom (a society almost all of whose members accepted Christianity) was formed. Christendom brought many benefits to Christian life. For one thing, it brought many more people to the Christian faith and life. At the beginning of the fourth century, the Christians were a relatively small percentage of the Roman Empire. At the end of the fifth century, the pagans were a relatively small percentage of the Roman Empire. Every environment in society (with the exception of some frontier situations where two civilizations made contact and, for a while, some remote rural situations) was Christian. There was a strong force drawing people to Christianity and keeping them Christian. Moreover, because Christianity was the life of society, everything in life could be Christianized and directed toward the glory of God. The following centuries were times in which men tried to see all of life in a Christian way. It would be too much to say that they succeeded perfectly. But the results were impressive. There was, however, at the same time a certain price to be paid in this change. The environment worked to make more people Christian than they had been before, it is true, but it also produced a lower overall level of Christianity among Christians. For one thing, since everyone was a Christian, people were not called upon to make their Christianity a matter of personal choice the way they had to when there were other options. Also, because a person became an outcast in society if he stopped being a Christian (since it was a Christian society), many people were inclined to stay Christians even though they had no desire to live a Christian life (while before they would have just dropped out). Also, it became harder to maintain Church discipline when the Church was no longer a tightly knit community within society from which someone could be easily excluded. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, another revolution occurred in the way Christianity was related to the environmental forces of the time. Society began to fall away from Christian belief. It became acceptable in society not to believe in Christianity (It was socially acceptable even before it was legally acceptable). The change began among certain thinkers in France and England who moved toward deism and a skepticism about Christianity. By the 18th century, the Enlightenment, represented by men like Voltaire, Diderot, Priestly and many others, was a dominant force in Europe. Environments began to change one by one. And as environments changed, the faith of the Christian people weakened. Because they had been taught to identify "what was right" in matters of religion with "what was accepted by society as a whole", most people began to weaken in their Christian conviction and their Christian living when they saw that Christianity was not being accepted by society as a whole the way it had been. In the Church of the first centuries, the fact that most men did not believe in Christianity was not necessarily a motive for losing faith. In fact, for many it was a strengthening motive because they expected that when they became Christians, they were joining a group within society that had something the rest of society did not have. But since by the end of the 17th century Christians considered themselves to be the society and not a group within society (they identified themselves primarily as Frenchmen or Europeans and not as Christians), a change in the religious conviction of society meant a change in the religious convictions of Christians. Therefore, as society became less and less supportive of a person's being a Christian, there was a gradual weakening of the environmental support most Christians had for being Christians. For the first time in the history of the Church, the whole Church was faced with a weakening of environmental support for being a Christian. A variety of things happened as a result of this change. Some environments in Western society stayed Christian because they were out of touch with the main currents of society (Many rural environments are still in this condition today, although less and less so). In the United States, ghettos were formed by immigrants who had little social contact with the rest of the country because of the nationality difference (and this trend was strengthened by the attempts of the Church to maintain a separate school system and a separate social system, by forbidding mixed marriages, etc.). These ghettos stayed Catholic - in fact, they tended to perpetuate a form of Christendom. But in an increasing number of situations in Western society, the environment provided less and less support for thinking and living as a Christian, and the result was a weakening of Christian life. Today, many parts of Western society are de-Christianized, and the trend is in that direction. In fact, even within Church institutions, even in environments which during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries were traditionally Christian (like Polish or Irish neighborhoods in American cities), the environmental forces are now against Christianity. Since there is less and less of a natural separation between different environments (Modern forms of communication have drawn modern society much closer and made it much more homogeneous), the Church can rely less and less on natural environmental forces (rural or ghetto conservatism, for instance, or separate school systems) to maintain Christian life. There are two pastoral approaches that can be taken in the face of the de-Christianization of Western society. One is to try to make society as a whole Christian (or different environments as a whole Christian). Traditionally, this has only worked when someone or some group of people who had control over a whole environment (the secular rulers, usually) became Christian and were willing to use their influence to Christianize the parts of society they were in control of. Conceivably, making environments as a whole Christian might also be accomplished through Christians and Christian ideas gradually beginning to permeate society or different environments in society, the way technological changes or political ideas begin to gradually permeate society. But the approach of making society as a whole Christian does not seem very feasible because society as a whole is resistant to Christianity; and therefore, it seems highly unlikely either that secular rulers would or could make all of society Christian or that Christianity will permeate society by natural trends. The second pastoral approach is to form Christian communities. This approach would mean returning to the strategy which the early Church (and many other religious groups throughout the centuries) found so successful. A real Christian community (especially in a society like our own in which there is little sense of common purpose and identity) should have the ability to provide an environment in which people could live strong Christian lives. If people can find Christian communities which are alive, they will have the strength, as Christians, to exert an influence upon society (and not simply conform to society). And the more these Christian communities grow, the greater the effect they will have upon society. The main goal of pastoral action in the Church today can be described in a variety of ways. We need to find an alternative form of Church life to a Christendom approach. To use a phrase which Karl Rahner made popular: We need to form a diaspora Christianity. We need to find a way of providing for people an authentically Christian environment of sufficient strength to make it possible for them to live as vital Christians if they so choose. We need to form real Christian communities. |
