CENTER SECTION: MULTICULTURAL MINISTRY
Beyond Multiculturalism: Engaging Pluricultural Ministry

by Clarence Williams

The millennial celebration of the Catholic church in the United States, entitled Encuentro 2000, was a watershed event in the culture of the American experience. A millennium change is only witnessed by one generation in fifty. The leadership of the church in the United States made a decision to invite the emerging Hispanic/Latino community to lead us in framing the celebration of this shared moment in North American history. This move by church leaders stunned many other leaders who could not understand that Encuentro 2000 was not for the Hispanics/Latinos but that it would “frame” the Anglo American celebration and build a bridge to our shared future.

Globally, the engagement of the Arab world by Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the Blue Mosque in Turkey stunned the world. The papal title Pontifex Maximus the “greatest bridge builder” took on new meaning.

The national and global migration of people into the countries of the north is supporting our economies suffering from low birth rates and shaping a new shared reality as these groups make themselves at home. National and global church leaders are challenged by this cultural shift that shows no sign of ebbing. The bridge to the future of Europe and the Muslim world is producing the pluricultural world of “Eurabia,” as some are calling it. The bridging of religion and culture is key to their shared future, social peace, and mutual success. Likewise, pastoral leadership for the church in the United States will require bold initiatives like Encuentro 2000 to effectively embrace the “Latinization of North America,” just as the church is reaching out in the Islamization of Europe. Both the global and the local culturally shifting landscape require a ministerial leadership that build bridges and tear down walls. Pluricultural ministry is the description of the task before the human family in the twenty-first century.

The Rev. Robert Schreiter, C.PP.S., professor at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, speaks of needing dual perspectives to engage in a discussion of culture. Schreiter suggests viewing culture as a noun and as a verb. The word culture can describe an object or an action. In the United States conversation on culture, the term pluricultural has a noun aspect and a verb aspect. As a noun it is similar to “multicultural.”

The term multicultural arose from framing of the conversation of groups finding their social identity in the midst of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant context of the racial Other. The vernacular of late twentieth century United States culture found in the academy the emergence of disciplines that underscored the racial nature of U.S. “racial otherness” in the new disciplines of Black Studies, Hispanic/Latino/ Boricua Studies, Native American Studies, and Asian/Pacific Island Studies. Though the academic terms clearly denote racial and geographical social groupings within United States culture, the term “multicultural” became the umbrella to connote “nonwhite” cultural realities. The avoidance of the four letter r-a-c-e word gave the term multiculturalism popularity and permitted a welcome digression from the social discourse on racial otherness for whites and nonwhites alike.

The pluricultural perspective engages the dual awareness of how our particular culture “frames” the “otherness” of the people we encounter, while being aware that we exist within the “other’s” framing of our cultural representation. A pluricultural conversation begins with the assumption that one’s social representation in the cultures of the Americas begins with racial framing. The pluricultural conversation moves beyond the multicultural frame’s focus on nonwhite social identities as the discourse of social problems in society and brings to the conversation the supremacy of whiteness in a racialized society. Whether in North America or Europe, the tensions described as multicultural are seen from the perspective of the status quo of white cultural norms. The plurality of racial caste identities and the hierarchy of value in a society will require a pluricultural lens to build the bridge and take the bold initiative to move the iconic elephant from the center of society’s living room.

In my presentation on racial plurality to social workers at a state conference in Seattle, Washington, I recited a popular racial mantra heard in the nonwhite community which captures the hierarchy of racial castes within and outside the United States “If you are white you’re right. If you are yellow you’re mellow. If you’re brown stick around. But if you’re black get back.” After I answered questions from the audience, I was approached by a man who said that I had left out one part in the mantra, “If you’re red you’re dead.” He identified himself as a Native American who grew up in the 1940’s and ’50’s with cowboys-and-Indians movies whose mantra was, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The plurality of racial castes in our society and world are framed by the terms and representation of the supremacy of the white cultural reality.

Pluricultural ministry focuses on one’s awareness of the dynamics of social interaction as our daily journeys intersect many different culturally racialized circles. These circles are framed by geography such as urban, suburban, and rural; framed by race in terms of White, Black, Latino, Asian, and Native; framed by class hierarchy in terms of middle class, blue collar, and underclass; framed by gendered identities of female, male, heterosexual, single; framed by religion such as Catholic, evangelical, Muslim, secular humanist; and ethnicity in terms of Irish, Jewish, German, and Afro-Caribbean. As one intersects these racialized cultural circles, he or she is “framed” by encounters. The pluricultural perspective has a heightened awareness of the supremacy of white Anglo-Saxon culture in the construction of the racial frames that define our social identity.

Appreciative Inquiry

Culture is a difficult reality to grasp, as we are in the midst of it and cannot reflect outside of it. However, for the sake of this discussion some elements of the nature of culture help us appreciate its presence in our lives as persons and people. When speaking of culture the Rev. David B. Couturier, ofm, describes the four elements of a cultural system as shared beliefs of reality, ritual of actions and practices, instruments and tools that are artifacts of the culture, and emotional affects that guide group social interaction. These elements of culture are shared with various subgroups throughout United States society across racial, religious, and ethnic lines. United States culture is so much a part of our lives in terms of beliefs of individual autonomy, rituals of behavior, technological artifacts, and likes and dislikes that “Americans” stick out when we travel to other settings. For example, in Haiti, Black Americans whether tourists or in the military are referred to as “Blancs” which means “Whites.” Haitian cultural framing sees all United States citizens sharing in whiteness despite the Black Americans’ protest that they are not White. Each group is an agent of its own culture’s representation of racial castes.

Appreciating how cultural representation makes it difficult to see ourselves in the frame of others is a starting point for the conversation that is needed in our church today as we interact with people from the global village. We as Americans—white and nonwhite, laity, clergy, and religious—live our lives with a particular understanding that is not usually shared by new arrivals. The challenge of building bridges between the cultural framing around race is encouraged by the contribution that people have to offer to our way of life, and the way they offer life to our aging and shrinking church population. A study of the growth of the church encourages pastoral leadership to engage this life-giving development.

A review of the Roman Catholic cultural borrowings from various cultures heightens the appreciation of what a pluricultural lens can bring to pastoral leadership. The cultural exchange of gifts can be hidden within the mosaic of the “Roman Catholic tradition.” A plurality of cultural artifacts in the fabric and folds of the tradition surrounds us today in worship, philosophy, devotion, and administration. We do not appreciate the ancient roots of our worship originating from the Egyptian priestly tradition and the theology of baptism. We enjoy a eucharistic prayer borrowed from the Jewish Passover’s Seder meal. The river of praise acclamations that flows through our worship is fed by Hebrew, Greek, and Latin cultural streams. The cultural foundations of global church administration and canon law are the artifacts of Roman imperial government. Our theological reasoning finds its grounding in the cultural lens of Greek culture supported by its Aristotelian logic. More recent contributions of European ethnic groups have also lost their distinctive origins in what we now assume as the Roman Catholic culture. Evangelization of the German tribes brought Christmas trees to our sanctuaries and the wedding ring to our celebration of the sacrament of matrimony. The Italian Franciscan tradition of the nativity scene has become the center of our representation of Christmas. Our Roman Catholic tradition is woven from a plurality of cultural threads over the loom of time.

Just as the cultural artifacts have a noun quality the work of evangelization provides the verb for the appreciative inquiry in the value of a pluricultural ministry. Pastoral leadership across cultural frames has been the lifeline of the church. The globalization challenge to receiving and evangelizing Catholics into the United States Catholic experience have iconic models from our tradition. Cross-cultural evangelists are among the most honored saints: St. Patrick, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Paul. Contemporary examples of pluricultural evangelization include St. Katharine Drexel, the patroness of United States race relations. All of these pluricultural evangelists had to overcome the issue of cultural supremacy as St. Paul did in Galatia (Gal. 2:1-21). St. Paul, as the patron of pluricultural evangelization, recorded his encounter with Jewish cultural supremacy in the first years of the church, which threatened to limit the Body of Christ to “Jews Only.”

Spirituality for Pluricultural Engagement

The mutuality in the doctrine of the Trinity of God is a source of deep reflection on reality and grace of diversity in God and humanity. The framing of a triune God ascribes unity of purpose as it describes diversity of personality and capacity. The plurality of identities forms a mystery of divine synergy as their presence is revealed in salvation history. The Trinity’s divine synergy forms humanity, heals humanity’s brokenness, and transforms its limitedness into its full potential to glorify the one God.

A Trinitarian spirituality personifies pluricultural ministry in how it seeks to reframe the brokenness caused by the denial of humanity into a family unity based on reciprocal respect, regard, and relationship. An appreciative inquiry into the Trinitarian spirituality of a pluricultural ministry is a great resource for the bridge-building task for our church and society. The church is called to its Trinitarian task of being disciples of the Father’s love, apostles of Jesus’ Good News, endowed with gifts through the Holy Spirit for the world. In the wisdom of our tradition we have a plurality of appreciative frames to go about the task of mission, that is, the four gospels. Though we have one Jesus, Christians are the only world religion that has four recognized versions of the savior’s birth, life, death, and Resurrection. The appreciation of the value of plurality in our tradition is a vital gift that our church can give to the human journey.

The Task of Pluricultural Ministry

The task of pluricultural ministry is the exercise of self-awareness as a social actor and a cultural agent. This requires the development of the capacity to identify the unspoken rules of social engagement around personal identity and the examination of one’s behavior as one encounters and/or avoids “the other” as agents of the church. The knowledge base needed for pluricultural ministry is realized through self-reflective critique on one’s cultural framing as a social actor, and intervention on one’s dysfunctional behaviors as a pastoral minister of the church. Such a knowledge base is key to the ongoing formation of the pluricultural minister as a bridge builder between estranged and marginal circles within church and society. The pluricultural minister has as his or her task to realize the description of the church as “the community of communities,” which Pope John Paul II used at his presentation to the United Nations. The model of Pontifex Maximus calls the pastoral agent to model how to bridge from one’s historic participation in social caste and racial hierarchy to an engagement as an agent of “the beloved community.”

The Formation Issue

Efforts to provide formation for those seeking a capacity for pluricultural ministry emerged in the 1970s alongside the discourse on multiculturalism. Cross-cultural ministry and racial sensitivity workshops and course work provided a space to be self-reflective and to address issues in ministry. These opportunities were optional and the status quo saw these efforts as commendable for “those who like to do that kind of stuff.” Ministry to the other was outside the circle of mainstream cultural representation. The popularity of religious communities with missionary backgrounds providing formation programs for cultural self-awakening and capacity for ministry outside the mainstream frames pluricultural ministry as “foreign” and “missionary.” However, it has its cultural precedence in the pastoral history of northern urban dioceses bringing in missionary orders to minister to the Black immigrants arriving from the rural south in the forties and fifties. A half-century later the centers for the pluricultural formation of ministers are found among missionary religious communities and returning missionaries. Those who have watched these developments over time see that new tools have been crafted to form their collective experience. An example of this networking among religious orders is the “Cultural Audit,” which is produced by the Center for the Study of Religious Life in Chicago. It is an awareness and assessment tool for religious communities to move beyond preparing “the other” to live in community; it takes a pluricultural perspective of “culturally auditing” the frame out of which the group receives and forms people as members in community and the church.

Most of the work in pluricultural awareness is being done in programs for clergy and religious from other countries to build their professional capacity for ministry with United States populations. This is a challenge, since pastoral ministers from other places do not always have the capacity to work with all United States populations. Just as we need to assist the globalized church workforce of the future, we need even more to work with the native pastoral workforce to reflect on our unexamined white Anglo-Saxon culture with its dysfunctional cultural framing of “otherness” domestic and foreign.

The most important issue in the formation of a pluricultural minister is developing the dual awareness of one’s cultural framing process and the awareness of how we exist in the framing of “the other.” The Rev. Bryan Massingale of Marquette University recently keynoted the annual Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C., to introduce the Poverty and Racism paper produced by Catholic Charities USA. The most controversial aspect of this twenty-first century briefing paper is the use of the term “white privilege.” Massingale acknowledges that a term like white privilege could be a trigger for white guilt and or white anger. To achieve a deeper understanding of the language, he related an experience of being challenged to recognize his status as holding “male privilege.” Massingale then made the point that though men enjoy “male privilege” they are not responsible for it, but they are responsible for their response to it. Likewise, people are not responsible for white privilege, but they are responsible for their response to it.

Transformation and the Pluricultural Minster

Pluricultural ministry is a spiritual exercise of realizing the prayer of Jesus, “that they all may be one.” (Jn 17: 11, 21). It is a ministry of healing of self and the Body of Christ and our world. To realize the unity in the human family for which Christians and non-Christians of good will pray begins with breaking the silence to have a conversation about race as lived in our parishes and church structures. It is not an easy subject and affects our relationship with any group in which we speak of it. To do the work, we need to be encouraged by leadership and given the tools to craft our message and strategies that make intervention a process of healing, not hurt, and grace, not guilt.

Such leadership exists among ministers in the church. Today, we have one of the major United States Christian denominations being the first to require a certification of racial sobriety training to qualify for ordination. I had the privilege of participating in this program that makes it clear that in their Christian communion pastoral leadership does not “go along to get along” in order to sit in the presider’s chair.

Pastoral leadership provides the modeling needed for the faithful to lead in answering the prayer of Jesus for unity around the table of the Lord. Within the Catholic church there are cardinals, bishops, religious provincials, and directors of formation intentionally building the capacity for pluricultural ministry. Through their public commitment of time and resources they have strongly encouraged week-long explorations of pluricultural ministry for all the priests, community members, and candidates in their dioceses and institutes of religion. These efforts inside and outside our church communion capture the Pauline passion to bring everyone into the Body of Christ in which there is no "Jew or Greek," "slave or free," "male or female" (Gal 3:28).

The Catholic church in the United States is in a pivotal position as it faces the pluricultural challenge of the new immigration. We can turn the Latino community over to religious missionaries or we can welcome them at the table. We have a history of our past responses to the racial and cultural other of the Black migration. To fail to engage the pluricultural challenge is to collude with the re-racialization of the church and society and its accompanying hatred under the euphemism of “ethnic tensions.”

Pluricultural as a verb is all about building bridges. Roberto Pina, formerly of the Mexican American Cultural Center, and I held four national dialogues between the Black and Brown communities in the 1990s. The United States bishops captured this pluricultural bridging in their document Reconciled Through Christ: On Reconciliation and Greater Collaboration Between Hispanic American Catholics and African American Catholics. It is an example of church leaders engaging in a pro-active initiative to equip the ministering and believing church with the knowledge base and formation needed to heal our brokenness.

From this experience of national dialogue there arose a process to structure the exchange: the five C’s of bridge-building for pluricultural ministry. These are conversation, connections, considerations, construction and crossing. Each step in the process in the bridge-building process requires a dual awareness of where one starts in relation to where one wants to end up. Bridge-building is relational, intentional, purpose-driven, and outcome-focused.

The conversation aspect begins within the pluricultural minister and echoes out to the listener. The connections are made in seeking mutual and reciprocal ministry. The articulation of how each partner frames his or her reality in terms of what he or she values in the relationship and as the product of the relationship is of utmost concern. The construction of the shared future in ministry is built on the partners extending themselves beyond the circles of their past to bridge to a shared future. And the purpose of a bridge is to cross from one side to the other. In the bridge-building process one does not give up the foundational elements of one’s cultural circle but enriches it by bringing gifts from other circles into one’s own. And the pastoral leader reflects in the local that same role of leadership of global leader, that of being the personification of the bridge to solidarity in the human family. However, those who build bridges between conflicted communities are the first to get walked on and walked over as they break the taboo and speak to the truth of racial dysfunction. Leadership encourages pluricultural ministers to be the St. Pauls of their day.

As the storm clouds of hate are gathering all around us, our commitment to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters cannot waver. The pluricultural minister leads the community by modeling change. We are encouraged with the initiative from the pope on the world stage and from new initiatives in the local church. But given the history of our church in race relations more leaders are needed. The moral position that the pastoral minister has within the worshipping community either challenges the racial dysfunction or gives a wink and a nod to say, “I’ll go along to get along.”

Finally, we need a pluricultural imagination to provide a new way of framing what our new identity as one human family looks like. St. Paul’s pluricultural imagination gave us the idea of the “Body of Christ.” Pope John Paul II talked of “a community of communities.” We need new ways to see in our differences our common humanity that challenges the dehumanizing process that frames groups as “the other.”

The American family's racial, cultural, and religious elements create a pluricultural quilt when seen through the lens of our shared lives together. The global community offers an alternative from a posture of tolerance, until the "un-meltable ethnics" are assimilated, to a posture of appreciation of the beauty of every hue in our humanity, the music of diverse languages and the richness of religious expressions. The hope of pluricultural ministry is that we build the bridges to a brighter future. On a November day in 2006, Pope Benedict told the leader of religious affairs in Turkey, “With the help of God, we must find the way of peace together, for the good of humanity." From the top down we are called to be pluricultural ministers and bridges to peace in the part of the world in which we are called into the Lord’s service.

The Rev. Clarence Williams C.PP.S., is senior director, Racial Equality and Diversity Initiatives, Catholic Charities USA, and a founder of the Institute for Recovery from Racisms.