AMERICAN CATHOLICISM By: John J. O'Brien, C.P.

BEING AMERICAN AND CATHOLIC - #2

WHAT ARE OUR PRIORITIES?

What set of priorities does the church honor in its mission to the world? Because the church is a sacrament or a sign of salvation, it must tangibly, visibly, and audibly proclaim the faith and the salvation that comes from Christ. It has to set same priorities for its service. Father Anthony J. Gittens presents four priorities for the church in the United States. (1) A preferential option for the poor and a challenge to the rich. (2) The promotion of new communities, (3) A commitment to mission instead of maintenance, and (4) A reverse evangelization (i.e., being a church that both gives and receives).

This column will consider the first priority: a preferential option for the poor and a challenge to the rich.

The church in the United States is being invited to move from the center, a place of comfort and respectability, to the margins. This engages the church with real people in their flesh and blood struggle for life, discipleship and citizenship. This stance confronts a culture that promotes individualism, privatizes our joys, and isolates people within their own social, language and economic classes. Concretely, this priority pushes the church to go beyond a willingness to sit on committees or to offer handouts for the needy. It must make a preferential (though not exclusive) option for the poor and the needy in this society. The church must be seen in the company of the poor and heard to irritate the rich. As Father Anthony Gittens states, "The preferential option for the poor, the actual choice God makes for the needy and brokenhearted (see Luke 4:18), is the basis for what we ourselves do." The option for the neediest means that the church has to involve itself with the most abandoned and isolated human groups.

Gittens identifies three groups of needy persons in the United States. First, the millions who struggle to survive below the poverty line. Many are homeless, a scandal in the most affluent nation the world has ever known. The homeless are often excluded from the church. So are others when the church practices a form of Apartheid that divides people who share a common baptism. Parishes are rarely multicultural. Some are racist, manifesting hostility towards newly arrived peoples. Gittens says, "For parishioners to maintain that they are not segregated and that all are welcome, when the liturgy or expression of community blatantly favors one group and implicitly excludes others, is unchristian." Third, the needy are any persons who cannot cope in this society. "Those who acknowledge that...they are unable to remain afloat and are slowly sinking, are among the neediest in this rapidly changing society." These people need an experience of hope, love, and brother - and sisterhood.

It is immoral for the rich to luxuriate while others barely survive and just about cope. The call to repentance is unequivocal. "The church in the united States is required to confront the comfortable and call them by example to a truly missionary response, a turning of their lives inside out rather than a careful outside-in maintenance of their own self-sufficiency and privilege. The gospel does not only console like balm; it stings like an astringent on an open sore....Has the church...betrayed the gospel and overlooked many of those whom Jesus favored."