Healing and Developing Our Multiculturalism

A New Ministry for the Church

Rademacher

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275576
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book is a theological/pastoral response to Vatican II's call to develop our cultures as outlined in section 2 of De Ecclesia in Mundo Huius Temporis: The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It provides a historical perspective on the Church with brief outlines of the Church's relations to the Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, and Latino cultures. The author then reviews some of the defects in our present multiculturalism and suggests means for healing and developing our culture in the United States.

1

St. Paul and Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, as noted in the Introduction, is not a new challenge for the Catholic Church. The New Testament, especially St. Paul’s letters and Luke-Acts, reveals numerous encounters with a variety of cultures. These scriptures will be our first guide in dealing with the contemporary intersection of cultures. We look to the scriptures, however, not as laws, but for inspiration, as a source of insights, to shed the light of God’s Word on some of today’s pastoral problems and garner a possible response. For the sake of brevity, we will concentrate primarily on Paul’s seven authentic letters.

The Apostle Paul was born as Saul around the year 1 B.C.E. in Tarsus, Cilicia, Asia Minor. He was born and raised as a strict practitioner of the Jewish faith. Being a diaspora Jew from Tarsus did not dilute his Jewishness or his zeal for the teachings of the Torah. At that time it was customary to combine the study of the Torah with some kind of trade: Saul became a tent-maker. Through his occupation as a tent-maker, Saul was exposed to a variety of cultures. Tarsus was a large, prosperous and cosmopolitan city, and some of Saul’s customers may well have been members of the Roman military, as well as travelers from various foreign countries. His interactions with those for whom he toiled likely broadened his understanding and appreciation of the vast network of cultures running throughout the ancient near eastern world.

Not much is known about Saul’s domestic life except his occupation. Saul probably began his trade as an apprentice in his father’s workshop at age thirteen. Describing the likely conditions of his daily life, Pauline scholar Ronald Hock comments that “making tents meant rising before dawn, toiling until sunset with leather, knives, and awls, and accepting the various social stigmas and humiliations that were part of the artisans lot, not to mention the poverty—being cold, hungry, and poorly clothed.”1 In his father’s shop Saul worked elbow to elbow with the slaves. Yet, his hard work in the sweaty world of the tentmaker posed no conflict with his deep spirituality and his strict practice of the Jewish religion.

A passionate man to the core, Saul was never half-hearted about anything. In 32 C.E. he began to persecute the Christians with great zeal. He watched the stoning of St. Stephen, the Christian Church’s first martyr, with approval: “And Saul was consenting to his death” (Acts 8:1). Understandably, following Stephen’s stoning, many Christians fled the Jerusalem area, some escaping to Damascus. But Saul, with violent intentions, chased after the fleeing Christians in the hope of capturing them and taking them back to Jerusalem.

He was on his way to Damascus when “a light from heaven flashed about him,” and “His eyes were opened” (Acts 9:8). Whatever the historicity of the details in Acts, Saul experienced a profound, perhaps gradual, religious conversion. From being a zealous persecutor of Christians, Saul became a zealous preacher of the Christian message of the Word of God. In fact, he became an important pillar in the new Christian Church, proclaiming the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles alike, undertaking a set of vast missionary enterprises.

In these events, we are confronted with the question of how Saul, who took the name Paul following his conversion, dealt with the wide variety of cultures he encountered on his missionary journeys. The scandalous morals of Greek Corinth were far removed from the strict Judaism of Saul, the Pharisee. And how did the new Paul deal with the cultural gulf between Antioch and Galilee? “Antioch,” writes Edward Stourton “was a mix of self-conscious chic and unabashed pagan polytheism, culturally, if not geographically, a world away from the hills of Galilee.”2 Rome too was a capital of polytheism with as many pagan temples as New York has McDonald’s golden arches.

Culture Defined

But before we try to answer the above questions we need to have a working definition of “culture.” It can be a slippery word. First of all, culture is not the same as race. We are born into a specific race without choice or ability to alter it as a fact. Secondly, culture is not the same as ethnicity, which usually refers to a nationality or minority group. Yet, race, ethnicity and culture are very much intertwined. We will begin with the definition of culture given by Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: “The word ‘culture’ in its general sense indicates all those factors by which man refines and unfolds his manifold spiritual and bodily qualities.”3 “Culture” used in this sense is fairly new in church documents, in that it is a departure from older documents that defined culture from a specifically Catholic or Christian standpoint. The Council here accepts a positive understanding of secular culture more in tune with the social sciences of the time, which perceive that culture is very much the product of human labor and ingenuity. Culture, so understood, can be seen to consist of an “historical and social” aspect, as the Pastoral Constitution reminds us.

Still by way of definition, it may be helpful, with John Kavanaugh, to look at culture, from a threefold perspective:

A culture is a cult. It is a revelation system. It is the entire range of corporate ritual, of symbolic forms, human expressions, and productive systems. It quietly converts, elicits commitments, transforms, provides heroics, and suggests human fulfillments. The culture, then, is a gospel—a book of revelation—mediating beliefs, revealing us to ourselves. A culture is cultivation. Humans tend and till themselves through nature into culture . . . although culture is made by humans, in a special manner it makes us–to some extent in its own image. A culture is a corporate symbolic dwelling place . . . the culture is a human tabernacle, the incarnation of corporate spirit . . . culture is of psyche and psyche is formed by culture . . . Culture is the product of men and women.4

A choice is given to us regarding our relationship to culture. We can be passive, as mere bystanders and sometimes even as victims, or we can be active as participants and builders. We can make our customs, institutions and social life more human both within the family and in the civic community. “The role of Catholics is to participate in and to act as a leaven within the many cultures of the modern world.”5 If we don’t develop our culture, our culture will develop us. If we are passive before our culture, we will become clay in the hands of the potter. By osmosis or by its daily media onslaught, culture will mold and shape us in it own image, with its own values, with its own clay heroes as models. If we don’t actively take a counter-cultural stand, if we don’t become the salt and the yeast in our culture, we will become dust blowing in the wind. So we need to cling tenaciously to the risen Christ in order to hang on to our very Christian identity. And, as we will see with St. Paul, it can be done.

Our own U.S. culture is presently so fluid and evolving so rapidly into multiculturalism it tends to resist a precise definition. Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, of California State University, gives us a passing glimpse of this phenomenon: “The only requisites for success in this glitzy culture are charm, athleticism, looks and pizzazz—none of it the property of any one ethnicity. If a Latina is curvy, she not only captures more attention than a rail-thin white woman . . . but wins commensurate money, status and celebrity . . .”6 In light of this, we must take caution, while reviewing Paul’s encounters with the cultures of his day, not to retroject our present “glitzy” and evolving U.S. culture unto Paul’s time. On the other hand, we may discern some helpful general principles in Paul’s pastoral style that give us some hints on how to respond to, and perhaps change, our multicultural society. We will list some of today’s pastoral problems and then see how Paul’s seven authentic letters shed some light on a possible pastoral response.

Paul and Our Immigrants, Legal or Illegal

Paul’s seven letters can indeed be a helpful guide in dealing with our millions of immigrants. But first we may need to take a prophetic stand with respect to some of the blind prejudices that are deeply rooted in our own culture. We won’t see clearly if the beams within our own culture obstruct our sight. For instance, we are not a better culture because we have running water and others do not; or, because we have the latest TV or iPods and others do not.

At the beginning of his letter, Paul states his position regarding other cultures quite clearly in Rom 1:14–16: “I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish: so I am eager to preach the Gospel also to you who are in Rome.” Making his case more emphatically, Paul asks: “Is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one” (Rom 3:29–30). Given the context in the Roman church, where Christian Jews and Gentiles lived together, Paul highlights “Abraham who is the father of us all, the father of many nations” (Rom 4:16–17). The law was for the Jews; but faith goes beyond the law and includes all nations, and all cultures. In view of the Gospel and Jesus’ death for all humans, we are under obligation without exception to proclaim the Gospel to all, even to the “foolish and to the barbarians.”

Further, Paul tells us “God shows no partiality”; there will be “glory and honor and peace for everyone who does well, the Jew first and also the Greek” (Rom 2:10–11). These passages demonstrate quite clearly that one culture is not preferred to another before God, nor is one more worthy or meritorious. We may deduce from this that we are to think well of every new culture that comes across our borders. Paul goes further than this, even, and gives an injunction to the Romans that they are “to practice hospitality” (Rom 12:13). What Paul has in mind here is likely the command given to the Israelites in the Pentateuch: “When an alien settles with you in your land, you shall not oppress him. He shall be treated as a native born among you, and you shall love him as a man like yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19: 33–34). In the present, parish communities who publicly proclaim this Word of God in their churches need to welcome all new cultures, however strange their customs may seem to their hosts. Given his directives to the Romans, we can conclude with some certainty that Paul would not support building a seven hundred mile fence along the U. S. / Mexico border. More likely he would offer the “ministry of reconciliation” to our southern neighbors crossing the border (2 Cor 5:18–19).

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul recounts his disagreement with Peter (2:11). At its deepest level this fight was really about the proper attitude of the early Church toward the Jews and the Gentiles, which were two very different cultures. Should the Jewish law and circumcision be required of the new Gentile converts or not? Peter appeared to straddle the fence on this issue: when those of the party who held strictly to these rules were not around, he ate with the Gentiles, presumably breaking the Jewish dietary laws; but, when the Jews came from James, the pillar in Jerusalem, Peter separated himself and refused to eat with the Gentiles. On account of this behavior, Paul scolded Peter for his insincerity, saying directly to Peter’s face: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Gal 2:14). Unlike the wavering and inconsistency of Peter, Paul argues straightforwardly: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: St. Paul and Multiculturalism
• Chapter 2: Meeting the Chinese and the Muslims
• Chapter 3: Meeting the Latinos and the Jews
• Chapter 4: Diagnosing our Cultures’ Wounds
• Chapter 5: Anointed to Heal our Cultures’ Wounds
• Chapter 6: Developing our Cultures
• Chapter 7: Our Faith and Inculturation
• Chapter 8: An Unsung Prophet
• Chapter 9: Conclusions
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography