Act Justly, Love Mercifully, and Walk Humbly with Your God

By Don McNeill and Margaret Pfeil

The Center for Social Concerns provides community-based learning courses, community-based research, and service opportunities for students and faculty and lies at the heart of the University of Notre Dame. It is a place where faith and action, service and learning, research and resolve intersect. For more than 30 years the Center has offered educational experiences in social concerns inspired by Gospel values and the Catholic social tradition so that students and faculty may better understand and respond to poverty and injustice. Through the Center's programs students, faculty, staff, and alumni are enabled to think critically about today’s complex social realities and about their responsibilities in facing them.
The Second Vatican Council articulated the significance of the baptismal call to discipleship for all believers, emphasizing active participation of the laity in the life of the church in the world. Responding to that urging, the Congregation of Holy Cross dedicated themselves to intentional formation of the laity through academic study of theology and through long-term immersion at their aposolates in the United States, Peru, Chile, and Uganda. The Center for Social Concerns, founded at the University of Notre Dame in 1983 by Fr. Don McNeill, C.S.C, deepened these efforts through a combination of pastoral theology, community-based learning, and lay formation for mission.
This edited volume consists of eleven firsthand accounts from those directly formed by the Center for Social Concerns' approach to pastoral theology and through post-graduate collaboration in ministry with the Congregation of the Holy Cross. These fifteen essays will hold great interest for Catholics wishing to explore the implications of Vatican II for the church's mission in the world, for undergraduate and graduate students focusing on pastoral theology and missiology, and for all the people of good drawn to explore the relationships between faith and justice, contemplation and action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781449483586

Book preview

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We dedicate this book to all who have been formed and shaped through the Community for the International Lay Apostolate (CILA), the programs of the Center for Social Concerns (CSC), the Holy Cross Associates (HCA), and the Holy Cross Mission Center.

Contents

Introduction

Fr. Don McNeill, C.S.C., and Margaret Pfeil

Chapter 1: Walking Humbly with God: Vatican II after Fifty Years and the Center for Social Concerns after Thirty Years

Andrea Smith Shappell and Felicia Johnson O’Brien

Chapter 2: Vatican II and Lay Formation: The Early Years of the Community for the International Lay Apostolate (CILA)

Maureen R. O’Brien

Chapter 3: Taking It to the Streets: The Prophetic Vision of Msgr. Jack Egan and Peggy Roach

Barbara Frey

Chapter 4: Walk the Walk

Stacy Hennessy

Chapter 5: Contemplation and Action: Conversations with Sr. Judith Anne Beattie, C.S.C., and Mary Ann Roemer

Margaret Pfeil

Chapter 6: Holy Cross Associates and Formation in Lay Vocation

Matt Feeney

Chapter 7: Holy Cross Associates in the United States: Sociological Insights into Formation in Intentional Lay Community

Mary Ellen Konieczny

Chapter 8: Learning to Fail: Lay Formation and the Holy Cross Associates

Bill Cavanaugh

Chapter 9: From Notre Dame to Chile and Back: Living Faith and Justice

Lou Nanni

Chapter 10: Canto Grande

Charles Kenney

Chapter 11: Holy Cross in Uganda: Living the Lay Vocation Theologically

Paul Mitchell

Afterword

Fr. Paul Kollman, C.S.C.

Biographies of contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Fr. Don McNeill, C.S.C., and Margaret Pfeil

This priceless treasure we hold, so to speak, in a common earthenware jar—to show that the splendid power of it belongs to God and not to us. We are handicapped on all sides, but we are never frustrated; we are puzzled, but never in despair. We are persecuted, but we never have to stand it alone: we may be knocked down but we are never knocked out! Every day we experience something of the death of the Lord Jesus, so that we may also know the power of the life of Jesus in these bodies of ours. (2 Corinthians 4:7–10)¹

On a beautiful, sunny day in early 1988, we recalled this passage from 2 Corinthians together as we sat on a bench at St. George’s, a K–12 school in Santiago, Chile, run by the Congregation of Holy Cross. I (Margie) had just arrived in Chile the previous October to begin two years as a Holy Cross Associate, and the initial landing had been rocky. The last five people to be disappeared by the Pinochet regime had been abducted just before our arrival, exacerbating tensions in the country and heightening the suffocating fear born of fourteen years of dictatorship. On a personal level, when Sylvia Elixavide, Bill Cavanaugh, and I stepped off the plane in Santiago, fresh from language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico, our hearts sank as we quickly realized that we would need at least another two months of immersion in Chilean Spanish before we would be able to communicate beyond a rudimentary level with our neighbors. I was entering a time of spiritual desert.

On the bench that day, Don encouraged me to embrace the fragility and vulnerability of that season of life, an enduring piece of spiritual wisdom that continues to nourish both of us. To this day, nearly every time we meet, we remember that we hold our treasure in clay jars and laugh at the latest reminders of our respective fragility.

In summer 2015, Don called to ask whether I would be willing to work with him on a book. Thus, the present volume began to take shape, with the generous and enthusiastic contributions of many. As has characterized Don’s fifty years of priesthood, the book he envisioned could be nurtured only in community. This book springs from the countless personal relationships Don has cultivated as a Holy Cross religious utterly devoted to involving as many people as possible in the work of the Congregation of Holy Cross in service of the church’s mission in the world. Don wanted to explore the story of this communal ministerial journey and its fruits.

More than fifty years ago, the Second Vatican Council articulated the significance of the baptismal call to discipleship for all believers, emphasizing active participation of the laity in the life of the church in the world. Responding to that urging, the Congregation of Holy Cross dedicated itself to intentional formation of the laity through academic study of theology and through long-term immersion at its apostolates in the United States, Peru, Chile, and Uganda, among other places. The Center for Social Concerns, founded by Don and a few collaborators at the University of Notre Dame in 1983, deepened these efforts through a combination of pastoral theology, community-based learning, and lay formation for mission.

This volume offers a glimpse of that Vatican II vision seen through the lens of particular narratives. And, for every personal experience recounted here, there are thousands more that remain untold. We lament that we were not able to include them all. We dedicate this book to all who have been formed and shaped through the Community for the International Lay Apostolate (CILA), the programs of the Center for Social Concerns (CSC), the Holy Cross Associates (HCA), and the Holy Cross Mission Center.

And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)²

Don has enfleshed this passage from Micah: generations of his students have been formed by bringing these words to life and accepting Don’s gentle but persistent invitations to live into them as part of Christian discipleship. This text greeted all who entered the original CSC building, and it is artfully inscribed on a silk scarf in the current CSC coffeehouse, reproduced on the jacket of this book.

Each chapter in some way reflects the spiritual fruit born of trying and often failing to act justly, love mercifully, and walk humbly with God. Bill Cavanaugh recalls a friend wishing him well as he left for Chile, while adding that it would probably be better for him if he failed. Lou Nanni remembers his baptism by fire as a rookie teacher in Santiago. Indeed, a connecting thread running through all these narratives is the tremendously formative experience of reaching the limits of one’s capacities and vulnerabilities and finding God there, within oneself and in textured layers of community—the Congregation of Holy Cross, the Associate households, the local community of friends and coworkers, and the Body of Christ that is the church, at once scarred and resurrected.

Begin by considering the first two chapters together. The first essay by Andrea Smith Shappell and Felicia Johnson O’Brien offers a fine overview of Don’s ministerial life and the ways in which it has yielded so many beautiful fruits, not least in the ongoing work of the CSC. Read in tandem with Maureen O’Brien’s piece, it provides the overarching historical context of the book. Maureen carefully articulates the significance of Vatican II for opening up greater possibilities for the sort of lay formation pursued through CILA. It paved the way for Don’s efforts to invite students to correlate their immersion experiences with theological reflection, particularly through theology courses using the method of community-based learning.

As Barbara Frey’s essay details, Don enthusiastically enlisted many collaborators along the way, including Henri Nouwen, Msgr. Jack Egan, and Peggy Roach, graciously building ties of relationship between students and activists working in inner cities. As those engaged in urban ministry came to campus for conferences and times of respite, Don invited them, along with committed faculty, to share their wisdom with young lay students wrestling with questions of faith, justice, and vocation.

The Urban Plunge and summer immersion placements took shape through these connections, facilitated through the pastoral efforts of Sr. Judith Anne Beattie, C.S.C.; Mary Ann Roemer; Marilyn Bellis; Dee Schlotfeldt; and other colleagues. They began working with Don in the Office of Volunteer Services in 1976, sharing an unobtrusive space in 1.5 LaFortune that only a truly persevering student could manage to find, as Stacy Hennessy attests. By emphasizing the interrelationship of service, justice education, theological reflection, and prayer, they encouraged students to notice the connections between contemplation and action and to discern how God might be drawing them vocationally. Immersion experiences like that of Charlie Kenney in Peru paved the way for the establishment of the HCA program, and Mary Ann walked with students through the application and placement process.

Matt Feeney bears witness to the lasting formative impact of Mary Ann’s accompaniment and of his time in HCA. Mary Ellen Konieczny’s review of HCA materials through the program’s twenty-eight years of existence resonates with Matt’s narrative, showing how the HCA pillars of prayer, service, community, and simple living shaped the lives and vocational paths of those involved, not least through the active involvement of members of the Congregation of Holy Cross.

Stacy Hennessy’s chapter recounts the path leading to the establishment of the Center for Social Concerns: at Don’s invitation, she, along with Mary Meg McCarthy and others, worked to make a case for establishing the CSC in the building being vacated by the WNDU radio station. Backed by a sympathetic and encouraging Fr. Hesburgh, their entreaty to the board of trustees led to the inauguration of the CSC in 1983.

As the HCA program was ending, Paul Mitchell took up an invitation from the Holy Cross Mission Center in 2007 to work with their apostolates in eastern Uganda through the Overseas Lay Missioner Program. Having been shaped significantly by CSC programs and immersion opportunities as an undergraduate, he describes well the disorienting transition into living the lay vocation without the benefit of more structured formation, like that of the novitiate in religious communities. What sort of formation is appropriate and necessary for laypeople entering young adulthood in a fragmented world?

Paul’s question lingers and points to the open-endedness of the overarching narrative of this volume. For its part, the CSC has grown from humble roots between floors in LaFortune in an enterprise anchored by four people to spacious new accommodations in Geddes Hall where a staff of more than forty continue to accompany students in linking theory and praxis, faith and justice, contemplation and action. Matt Feeney writes of his bucket list desire to re-establish some version of the HCA program, perhaps under the title that Don McNeill suggested, Companions on Mission.

Fifty years after Vatican II, what might lay collaboration with Holy Cross in service of the church’s mission look like? How might the vocational paths of lay and religious contribute to a mutually formative experience of being companions on mission? Come, Holy Spirit!

That these essays surface such questions for discernment is a testament to Don’s vision and ministry. He did not want this book to be a Festschrift in his honor, and so the contributors have respected his wish; yet, it is impossible to enter into these narratives without appreciating the profoundly formative influence Don has lovingly exercised in all of our lives. The authors have undertaken this project together as an expression of our deep gratitude for his life and witness among us. He truly has been a companion who invited all of us on mission with him. ¡Gracias, Padre Don!

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1 I (Don McNeill) prefer this J.B. Phillips version of 2 Cor. 4:7–10 and particularly the phrase We may be knocked down, but we are never knocked out!

2 New International Version.

CHAPTER 1

Walking Humbly with God: Vatican II after Fifty Years and the Center for Social Concerns after Thirty Years

Andrea Smith Shappell and Felicia Johnson O’Brien

You have been told, O mortal, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

In the Old Testament book of Micah, God chastises the people of Israel for their corrupt ways and pleads with them to convert. The Center for Social Concerns (CSC) at the University of Notre Dame finds its roots in this call to conversion, to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God. Gaudium et Spes , a document that emerged from the Second Vatican Council in 1965, echoes this call to discover God’s will on the journey in contemporary times. Inspired by these mandates, Don McNeill, C.S.C., with Judith Anne Beattie, C.S.C., and others, founded the Center for Social Concerns in 1983.

Fifty years after Vatican II, this call continues to inspire the work of the CSC. Prior to Vatican II, the church utilized a hierarchical model, one that worked from the top down and rarely employed input from the laity. In contrast, the documents promulgated in Vatican II stressed a more symbiotic relationship between the church and the world. It urged more participation from the laity, from all peoples, and from all cultures.³ The model of community-based learning, which recognizes that all parties benefit from acts of service, also mirrors the shift in thinking that occurred after Vatican II. The notion of inclusivity, of reaching out to all of humankind,⁴ further encourages CSC programming to reach an incredibly diverse population in the local, national, and international spheres. By focusing on the church in the world, we as a church, and at the CSC in particular, have an ongoing responsibility to respond to the signs of the times by listening closely to current events, educating ourselves and our students about current social issues, and, finally, advocating on behalf of those who are most affected by injustice in the modern world.

As we reflect upon the roots of the CSC preceding 1983, it is also important to review Don McNeill’s formation and the deep influence of Vatican II. As an undergraduate at Notre Dame, Don spent much of his time on the basketball court and in student government activities. After his graduation from Notre Dame in 1958, he and his brother participated in an Institute for European Studies semester in Vienna. While there, Don took a life-changing course with Victor Frankl, discussing ideas that would later become Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. At the end of the semester, Don went to India, where he was exposed to poverty in a way he had never seen. These two experiences, each confronting suffering, were instrumental in leading him to his vocation as a priest.

Don studied in Rome as a seminarian from 1962 to 1966, coinciding with Vatican II. The church’s shift to embrace society more fully made a strong impression on him, particularly the emphasis on addressing the disparity between first-world and third-world countries, integrating local culture in the celebration of liturgy, and increasing lay participation in the life of the church. He reflected that the document Gaudium et Spes gave many of us great hope that compassion and justice-related responses to, and with, the suffering of the poor were constitutive components of the Gospel.⁵ In other words, the most basic and important work of the church asked that all of its members act with compassion and justice in the world. He carried this vision back to Notre Dame, where he founded the Center for Experiential Learning in 1971.

Don’s courses, Theology and Community Service (TCS) and Theology and Social Ministry (TSM), were foundational for hundreds of students from the 1970s to 2002. Don’s pastoral theological pedagogy required students to form relationships with the marginalized in the local community and invited students to reflect on their experiences through journal writing. In class, Don facilitated discussion to help students integrate their experiences in the community with their insights from the course readings. Eventually, these types of courses came to be known as service-learning or community-based learning courses that flourish at the Center for Social Concerns to this day.

Getting to Know Fr. Don

Andrea: As a sophomore at Notre Dame, I enrolled in the course Theology and Community Service on the advice of friends who had taken the course. I was very shy and challenged myself to be in a small group discussion course that included weekly visits to two women in a nursing home. The process of visiting, writing a journal about the visits, responding to theological readings of the course, and discussing the visits and readings with seven peers was life-changing for me. My faith became alive, and I looked for more opportunities to take courses from Don and to become involved with the student group CILA (see chapter 2 by Maureen O’Brien).

Formed in the integration of faith and action as an undergraduate groupie of Don McNeill, I worked in family ministry with Catholic Charities of Gary, Indiana, and then with the social apostolate in New Orleans, Louisiana. I returned to Notre Dame to study for a master’s degree in theology and asked Don whether there was a part-time position at the Center for Experiential Learning. Don persuaded me to consider a full-time position that was available, so I decided to take the position coordinating the summer service projects and participating on his teaching teams while pursuing the degree part-time.

I was on the teaching team for Don’s experiential learning courses for twenty years. He was a master of inviting four to six people each year to teach with him, allowing much of the classroom time for small group discussions. Don’s teaching style offered students a classroom that cultivated the integration of learning from the actions of service with the knowledge from books and lectures. For the following seven years, I worked with students discerning postgraduate service. Now, I direct the Summer Service Learning Program and lead efforts related to theological reflection at the CSC. We still use Don’s pastoral theological pedagogy in the Summer Service Learning Program, a three-credit course in theology for approximately two hundred twenty-five students taught by a teaching team of twenty facilitators.

Felicia: After graduating from Notre Dame in 1995, I helped start a community-based organization and orphanage in Honduras called Farm of the Child. In 1998, at Don’s prompting, I took a job working at the admissions office of Notre Dame to focus on recruiting efforts in Latin America. I later pursued my master’s in social work at Catholic University in Washington, DC, where I subsequently worked as a social worker with immigrants. Eight years ago, I joined the staff at the Center for Social Concerns as a program director with the Summer Service Learning Program. Personally and professionally, Don continues to accompany me along the different stages of life from college student to professional, wife, and mother.

I didn’t really get to know Fr. Don, Padre, until my senior year at Notre Dame in 1994. My friend Katie Glynn and I were both greatly impacted by our summer service projects and needed a place to process our