A few weeks ago, I made my annual visit to Memphis. I still have cousins and a few friends “back home” that I have stayed in touch with through the decades. Getting to see them again was important, since we are all in our seventies now and who knows how many more opportunities we are going to have. Normally I stay at a motel in an outlying area because rates are cheaper; but this time I stayed at a new hotel that had opened in a former loft building near downtown and the river that was offering great rates. Fifty years ago, when I still lived in Memphis, this was an aging industrial area in which no one lived or wanted to live. Not unlike the transformation that has taken place in River North and the West Loop over the last forty years, this Memphis neighborhood is now full of new townhouses, high-rises, restaurants, and galleries. Because I had no reason to visit this area on previous trips, what I encountered in my early morning walks was a kind of culture shock. When did all this happen? Change had been happening over time, and I encountered the result of all those incremental changes. The whole culture of the neighborhood had changed.

We can look back on the papacy of Pope Francis and see cultural change. The simplicity of his lifestyle, his outreach to migrants and prisoners, his focus on economic justice and the environment, the priority he gave to the church’s mission, and his condemnation of “clerical” culture” served to create a new way of being Pope. His lack of clarity on certain long-held Catholic teachings led to heavy criticism from traditionalists, but his focus on following Christ and church teaching as a journey and not a line of demarcation resonated with many Catholics. Pope Leo inherits a different papacy than Pope Francis inherited.

In Awareness, a book by the late Jesuit Anthony De Mello, we read, “Every new idea, every great idea, when it first began was in a minority of one. The man called Jesus Christ—a minority of one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying. The Buddha—a minority of one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said, ‘Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.’ That’s well and accurately put. About Jesus they said, ‘He has blasphemed.’”  Yet, here we are thousands of years later, with millions of people adhering to the words of Jesus and the Budha. That is a massive cultural change.

It is not unusual to detect a cultural change in our own faith journey. Sometimes in confession penitents will want to confess a sin from the past that they already confessed in a previous confession. Part of that can be a reluctance to accept God’s forgiveness as undeserved and unearned; but it often points to the fact that these sins committed years ago now loom larger to us than they did at the time. As we grow closer to God, our past failings trouble us more. There has been a cultural change. Our relationship with God is not the same as it was a decade ago.

In the Renew My Church process, there is a great emphasis on changing the culture of the parish, making our churches more mission-oriented, more focused on the people who are not here and not just the people who are here. Like all cultural changes, this change cannot be induced by any one program or series of initiatives. It is not just about adding greeters or service programs, or forming an evangelization committee, or adding Alpha or other programs designed to connect with non-churchgoers. It is about altering our own relationship with church. It is about greeting newcomers and strangers and not just our friends; it is about feeling an urgency to get involved in the parish because I sense how much more could be done if more of us took an active role; it is about responding and singing at Mass as if I really wanted to be there; it is about making sure that our ministries not only perform functions but also form a community; it is about keeping the people who are not here on our prayer list; it is about becoming more comfortable talking about my faith with others; it is about being more aware of the issues that impact our global church and not just our local church. It is about this and many other things; and, remember, all we need to get the process started is a minority of one.

                                                                  Fr. Joe