Does your concept of the gospel and practice of church need to be reinvented?

Is your concept of church primarily:

 * sanctuary centered or community centered
 * gathered church or scattered church
 * dispenser of grace or doer of justice
 * 1 day of week or 6 days of the week

The following is a review of a book, Revolution From the Heart, 1987, by Niall O'Brien.  Hey, you Protestants may have something to learn as well.

Father Niall O'Brien worked for over 20 years in the Philippines on the island of Negros as a member of the Society of St. Columban.  He arrived in the Philippines in 1964---a time when the Second Vatican Council was in full swing; it was introducing major changes within the Roman Catholic Church trying to make the church more accessible to the people and the poor.

As Father O'Brien arrived in Negros, he noticed a set of beautiful houses which belonged to the sugar planters.  His colleague commented: "They own ninety percent of the land in the municipality of Kafankalau.  Many of the owners don't live here at all, but live in Bacolod or Manila and have an administrator looking after the land."  I am reminded of Galilee where most of the best agricultural land in Palestine was located.  Much of it was owned by absentee Sadducean landlords living in Jerusalem.

O'Brien also noticed extensive poverty in the same area.  In learning the language, he would go door to door talking with the people so he saw their poverty first-hand.  By the way, the masses in Galilee were also poor people even though some of the surrounding land was fertile and productive.  Rich land, poor people---in both Galilee and the Philippines.

O'Brien writes:

"I was taken aback by the poverty, but it did not disturb me deeply since I saw my work as being somehow 'spiritual.'  To me that meant exclusively concerned with the 'soul,' which I pictured as a sort of invisible second heart, like a flame.  My questions focused on whether the people were going to Mass, saying their prayers, or properly married.  If there was a sick person, I would ask whether they had received the sacrament of the dying, the last anointing, and frequently as a result of these visits I found myself coming back to 'fix up' marriage or anoint the sick.  I made sure to leave in every house a copy of the formal for baptism in danger of death.  If there was a sick person in the house, I got them put on the list for our weekly Communion rounds, when the priests of the parish brought the Eucharist to the sick.  I do not recall people asking me to help in medical matters or with problems of injustice."

Next O'Brien briefly summarized Spain's entry into the Philippines and the role the Catholic church played:

"Spain came in search of spices and gold: a voyage unashamedly commercial, funded by banking houses of Europe such as Fugger's.    The found neither spices nor gold in quantity, but stayed to propagate their faith---the personal decision of Philip the Second, after whom the islands are named.  Letters to Philip are still extant, in which the first priests vehemently attacked the oppression of the native population by the soldiery and corrupt government officials.

"As time went on, however, the Church was co-opted into the new ruling body and became almost identified with it---an important part of the colonial means of control.  When the people rose up in 1896 and overthrew Spanish colonial rule, the Spanish Church fell with it and a great number of friars were expelled."

Then O'Brien describes how they church was relating to the people.  He calls the relationship a "mechanistic theology" in which the parish church "provided the sacraments, education and grace."  The people were not the Church, but "object of her care."  The parish was like a filling station where one went to get these graces.  A priest must be in each parish to attend the pump."

Then O'Brien went through a series of stages which ended in a revolutionary change in his ministry.  Father O'Brien was familiar with the social fact of poverty, but one day he was deeply touched by the pain of poverty.  As he was traveling in a remote area, walking, he took shelter from a rainstorm in a shack.  "I took out my food and was thoughtlessly beginning to eat it when I noticed all eyes were upon me."  Suddenly it dawned upon him, "that they were all hungry and there was no food."  So he shared his food with the children.  O'Brien experienced two things: 1) shame, because he started eating in front of hungry children, and 2) hunger because there was not enough food for him.  For the first time in his life he "experienced hunger because there was no food."

This seemingly small incident shook Father O'Brien to the core of his being; he now realized that the ministry of the Columbans must address the issue of poverty.

When the time for O'Brien's yearly vacation arrived, he decided to attend a church congress in Manila where the top liturgists and pastoral theologians would be present:

"I had enjoyed the Congress and learned a lot, but as it was ending I suddenly realized that no one, not one speech or petition or statement, referred to the fact that so many of the world's people were hungry.  My mind went back to the little shack in the mountains and the bloated hungry children gobbling my sandwich.

"I put my head down and let others leave.  I had no heart to move.  So much suffering, and the best and brightest had not even touched on it.  Once again I was overcome by grief like the night I had seen the little boy in the doorway.  It came on me like a storm, and now I was ashamed to lift my head in case anyone would see.

"Presently I felt a hand on my head.  I looked up.  I was alone in  the great hall with an old bearded Greek archimandrite.  "They never mentioned the poor," I said to him.

He nodded compassionately again and again.  He understood.  His threadbare clothes said the same thing.  We remained there silently, understanding each other, anguished and shamed that the churches we loved so much should take so long, so long, to notice that Lazarus was at the gate."

About this time another papal encyclical was published entitled "The Development of Peoples."  It was an "impassioned plea for the poor' and it opened the door to the "idea of structural injustice," but O'Brien was not yet ready to understand and deal with systems of oppression.  He was consumed by his successful missionary among the poor.  The numbers of persons at Mass, in Catechism, in schools were increasing rapidly.  As a religious professional, he was content to play the "numbers game."

In his next assignment, O'Brien ended up living on a sugar plantation where he got to know both the owner and the exploited workers well.  The owner appeared to be a decent person, often quite humane and charitable.  Yet the plantation system that he and others ran created semi-slaves out of the workers.  After much reflection, O'Brien concluded:

"I was beginning---only beginning---to understand structural injustice and how important it was to its perpetuation that at the head of these unjust systems there should be a face, a good face, a friendly face, a human face like that of Juan Ramirez, to mask the real nature of the system."

Next bog:  Part 2, Reinventing the Gospel and Church