Catholic Sensibility

If it's a good pitch for telephone service, maybe it'll work for campus ministry on Long Island. The plan is to replace women religious with recent college graduates as peer counsellors, while keeping the clergy in place. Okay. Pardon my distrust of yet another bishop. I have fond memories of my two years in campus ministry at Michigan State. Working with students was great. Dealing with the chancery was interesting. There are three large universities in the Diocese of Lansing, each with their own parish. In 1993, various part-time chaplains serving the small schools and community colleges were not rehired. Save some money, was the thought, I guess. Supposedly, the parishes near these institutions were supposed to be attracting and serving the students. $15,000 was left in the budget, which we learned was set aside for priest stipends for saying Mass. But if the parishes are supposed to be serving these colleges, why isn't the local pastor and the ministry staff there involved, we asked. The community college Mass fund I didn't get. The main campus of Lansing Community College was actually in the cathedral parish. I could see giving a priest a stipend to walk around the campus with a sign for an hour or so before noon Mass, but ... The LCC campus minister operated out of an office, and with the proximity of the cathedral (not to mention commuting students' home parishes around the county, Mass was never part of the outreach there. The upshoot of it was this: our unenlightened dinosaur liberal Lansing Catholic Campus Ministry Association suggested that clergy, staff, and volutneers from the parishes should be serving college kids within their borders, and that most of the $15,000 would be better spent training college students as *gasp* peer ministers. Imagine that! Old V2 fogeys were the cutting edge of the Long Island New Evangelization long before it was envisioned on the tail end of New York. If the diocese of Rockville Center has job performance standards in writing, and the priest-supervisor can document these sisters were not doing the job, that would be one thing. (Leaving aside the notion that clergy are rarely put in a position to be held accountable for job performance.) Incorporating new blood into ministry is also a good way to go, though the notion of mentoring new ministers is a valuable approach to consider, as the CCMA does. Professional standards are important, a sampling of which reads (and note the highlights): A Catholic campus minister is a fully initiated member of the Catholic Church; nourishes his or her faith through participation in a worshiping Catholic community and a commitment to prayer and spiritual growth; publicly adheres to Church teaching and the CCMA Code of Ethics; demonstrates a balanced lifestyle, showing concern for the emotional, intellectual, physical, psychological and spiritual components of one's life. A campus minister is expected to be theologically competent, to have a basic understanding of Roman Catholic teaching in the following areas: God, Christ, Church, Pastoral Theology, Ethics and Moral Theology, Liturgy, Justice and Peace, Spirituality and Prayer, Canon Law, Scripture and Scripture Interpretation, Church History: World and American. Also to be able to articulate an understanding of the six aspects of campus ministry as delineated in Empowered by the Spirit: Campus Ministry Faces the Future, the pastoral letter on campus ministry. A familiarity with other religious traditions is expected, as is continued theological reflection and education. Expected professional competencies include the ability to discern the needs of the campus community and to call forth and coordinate the diverse gifts of the community for meaningful worship; evangelization, catechesis and theological reflection; conscience formation and justice education; leadership development and vocational discernment; personal development and service to others. Also communication skills by an ability to articulate the faith through preaching, teaching, writing, and spiritual direction; an ability to articulate an understanding of the nature and purpose of higher education; an ability to articulate an understanding of developmental theory as it applies to ministry on campus. Pastoral skills also: the ability to organize, facilitate, administer and share responsibility and decision-making with other campus ministers in an ecumenical, interfaith and multi-cultural environment, with other college and university professionals. Professional relationships with peer campus ministers, with college and university professionals, and maintaining membership in local, regional and national campus ministry organizations. For too many chanceries, campus ministry is a great unknown. And as is true for youth ministry, too many bureaucrats hope it stays that way. Few bishops have any idea what happens on campus. Bishops make headlines for visits to the March for Life, and that's fine: bishops should be serving the ninety-nine. A few bishops are noted for visiting prisons, nursing homes, and even giving up luxurious life in the cathedral mansion to be with the flock. Another good example. But in my experience, I've only known one bishop (Matthew Clark) who has ever visited a campus ministry to preside at Mass. Campus ministry is a largely thankless job outside of the CCMA culture and the students. You inherit the ten percent teen Mass attendance the Catholic school system has left you. You deal with wonderful young people who make poor choices left and right as they try on their adult wings. You try to run a parish (if you're lucky) on a 75-25 mix. The "75" percent are kids who might have been confirmed but their parents were the ones still expected to give generously of time and talent. The "25" are the adult parishioners who like the kids, the setting, could never let go of the parish, or are otherwise university-connected. If you're not so lucky, you run campus ministry out of the back of your car or in a throwaway office the secular university provides for you. I remember the discussion about "households" with the diocese. We had about a thousand MSU students registered in the parish, plus a few hundred "normal families." What do you do? If you count each individual student as a "family," the cathedraticum went through the roof. Count each dormitory instead. Enough rant. My take on Rockville Center is that they have high ideals but they're going to fall flat on their faces putting twenty-somethings on the front line of the universities. They themselves have failed on at least a few points of the campus ministry codes of ethics and professional standards. I'd be the last person to tell you that the CCMA has it all figured out. I found campus ministry types to be extremely conservative with regard to their ministry philosophy obviously, not their ideology or politics. The "liturgy" unit at the ten-day conference I attended was pitiful. I found an amount of resistance from my staff colleagues to some of my ideas and notions. The adult parishioners welcomed new ideas like inviting students into the lay preaching group and other "radical" organizations. But "we've always done it this way" gets tired, be the approach rooted in the 70's or the 50's, and especially when it's clearly time for a change. I can't blame my former colleagues too much for being insular and turf-protective. College students don't add much heft to the Bishop's Annual Appeal or the Cathedral Renovation Fund, so their protests at the chancery will likely fall on deaf ears. I wish the fired sisters the best. I will pray more for the college students involved in this experiment, which can hardly be called progress.