UP FRONT
Supporting Parish Leaders: The Role of CHURCH Magazine
Karen Sue Smith|  Spring 2009

How CHURCH and the National Pastoral Life Center grew and served the church.

In January 1990, when the National Pastoral Life Center was six years old and CHURCH magazine was four, I officially joined the Center staff as publications director and the magazine’s third editor. My immediate predecessor, the Rev. David O’Rourke, op, had suffered a major heart attack and had to leave suddenly. I was still an associate editor at Commonweal through the end of 1989, but the Winter issue of CHURCH was seriously behind schedule, so I pitched in at the Center several weeks early. The move to the NPLC proved to be an inspired choice, at least for me. Today I count myself blessed to have worked closely for nearly 18 years with Msgr. Philip J. Murnion and the center staff, to have shared his vision, and to have collaborated with so many fine writers and artists. Congratulations on the Center’s twenty-fifth anniversary to all who have participated in its work. For the NPLC, while very small in terms of staff size, has made a large contribution to the pastoral leadership of the Catholic church in the United States, and in doing so has improved parish life for Catholics.

When I became the editor, I inherited a magazine and a joke that our designer Emil Antonucci and I never stopped telling over the years.

“Have you heard about the lampoon edition of CHURCH we’re putting out?” “It’s called Pew.”

I still get a kick out of telling it and regret that we never published a lampoon issue—just once—to demonstrate that humor, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. But that little joke highlights a gold nugget that has made the NPLC a vital resource: a tacit acknowledgment that there is no church apart from the pew. To minister well, church leaders need to see themselves as the people in the pew see them. And both the clergy and the laity must understand that the call to discipleship is one vocation all Christians share.

Phil Murnion knew this in his bones. It enabled him to set up an institution that catered to bishops and diocesan staff, to pastors and parish staffs—a center devoted to an organizational top tier, so to speak—but whose ultimate goal was to serve the people of God.

So how did the Center try to build parish? The working process was somewhat formulaic: gather people; set them to work on a common issue, problem, objective; keep them talking and sharing their knowledge and experience; bring in whatever experts are needed and ask them probing questions; and expect the Holy Spirit to be there in their midst.

Murnion, who held a doctorate in sociology from Columbia, had a healthy respect for the facts, for rigorous research and study, and so Center projects and gatherings included experts and scholars. By the time a group had worked, prayed, eaten, laughed, told a few stories, and sung together, they could make a breakthrough, plan some action, and accomplish more than any subgroup of them might have done alone. Together they could do God’s work. This is how to break a logjam, get out of a rut, think beyond the box, experiment boldly, move toward tomorrow today. And the process has worked for groups big and small. A handful of inner-city pastors, for example, can find mutual support and a few solutions to seemingly intractable problems, like clearing drug dealers from a neighborhood or helping teens find jobs or single mothers obtain childcare. Over the years the NPLC has convened hundreds of gatherings.

A second bedrock belief on which the NPLC was built is the centrality of the parish. The parish is no formless ad hoc gathering; it is a particular community of disciples convened by the Holy Spirit, gathered to worship and serve a common mission. Murnion realized, of course, that the church’s formal governing structure is the diocese shepherded by a bishop, but he knew that contemporary Catholics, a church of one billion members, experience church as the local parish. So the Center’s primary focus has always been the parish.

The idea of strengthening parish leaders by identifying issues of importance to them and finding ways to offer support had developed directly from The Parish Project, a multi-year project that the U.S. bishops had sponsored and Murnion had led. When the project ended, the bishops encouraged him to continue the work independently in what became the NPLC. His national center would help them improve the training, education and formation of parish leaders, benefiting parishes and Catholics at large.

CHURCH Builds Parish

CHURCH magazine set out to engage its own gathering—the thousands of subscribers who four times each year receive an issue to read—in an ongoing exercise of pastoral theology. The magazine draws connections between theology and parish, where theology of all types is routinely applied in catechesis, preaching, spirituality, counseling, and administration, which involves staff-building, parish planning and priority-setting, and managing a schedule as well as a budget and a physical plant. For this we engaged the best, most pastoral among the nationally known scholars and writers, including bishops and cardinals. As a result the CHURCH author index reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary Catholic writers.

We also gave space to any parish leader who could describe what had worked in his or her parish. The model was a swap table to facilitate the sharing of tested projects and specific programs of social action, stewardship, renovation, youth recruitment, or men’s spirituality. CHURCH provides a lifeline, a network of people, a forum, a basis of comparison, and a set of resources by which any minister can connect to others. Every subscriber is both a potential learner and teacher.

As a flagship publication, CHURCH has always been the Center’s main microphone, its primary channel for broadcasting a progressive ecclesiology, a receptiveness to differing pastoral styles and models, a public exchange on issues related to contemporary theology, and a respect for parish ministers and the high standards and commitment their work requires.

Responding to the Signs of the Times

The timing for establishing the Center couldn’t have been better: parish staffing was undergoing a sea change more momentous than the bishops or Murnion might have predicted in 1983. And parish life since then has changed dramatically.

Readers can recite the litany. The number of Catholics in the United States has steadily increased, thanks to a growing number of Latino Catholics. While the number of clergy and religious has dropped, some 16,000 deacons and 30,000 lay ecclesial ministers have offered their service to the church, most describing it as a vocation to minister. Other changes include new ethnic and linguistic diversity within single parishes, which is no longer an exception but the norm; a multiplicity of parish structures, like the mega parish, the merged parish, and some pastors ministering to multiple parishes. All these changes have contributed to the increasing complexity of parish staffing, parish ministry, and the formation of ministers. For example, large parish staffs create specific opportunities and demands, and very small parishes have their own particularities. On top of all today’s parish leaders must master, there are such relentless little chores as maintaining a parish Web site.

Demographic changes have caused dioceses to seek new ways of using and distributing the limited resources they have. In response to local needs, the bishops have tested new ideas, like training lay people in the northwest to preach; bishops have also delegated to persons other than priests (some 3,000 deacons, religious, and lay ecclesial ministers) responsibility for parishes without resident pastors. All of this is appropriate; some is extremely creative. And it shows a church pastorally responsive to changing needs and circumstances, such as a small pool of candidates for the priesthood.

Catholics too have changed. For many reasons (work schedules, limited time of families with both parents working, a weakened sense of why their presence at Mass matters) many no longer attend Mass every week. And young Catholics know fewer of the basics of the faith. This has added urgency to catechesis, evangelization, and popular parish renewal programs.

During the last three decades, the long pontificate of John Paul II both stabilized and centralized the Catholic church; the Vatican has published a worldwide catechism for the Catholic church; Christians have entered their third millennium; and Catholics in the United States and several other countries have experienced and are trying to recover from the clergy sexual abuse scandal. All of these have affected parish life and ministry.

CHURCH has addressed these changes in its articles and other publications, serving as a forum for the discussion and evaluation of new problems, new directions, and proposed solutions. Publications hold up a mirror that shows church leaders what is being discussed as well as what is taking place, and they plot the path toward change; sometimes they even break the path. Three examples illustrate how the Center created publications to respond to particular signs of the times.

Lay Ecclesial Ministry. In the development of lay ecclesial ministry, the Center has made a unique contribution. On behalf of the USCCB Msgr. Murnion and Dr. David DeLambo, both sociologists, documented the entrance of lay people into parish ministry—something virtually unheard of before 1983. Three studies were published: New Parish Ministers (1990) and Parishes and Parish Ministers (1997), both directed by Murnion; and Lay Parish Ministers (2005) conducted by DeLambo. Before each study was made public, its executive summary appeared as an article in CHURCH magazine. That meant that after the bishops, CHURCH readers were the first Catholics to learn who the new ministers are, what they do, why they minister, how they were educated and formed, how satisfied they are in parish life, what bothers them most. The research also examined how pastors and parishioners responded to the new ministers over time.

In their reports Murnion and DeLambo noted that since most of the new ministers were female, parishes were becoming increasingly female-led. Later, when the number of lay women in parish ministry exceeded the number of women religious, they noted that ministry was becoming increasingly lay-led. Such careful analysis and reflection helped leaders to understand current changes.

As editor of CHURCH, I invited writers outside the Center to reflect on what they saw in the data: to note possible repercussions for good and for ill, to spell out who is not represented among the new ministers, to project how the new ministers might enliven and expand ministry, and to identify future challenges.

Parish Renewal. With the publication of John Paul II’s apostolic letter, Tertio millennio adveniente, On the Coming of the Third Millennium, in November 1994, which encouraged Catholics to seize the millennium for evangelization, we at the Center began to discuss what we might do to spark parish renewal. We decided to invite a co-publisher, St. Anthony Messenger Press, to develop with us a project of education, reflection, and planning that would be carried out by small Christian communities in participating parishes and dioceses. The project, “Follow Me!” proved quite a successful venture. St. Anthony Messenger created “The Millennium Monthly,” an educational piece modeled on their popular leaflet series, “Catholic Update”; supplied the capital, kept the inventory, and mailed the promotions. The NPLC created the program content—a set of Lenten reflection booklets and planning guides. We furnished the talent and the training. Nearly three hundred parishes signed on for the three-year project. The Lenten reflection booklets turned out to be so popular that we wrote new ones for three more years after the project ended and the millennium had passed.

Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal. In the summer of 2002, after the clergy abuse scandal broke, Phil and I talked about how we would handle the crisis editorially. We jointly wrote the longest, and perhaps most important editorial in the history of the magazine, “A Purification Urgently Needed.” In his half, Phil described the church’s responsibility and the bishops’ role. In my half, I discussed the act of pastoring in such a situation and suggested practical steps parishes could take. We solicited articles from the Rev. Frank Kelley, an outstanding pastor in Massachusetts, and the Rev. Canice Connors, an experienced psychologist and counselor to priests. We published other articles, of course, one of which was reprinted as a pamphlet: “Keeping Our Children Safe” by Linda Piezynski, an active Catholic lawyer and mother of three. Pieznski wrote it in a frank, direct way that allows pastors working with parents and teachers to do all they can together to protect the children in their care. It turned out to be one of our best-selling pamphlets. Dioceses and parishes used it in great quantities because it filled an immediate and important need.

NPLC Culture

As a parish-centered organization, the NPLC tried to practice what it preached, though we sometimes fell short, of course. Staff members gradually developed job descriptions and an employee handbook—not bad for fewer than a dozen employees. We worked at staff development through a weekly lunch together; through monthly staff meetings that opened with prayer that we each took turns leading; and through an annual retreat.
During Holy Week we invited a speaker (the Rev. Eugene LaVerdiere, for example) to prepare us for Easter. Once or twice a year, we would ask some outstanding pastor or parish staff member to come to the center to inform us about a particular aspect of parish life or some other pertinent topic. We prayed regularly for those whose donations helped keep us functioning. We served food at many gatherings, too, which meant setting up and cleaning up, staff willingly pitching in to make quick work of such chores. Extra food went to the center for homeless men that occupies the lower floors of our office building, a former Catholic school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Often we worked with local Catholic schools to give manual jobs (like stuffing hundreds of packets of handouts or conference materials) to those students who could use a little extra cash.

Once we accidentally hired a girl who was too young to be working, so we had to “lay her off.” In the process, Murnion got to know her mother, kept track of the family, and recommended the girl for college.

Murnion had style; he was classy and urbane. CHURCH magazine was professionally designed with a certain high quality “look.” Why? Because those who work for the people of God deserve the best. We tried to produce a magazine they could be proud of reading and showing to others. CHURCH contained art because the church historically was a patron of the arts and should be today as well. That quality and a certain polish were applied to everything the Center did.

And what never failed to move me, personally, was that we practiced an expansive ecclesiology where everyone—of every race, ethnic group, education level, background, and so on—could mediate the Holy Spirit: a cleaning lady, a high school student, an old person pushing a cart, or some expert. One time Murnion came into my office showing a little ink drawing he had just purchased for $5 from a homeless man on the street. “I think it’s pretty good,” he announced. Then he left to buy a frame and hung the drawing on the wall in a place of honor, where it hangs still.

Murnion met a young woman on a subway ride, found out that she was here from Italy and played a musical instrument; she wanted to make it as a musician. He gave her the $100 bill he carried for just such situations. After he died, she came by the center to find him, to thank him; she had landed a gig and found that meeting with Phil seemed to her to have been providential, filling her with the confidence she needed.
Another time, after 9/11, Murnion could hardly contain his laughter. He had seen a sign in the subway asking riders to report anything unusual. “I looked around and saw a guy with green hair, a girl with a ring in her nose, a little old lady with three dogs in her purse, a bunch of kids doing flips in the cars hoping for change, a Chinese man selling batteries, and two homeless people who had filled up a whole seat with sacks of their belongings. I got out and saw five cab drivers standing outside their cabs screaming, almost in a fight. But I didn’t see anything unusual.”

Karen Sue Smith, currently editorial director of America magazine, was for nearly eighteen years the editorial director at the NPLC and editor of CHURCH magazine.