Seven lessons in ministry

In Dan’s NT 101 class, a student once asked a memorable question about one of Jesus’s miracles. The student stood up, which was a surprise. No one stood in class to ask a question. He said, “Fr. Harrington, with what we know about Jesus’s identity as the Second Person of the Trinity, and his relationship to the Father and the Spirit, and the hypostatic union of his two natures, when he is performing this particular miracle, what is going through his mind in terms of his self-conception as the Son of God?”

And Dan said, “We have no idea.”

When it comes to ministry, you won’t know everything. You study hard, you take your work seriously, and you give yourself fully to your ministry. But you know that you’re not going to be able to answer every question, solve every problem, meet every ministerial challenge—or, for scholars, know everything about your field. In pastoral ministry, you may not know what to say to someone who has lost a job, contracted an illness, or had a death in the family. It’s important to take pastoral counseling courses, as I did at Weston, to learn the “best practices” for accompanying people, but you can’t know what to say or do at every turn.

That’s when you are called to remember who called you to ministry: God. And, more to the point, God put you there in front of the person in need—not Pope Francis, not Mother Teresa, not Jean Vanier, not Helen Prejean, C.S.J., not Dan Harrington. And not a know-it-all either. God put you in this place at this time before this person, which means God wants you there, with all your strengths and weaknesses. Trust that.

From 1992 to 1994, I worked with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kenya. My assignment was helping East African refugees start small businesses to support themselves and their families. We sponsored dozens of income-generating activities, from a Ugandan women’s tailoring group, to a Rwandese bakery, to two Ethiopian restaurants, both named The Blue Nile. In time, we opened a small shop in Nairobi to market refugee-made handicrafts. It was the most enjoyable and fulfilling ministry I’ve ever had. But after a while, I started to burn out. I was helping to run the shop and oversee the small businesses, visiting refugees at their homes in the slums, helping them to deal with health problems, landlord problems, legal problems, fear, hunger, depression, loneliness.

One day I said to my spiritual director, a Jesuit named George Drury [’45, M.A.’46, M.S.’49], “I don’t know how I can do all of this!” And he responded, “Who says you have to do it all?” And I said, “Well, it’s what Jesus would do. He’d help all these people.” And George said, “Well, maybe, but I have news for you: you’re not Jesus.”

Here we need to remember something about Jesus’s ministry: Jesus didn’t cure everyone in Galilee and Judea. In his public ministry, Jesus dealt with the people in front of him, as we are to do. That doesn’t mean you don’t work for structural change. But it does mean that you can’t do everything.

One of my more unusual ministries was at Ground Zero in the days and weeks following the September 11 attacks in 2001 in New York City. I was working at America in New York, and on September 13 I made my way down to a place called Chelsea Piers, on the West Side, where rescue operations were being staged. I ran into a police officer who asked me, “Do you want to go down there?” I said, “Yes,” and suddenly I was headed to Ground Zero. In the backseat of the car with me was a psychologist, and I said to him, “Do you have any advice?” He replied, “Have you ever dealt with trauma victims?” And I said, “No,” somewhat terrified. And he said, “Just listen.”

When we arrived at Ground Zero, the police officer wished us good luck. We got out of the car and there was the scene familiar to most Americans from the news reports: the ruined towers, the smoldering buildings, the ash, the paper, the debris. It was, as you can imagine, overwhelming.

Someone said, “The morgue is over there.” I knew myself well enough, and knew my limitations well enough, to know that I couldn’t work in the morgue. I couldn’t do that. So I stood there on the papers and the ash and tried to think of what I could do. And I realized I could minister to the firefighters and EMTs and policemen. I could listen to them. Let them grieve. Accompany them. I would have been paralyzed if I’d thought I had to do everything at Ground Zero. Instead, I did what I could: the ministry of presence, as we used to say at Weston. Along with my Jesuit brothers, I worked there for several days and then weeks.

Recently I’ve been learning a great deal about what I consider a new ministry for me, outreach to LGBTQ Catholics. Last year I wrote a book called Building a Bridge, about how the Church can more compassionately reach out to LGBTQ people. A few months after the book was published, I was invited to the 2018 IgnatianQ conference at Loyola University Maryland. It is an annual gathering of student representatives from the LGBTQ groups at all 28 U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities. The conference organizers had asked me to speak, and I started off by saying that I didn’t know everything about LGBTQ ministry, something that was made abundantly clear to me over the course of the weekend. I found myself having to learn new language, a new tone, and a new appreciation for their lives. My experience can be summed up as my telling them, “God loves you,” and them saying, “Yeah, we know!”

During the IgnatianQ conference, the confession that I was still learning seemed to make the students more open to teaching me. At one point in my talk, I mentioned “transgenderism,” and a hand shot up. “Father, I’m not an ism,” said the student. “Okay,” I said, “What should I say, ‘transgender experience’?” They snapped their fingers appreciatively. You can always learn something new.

Building a Bridge was essentially an invitation to dialogue and prayer and an encouragement for the institutional Church to treat LGBTQ Catholics with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” three virtues mentioned by the Catechism of the Catholic Church in dealing with “homosexual persons.” At the same time, the book invited the LGBTQ Catholic community to treat the institutional Church with those virtues, even though, I should point out, the onus is on the Church to reach out to the LGBTQ person, because it is the Church that has made LGBTQ people feel marginalized, not the other way around.

I thought the book—which was just 160 pages—was pretty mild. It was rooted in the Gospels, based on the catechism, and had the approval of my Jesuit provincial, as well as the encouragement of the Jesuit superior general, and the endorsement of several cardinals, archbishops, and bishops. But I underestimated the strong reactions, both positive and negative.

To be clear, the vast majority of Catholics, both the hierarchy and the people in the pews, welcomed the book. And at first it was the positive reactions that astounded me. One of the early talks I gave was in Boston, at St. Cecilia Church in the Back Bay, which has a flourishing LGBTQ ministry. The talk was scheduled for a weekday night; I had just spoken at the parish a few months before and figured that attendance would be low. But some 700 people turned out, it was standing-room-only, and I signed books for three hours. Afterward people burst into tears, hugged me, and told me their stories—LGBTQ Catholics and their parents and grandparents.

The strong negative reactions also caught me by surprise. A few days after the book was published, I started to get attacked on far-right religious websites by commentators who called me, and I quote, “heretic,” “apostate,” “sodomite,” “homosexualist,” “fairy,” “pansy,” “false priest,” “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and “heresiarch.” Then came attacks from Catholic commentators and columnists and a few bishops, including one bishop in a diocese not far from here who, halfway through his critique in the diocesan newspaper, admitted that he hadn’t read my book.

Several talks I had been invited to give were cancelled: by the Theological College of the Catholic University of America; by CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development), the U.K. equivalent of Catholic Relief Services; by the Order of the Holy Sepulcher; and by a Catholic parish in New Jersey. Each of these talks was cancelled because of online petitions and telephone campaigns targeting the sponsoring parish or group. And each talk was scheduled to focus on the 2014 book that preceded Building a Bridge, which was a life of Christ entitled Jesus: A Pilgrimage.

Then came pushback from the other side. Cardinal Blase Cupich [H ’15], the archbishop of Chicago, invited me to give two lectures during Holy Week at Holy Name Cathedral; and other cardinals and bishops spoke up to endorse the book and offer invitations. In August of 2018, at the Vatican’s invitation, I gave a talk at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin. The Vatican proposed my topic and the title (“Showing Welcome and Respect in Our Parishes to LGBTQ People and Their Families”) and vetted and approved the text. But partially in response to that talk, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican nuncio to the United States, denounced me for “corrupt[ing] youth” in a letter published in Rome as the World Meeting neared an end—the same letter in which he more famously accused the pope of covering up clerical sexual abuse.

What does all of that have to do with ministry? Just this: Remember the story of the “Rejection at Nazareth” in the Gospels (Mark 6:1–6; Matthew 13:54–58; and Luke 4:16–30)? Notice how Jesus is treated after he proclaims his identity as the Messiah. Initially, the people of Nazareth, his hometown, praise him; then they turn on him, try to drive him away, and make ready to throw him off a cliff. But he “passes through their midst.” Once when I was on retreat, I asked Jesus, “How were you able to do this? I certainly couldn’t stand up before people who I think would reject me.” And the answer I heard in prayer was, “Must everyone like you?”

Simply because you face opposition in ministry doesn’t mean you’re doing the right thing. As my novice director used to say, “If people disagree with you, it may just mean that you’re wrong.” But if you are ministering in Jesus’s name, you will inevitably face opposition and perhaps even persecution.

What can keep you going? First, the knowledge that Jesus went through this too. Second, the trust that if you’re doing the right thing, Jesus is with you. Third, some good old-fashioned Jesuit “detachment” or “indifference,” to use the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit founder (another way of speaking about an interior freedom). Whenever I see attacks on myself that are clearly cruel and not at all constructive, I repeat a helpful mantra: “Who cares?” Freeing yourself of the need to be liked will free you for “life in the Spirit,” as Dan liked to say.

In my 30 years as a Jesuit I’ve met hundreds, maybe thousands of people who minister in Jesus’s name—scholars and writers and editors, pastors and pastoral associates, bishops and priests, sisters and brothers, spiritual directors and counselors, social justice activists and peacemakers, college and university administrators, high school presidents and teachers, and on and on. And, very occasionally, among these people I notice something. A few of them are cruel. Not often but enough that it registers. They’re short-tempered with their staff, denigrate others, and are, to use a word that needs to be recovered in our theological vocabulary, mean.

There are always excuses. Everyone who is mean has an excuse: exhaustion, stress, overwork. And, in those cases, I remember Dan Harrington: always busy, probably tired, and yet always kind. I’ve started to think of Christian ministry in terms of what might be called the “asceticism of kindness.” I’m not saying I always achieve that goal—ask anyone who knows me—but it’s a good goal nonetheless.

These are difficult times in the Church. Historically difficult. And it can be hard to be a Catholic, let alone minister as one. But remember: At your baptism God called you into the Church by name. And in your ministry God made a further call. When things get tough for me, I think of Peter and Andrew, and James and John, and Mary Magdalene, and all those disciples Jesus called at the beginning of his ministry in Galilee—the “Galilean Springtime.” After the Resurrection, and the Ascension, when Jesus’s time on earth was over, these people faced tremendous difficulties, even martyrdom.

And I’m sure that, at the worst times, they thought back to the original call, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and remembered who called them.