ARTICLES

Horizontal Hell

A Report on the Local "Small Church Community" Conference

BY STANFORD ESPEDAL

"The Pre-Vatican II Church was entirely vertical in its structure. God was the sole focus. It was not a communicative Church; the horizontal dimension of human relationships was lacking. Vestibules set the boundaries to the place of silence and strictly vertical relationship to God. Vatican II changed all that; the Council gave a good 'elbow in the ribs' to this vertical Church structure by reminding us that we are the Church; we are the people of God. Our relationship to one another is just as much a part of 'being Church' as worshiping God in the Mass."

Thus began Father Jim Rafferty, pastor of Saint Timothy parish in Escondido, in a workshop on parishes restructuring as communities. My head reeled with the implications of his statement. It seemed like a formula for toppling divine authority and replacing it with human authority simply by making the horizontal equal with the vertical.

I had come to the Small Church Communities Alliance conference at the Mission San Diego de Alcala on Saturday, October 15. Monsignor Neal Dolan, pastor of Saint Michael's in Poway and head of the local Small Church Communities Alliance since 1990, led the proceedings.

The local alliance is affiliated with the National Alliance of Parishes Restructuring as Communities on whose board of directors Monsignor Dolan served from 1990-2001. The president of the national alliance is Father Art Baranowski, a frequent speaker at the dissent-ridden national Call to Action conferences. Baranowski says small church communities are a way to "re-invent the Church."

The conference theme was "Hungry? Come to the Table." The keynote speaker, diocesan director of media relations Bernadeane Carr, gave a talk on the Eucharist as our primary means of nourishment. Present were facilitators and group members from Saint Michael's Poway; Saint Timothy's Escondido; Sacred Heart, Coronado; Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and other parishes.

The day began at 8:30 with a conti nental breakfast. I munched on croissants and fruit at a round table with a group of ladies who told me how wonderful their Small Church Community experience was. I may have been the only person at the conference not part of a small church group. I explained that my purpose was to learn about it for myself and my parish.

After listening to Ms. Carr's presen tation we "did church." This sort of activity, I learned, is typical of all small church meetings. Led by Monsignor Dolan, we started with a responsive call to prayer that emphasized the triumph of the weak, foolish, and poor over the strong and wise. A Gospel reading followed: Matthew 25: 14-30, the parable of the talents. Then we engaged in another responsive prayer which concluded thus: "If we would be church, then we are poor and blind and hungry. If we are church, then we are justice, bread, and sight. We pray for church to happen, for courage and for truth. We pray, in need, with all our hearts, for church to be, for us to be your church."

This led into the heart of the session, the "opportunity for sharing," in which everyone must participate. One on one with the person sitting next to us, we had to choose one of three questions: "Share a time you recognized the Lord in the 'small' or 'weak.'" "When do you fail to serve because of 'mistaken heights?'" "Identify a person you know that makes church happen." Since participation was mandatory and I was faced off with a man who had just joined our table, I responded briefly to number two with respect to some family situations. He also chose number two and proceeded to talk about how he was gay; the only gay man in his parish, and was thinking about giving up trying to motivate people in his parish to join a small church community since he was more interested in working to get President Bush impeached and our military out of Iraq. As soon as the larger group discussion began, I moved to another chair.

We then broke up and made our way to various classrooms for the workshops, where I heard Father Rafferty open by announcing the revolutionary formula above. He continued by quoting from a handout, "It has been almost 40 years since the close of Vatican II, and in that time parishes have tried a great number of programs to renew the Church and individual parishioners. Only in the past 15 years has there been a renewal process to change the parish structure itself."

He pointed out that the term "restructure" can cause tension in a parish unless it is properly understood. "Parishes as we know them have become very large, and as many state -- imperson al. A primary need in recent surveys shows the need to belong; the need for community. American Catholics have less stable relationships than in the past, which brings isolation in life. A parish must offer proper attention to deepening relationships. This requires conversion" -- "to what?" I thought "and forums to share faith.

"Restructuring a parish," Father Rafferty continued, "has a specific direction: its first goal to provide oppor tunities for people to meet other ordi nary people to share life and faith. This can be done by doing parish programs differently. It requires sharing life stories in the context of the Gospel message no matter what the purpose or make-up of the group. The second goal is to establish 'smaller churches' that have regular gatherings to share life and faith as Small Church Communities."

The remainder of the workshop was devoted to practical means of approaching every existing parish group with the goal of transforming them by means of Small Church Community techniques, especially their peculiar forms of prayer and the use of faith and life sharing questions.

During a workshop discussion a man said, "The people we approach need to understand the difference between the way we use scripture in faith sharing, and traditional Bible Studies."

I asked him to explain this point. He told me "Faith sharing means sharing with others who you are through your faith-based experiences without being either right or wrong."

After the workshop, as we walked back to the conference room I talked to pro-life activist Margi Pearson who is a small church leader in her parish, Sacred Heart in Coronado. I told her of my concerns about what Father Rafferty and others in the workshop had expressed. She agreed that the horizon talizing emphasis was overdone, and that the questions in the "Quest Books" that her group had been using were too "touchy-feely." However, she said she has seen some good results in her own group. "I've seen people who were cafeteria Catholics change for the better. They came into my group saying that abortion was okay in some situations; that birth control was okay as long as you follow your conscience. When they were sharing I never said they were wrong because we're not supposed to do that. But then when my turn came to share, I shared what the Church teaches and why I accept it. At least some of them have changed and have started to follow the Church's teachings on these things."

Clearly, in the right hands, the dangers of such a horizontal, humanistic approach may be mitigated. Who the facilitator is can make a difference. But as I talked to people after the conference who had been involved in the movement, it became clear that freedom from being right or wrong is a major element of small church communities. This was brought home to Mary McGuire (not her real name) as a small church member at Saint James in Solana Beach. "In the course of the sharing I found out that an unmarried couple in our small church group was living togeth er" she said. "I went to the facilitator and told him about it. He told me that if I had a problem with that I should find another group. That was the end of my involvement in small church."

It also became apparent that Small Church Communities differ radically from traditional prayer groups. Only the prayers set forth in the official books are to be used. These are meant to guide people in attaining a group religious experience. The Rosary is not allowed. One elderly lady was asked to leave her small church group at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Lakeside because she kept asking that they would pray the Rosary.

So, where did the Small Church Community come from. Its historical antecedents lie in the interfaith groups connected with Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. Some of Alinsky's cohorts, including one Father Jack Egan, found that if they guided people to a group decision using the Bible in a facilitated discussion, they could get them to work for social change much more effectively than with a persuasive lecture. The Small Church Community movement also has connections with the Call to Action syndicate, which has compiled a list of its favorite small church communities; and the notorious Renew 2000 program, which Kathleen Brown of Our Lady's Warriors has called "a vehicle for the Protestantization of the Catholic Church."

I talked with Father John Hritzko, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Ukrainian Catholic Church in La Mesa, about the faith and life sharing process used in Small Church. His response, "This sounds just like the Rogerian encounter groups which destroyed the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters in the '60s. Their superiors directed them to attend group sessions where they were required to answer immodest questions that made them bare their souls to others. Some ended up leaving the religious life, and others entered into lesbian relationships and worked for the destruction of the Church. A wonderful teaching order was completely de-Catholicized. I would never allow any such groups in my parish."

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