A Strategy for Pastoral Action

In a recent conversation with a friend who is a  priest from Poland I felt prompted to relate to him my personal pastoral strategy. How do I see my personal ministry functioning in today's world? The first point to make, before even considering my own ideas, is that any activity must take place within the context of the epoch making and defining event we call Vatican II. Charles de Gaulle called it the most important event in modern history. Its influence means that the actions of any individual, including popes, must be seen as part of the paradigm. Turning to contemporary New Zealand society, as a diocesan priest, I see the disintegration  of traditional and long standing family and social structures in the context of widening inequality and significant demographic change. In  many ways, at a religious level, this is analogous to the chaotic period following the fall of the Roman Empire and the division of Europe into many different political entities and a subsequent loss of identity, tradition and transmission of culture. It was in this time that monasteries became crucial in retaining and passing on faith, culture and spirituality. 

I see parishes and urban religious communities as performing the same task today. They should be centres of spirituality, culture and civilization around with a renewed community can crystallize. This means that we already exist in a periphery situation. We do not need to search abroad for peripheries which happen to be in their midst should we care to notice them: "Then, turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, Do you see this woman'." (Luke 7: 44) The implications of the paradigm of infant baptism and religious freedom mean that the tribal loyalties of the past are dying along with nominal religious adherence. The Catholic Church cannot take anything for granted, although she has the promises given by her through St Peter, but she must work harder to provide a house built on rock for all the refugees from a collapsing post-modern situation where everything including human identity and sexuality itself is being placed in doubt. It is not a time for the fainthearted. The strength of personal witness to the faith and a reasonable defense of the hope that is within us (cf 1 Peter 3: 15) is essential. The role of a priest, in parishes, is to foster and nurture the gifts and charisms of all the evangelizers who come to him for the sacraments and motivate them to realize a new Christian culture on the ruins left by the house built on the sand of post-modernism, the Frankfurt School and rampant globalized capitalism.