Bridgefolk is a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other's traditions, explore each other's practices, and honor each other's contribution to the mission of Christ's Church.
By Laura Larson, Lombard Mennonite Church and Celine Woznica, Ascension-St Edmund Catholic Parish in Oak Park
Making political points with humans as pawns, Governor Abbott of Texas began bussing asylum-seeking migrants from Texas to Chicago in August 2022. By April 2023, the shelters in Chicago were near capacity and by May 2023, migrants were being placed in Chicago police stations, including a station just two blocks from the border of Chicago and the suburb of Oak Park where both of us live.
I (Celine) joined a local volunteer team that quickly responded with blankets, air mattresses, clothes, toiletries, and meals. But what about showers? Where could the migrants refresh themselves after that arduous 3000-mile trip? Having recently learned a new word (NAG-VOCATE), I was able to make arrangements for those we call our “new neighbors” to take showers at the closed rectory of a Catholic parish just three blocks from the station in Oak Park. Volunteers were recruited from the Catholic parishes, towels and personal hygiene supplies were donated, and snacks were made available. Easy-peasy.
Laura Larson (l) and Celine Woznica (r) with a migrant volunteer trying on a coat.
But as the summer progressed into the fall, the number of migrants at the station swelled from a few dozen to almost two hundred. The demands changed as well. Our new neighbors needed more and a wider variety of clothes, shoes, and toiletries. Snacks turned into a full breakfast and, as the weather turned cooler, our friends needed coats and blankets. We needed help.
And the Spirit provided, breaking down the silos that kept too many faith centers isolated in their ministries. Ahh….
About this time, my heart was aching for the migrant men, women, and children struggling to survive in Chicago without adequate housing and resources. The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest was the first place I (Laura) learned of the relief efforts of the Catholic Parishes of Oak Park. Volunteering to assist with their work seemed like the perfect opportunity to contribute. Soon after I started volunteering, the mission commission of my church, Lombard Mennonite, decided that assisting asylum-seekers was a high priority for our congregation. I suggested partnering with the efforts of the Catholic Parishes in Oak Park as one way to help.
Working with our Catholic brothers and sisters was a natural fit because both our traditions place a strong emphasis on compassionate service and justice. Our congregation decided to make the Migrant Ministry the focus of our annual Advent giving project. With enthusiasm we raised significant funds and collected piles of warm coats, clothing, boots and blankets. Several individuals volunteered. Carmen, a retiree, and Emily, a college student, helped distribute jackets. Bill, a social work student, handed out warm blankets. Rebecca and Gray, a mother-daughter team, used their ability to speak Spanish to help the migrants feel welcome as they selected hats, scarves, and gloves. God inspired an outpouring of generosity.
The Catholic Parishes of Oak Park provide the space for what is now known as the Migrant Ministry at Centro San Edmundo, but the effort is so beautifully interdenominational. We are blessed with volunteers from a wide variety of faith traditions and, of course, those who identify their religious affiliation as “none.” We have served thousands of our asylum-seeking brothers and sisters, and in this service, have found joy and fellowship with the other volunteers.
On a personal note, how wonderful it has been for my husband and me (Celine) to reconnect with Mennonites in ministry! Don and I served as Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. These were tough times, and most of the lay missioners left for their safety. Not the Mennonites and the Catholics! Don and I stuck it out because we had Gerald and Joetta Schlabach for support.
I (Laura) have been so blessed to volunteer for the Migrant Ministry. I appreciate the spirit of cooperation that the volunteers share. Every week Celine says, “We are learning, we are adapting, we are growing.” The dynamic of love propels the mission.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Celine considers herself to be a “closet Mennonite”! In turn, my seminary thesis advisor was the Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether. Both of us have deep regard for our respective faith traditions. After all, Christ commanded, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. All of us can be united by this aspiration.
Mennonites and Catholics – we are cut from the same faith-motivated, hope-filled, social justice cloth!
Note: Bridgefolk would like to feature other Catholic-Mennonite collaborations that are happening in Canada, the US — and beyond! If you are involved in such a relationship in your local community, please let us know by sending a message to info@bridgefolk.net.
PRESS RELEASE RE: Bridgefolk 2022 conference 21-24 July 2022
Collegeville, MN (BRIDGEFOLK) – Participants in the Bridgefolk movement for dialogue and greater unity between Mennonites and Roman Catholics have long made the phrase, “Proceed through friendship,” their byword.
Celebrating their 20th annual conference under the theme, “Standing at the Crossroads,” as they met at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota July 21-24, Bridgefolk found reason to hope that the steady relationship building that is basic to its “charism” or gift might also help their churches face a challenge that their traditions share. Both are at a “crossroads,” after all, reminiscent of the one where the prophet Jeremiah told Israel to “ask for the ancient paths” and walk “the good way.” The challenge is to find ways to repent and repair the legacy of harm done to indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States through historic removal, European settlement, and misguided mission efforts.
How to seek just peace through racial justice and indigenous/settler encounter has been an ongoing theme in recent Bridgefolk conferences. This year’s theme proved particularly timely when the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would take an apology just days after Bridgefolk’s conference to the Metis, Inuit, and First Nations peoples of Canada for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools from the late 1800s until as late as 1990.
Though church collaboration with governments in running residential or boarding schools did not last as long in the United States as in Canada, churches south of the border – including Mennonite ones – also face the legacy of their own mission efforts. Rather than sharing the Christian message as an uncoerced invitation consistent with host cultures, too often churches have joined in colonializing efforts to assimilate native peoples and strip children of their cultures and languages. Furthermore, Mennonites whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. and Canada have begun to grapple with the fact that policies of Indian removal made possible their very presence on the continent, even if those ancestors participated unwittingly.
Introducing these challenges, Sister Pat Kennedy OSB of Saint Benedict’s Monastery and Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota, shared the story of their communities’ collaborative project to reckon with their history. From 1878-1945 the Sisters of Saint Benedict operated schools on three sites, including the monastery itself, along with the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations. The Sisters have officially apologized for their complicity in the boarding school program, but Kennedy and Arsenault both insisted that this can only be a beginning.
Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation
“My work on historical preservation for White Earth is future-oriented,” noted Arsenault, while Kennedy underscored that her community must now work to build relationships of trust with White Earth and Red Lake. Sharing long-forgotten documents and photos from monastic archives offers one opportunity for healing to indigenous descendants. Artifacts are still being discovered among the archives, and even if they were originally given to the community as gifts, the community is working with Arsenault to return them to families and communities where they will be treasured far more for their material and spiritual connection with ancestors.
Boarding schools and forced assimilation were part of a much larger set of policies aiming to strip indigenous communities not only of their culture, insisted Arsenault, but of their resource-rich lands. In the following session, Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation stated the implication bluntly: “For white congregations there is no pain-free path forward in this. Reconciliation will cost you something. It should cost you something because it cost me everything.”
In what may be the most revolutionary text in the New Testament, Jacobs explained, Jesus told his followers that making repair when someone has a grievance against them is even more important than “bringing your gift to the altar” in worship (Matt. 5:23-24). Jacobs called on every congregation in every denomination that was complicit in boarding schools “at the very least” to “commit a significant amount of your church budget to indigenous language and cultural reclamation projects” not simply as charity but as something “you wrestle with at every quarterly business meeting” just like salary obligations and light bills.
Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation
Jacobs also called on congregations and parishes to assess the stories that their buildings tell through their iconography, flags, symbols, stained glass windows, and especially their portrayals of Jesus. “Does he look like a good old-fashioned Swede? Or might I find a Jesus with brown skin?”
Jacob’s challenge was paired with a presentation by Dr. Jeremy Bergen of Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario in a session that asked, “How Does a Tradition Repent?” With expertise on the theology of church apologies, Bergen is regularly called upon to comment on the residential-school scandal in Canada and the Catholic Church’s response. But he also notes ways that the stories of his Mennonite ancestors’ flight as refugees from war and persecution in Europe has long blinded Mennonites to the realities and histories of the indigenous people unto whose ancestral lands they settled.
That churches have begun to make official apologies both to one another for past persecutions and mutual recrimination, as well as to the descendants of enslaved and displaced peoples, said Bergen, is a noteworthy historical development and sign of the Holy Spirit’s work – but never sufficient. Tests of whether apologies are authentic and appropriate include: Are they vague or do they confess specific sins? Do they use a request for forgiveness as a way to control relationships or do they invite those receiving the apology to move toward reconciliation at their own pace, on their own terms? Do they merely seek to alleviate a sense of guilt, or do they contribute to a longer process of action and repair?
Dr. Jeremy Bergen, Conrad Grebel University College, Ontario
Perhaps the hardest task of repair for white settlers and their descendants is to actually return stolen land or the resources indigenous communities need to recover land. “It may be unrealistic to return all the land,” noted John Stoesz in a final session on the topic of repairing the legacy of harm to indigenous peoples, “but it is unjust to return none.”
Erica Littlewolf, Indigenous Visioning Circle Program Coordinator, Mennonite Central Committee-Central States, and a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, elaborated on that legacy of harm and injustice. The Doctrine of Discovery by which Europeans rationalized their displacement of indigenous people from the American continents can seem “cerebral” at first but its consequences continue to impact her people and their very sense of identity. “If you fail to see the roots of social ills, you will always blame the oppressed for their oppression.”
Repairing 500-year wrongs may seem daunting, but as an advocate for land recovery, Stoesz has practiced what he preaches. When his family sold its farm near Mountain Lake, Minnesota, he turned over half of his share in the proceeds to the Makoce Ikikupe organization, which seeks to reconnect Dakota people to the homeland from which they were expelled in Minnesota in the 19th century. His personal story and his elaboration of the work Makoce Ikikupe is doing to return Dakota land, revitalize Dakota culture, and renew the natural environment, underscored that the work of repair really is possible.
More than possible, the work of repair is joyful when it is grounded in deepening friendship, suggested various speakers. Speaking warmly of her relationships with the Sisters of St. Benedict to whom she often brings wild rice or sunflowers, Arsenault told of her hope to return a hundred-plus-year-old pair of moccasins with a floral design to a family she knows in the White Earth community. “No matter how difficult things get, there will be moments like that peppered throughout this experience – I guarantee you. How interesting that I brought flowers to the sisters to bring joy and that flowers might return to equally bring joy back.”
Whether “reconciliation” is the right word for this work was a question that some speakers at the conference took up, since indigenous people see no time of right relationship between their ancestors and Europeans in the past to which they can return. When those who have benefited from past wrongs are willing to live with their discomfort, relinquish their need for control, and do what they can to repair past wrongs in tangible ways, however, new and deeper relationship can bring healing for all.
Friendship itself may help us navigate a crossroads, after all. Bracketing the 2022 Bridgefolk conference were two sessions commemorating the movement’s history and anticipating further work, and yet key themes and lessons carried through. The progress that Catholics and Mennonites in Bridgefolk have made by “proceeding through friendship,” noted Bridgefolk co-founder Marlene Kropf, may seem slow but is real. Even when our unity is incomplete, noted Bridgefolk co-chair Abbot John Klassen, new rituals like annual hymnsings and footwashing celebrate our work and relationships so far. Surely, they agreed, these Bridgefolk gifts have something to offer to other dialogues and processes of healing.
Pope Francis makes historic apology to Indigenous of Canada for church abuses
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Friday made a historic apology to Indigenous Peoples for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools and said he hoped to visit Canada in late July to deliver the apology in person to survivors of the church’s misguided missionary zeal.
Francis begged forgiveness during an audience with dozens of members of the Metis, Inuit and First Nations communities who came to Rome seeking a papal apology and a commitment for the Catholic Church to repair the damage. The first pope from the Americas said he hoped to visit Canada around the Feast of St. Anna, which falls on July 26 and is dedicated to Christ’s grandmother.
More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior. … To continue reading, click here.
But is it enough? Here are representative responses:
Murray Sinclair – Ojibwe lawyer, judge, and senator from Manitoba who chaired Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission – calls Francis’s expression of contrition “a major step” but argues that the Catholic Church must go on to address deniers.
Jeremy Bergen – Mennonite theologian who studies church apologies for historical wrongs – elaborates on needed next steps and insists that the Catholic Church must not only apologizes for the actions of sinful Catholics but take responsibility for harms it has inflicted as an institution.
Associated Press reporter Peter Smith anticipates that US churches to will now face their own reckoning concerning boarding schools.
“Toward a Just Peace: Eradicating the Evil of Racism”
The 17th annual Bridgefolk conference was held at Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MN, 26-29 July 2018.
Rev. William Skudlarek OSB, Bridgefolk Interim Coordinator, makes the 2018 Conference Report available online as a PDF document.
I arrived at Saint John’s on New Year’s Day 2009, as “wife of” a scholar at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, afraid I would either freeze to death or die of boredom! I came not knowing what “the Hours” were and not knowing much about monks or why monks exist. But soon I was walking to the abbey church in minus-20-degree weather to pray with you. I returned day after day, not knowing why, but I simply could not stay away. You were always there in the choir stalls; I came and you took me in. You gave me hope.
At daily Mass I listened to homilies that were from the heart. Some were inside the box, some outside—but they were homilies that have and are changing my life. I prayed prayers that were no longer just words, but truths that caused me to question and to make commitments.
After five months at the Collegeville Institute, my husband and I returned to our home in Washington, D.C., but you were still with me. I trusted that my heart, the one you helped to heal, the one that is learning to listen, would be a heart that gives to others and helps bring healing and love to the wider world. If and when that happens, it is because of you.
[The following article by Bridgefolk’s Executive Director appeared recently in PeaceSigns, the online magazine of the Mennonite Church USA Peace and Justice Support Network]
There were several things that attracted me to the Mennonite-Christian tradition-discipleship, community, simplicity, service, and, of course, peace. In my fifteen years among the Mennonites, however, I have observed two disconcerting tendencies in the Mennonite peace ethic.
First, too often we practice peacemaking as if peace were the fruit of our good intentions and hard work. We thus neglect two things: the reality of the persistence of sin in ourselves and our world despite our best intentions, and the need for divine grace to sustain the spiritual fertility of human effort. Consequently, Mennonite peace activism can often be a cause of frustration (when our intentions falter) or an occasion for pride (when our efforts “succeed”).
Second, too often we think and talk about peace in ways that reflect our national contexts and reveal our political commitments. We thus forget two things: that our hope for peace is to be set on God’s purposes for the world, and that our commitment to peace is to be aligned with the priorities of God’s kingdom. Consequently, Mennonite peace rhetoric can often be hardly distinguishable from a national “peacekeeper” identity (Canada) or a left-wing partisan agenda (United States).
Bridgefolk board member Darrin Snyder Belousek has won an award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for an article he wrote in 2010 in the Journal of Markets and Morality entitled ““Market Exchange, Self-Interest, and the Common Good: Financial Crisis and Moral Economy.” The Templeton Enterprise Awards on the Culture of Enterprise are given annually to the best books and articles published in the previous year on the culture of enterprise. The awards are designed to encourage young scholars (thirty-nine or younger at the time of publication) to explore and illuminate the process by which economics and culture are related throughout the world. Snyder Belousek, a Mennonite, notes that the article is “effectively a Catholic-Mennonite affair,” since “the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching substantially informs the argument.”
COBAN, Guatemala – Local Catholics and Mennonites recently gathered in an unprecedented ecumenical meeting in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. Among the participants were Rob and Tara Cahill, former workers with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Coban. Continue reading “Catholic-Mennonite encuentro in Guatemala”→
VATICAN CITY, FEB. 14, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is affirming that Jesus satisfies man’s “thirst for justice,” through his Divine love rather than political revolution.
The Pope stated this today in a public address before he prayed the midday Angelus with the pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
He reflected on today’s liturgy and the Gospel reading of the Beatitudes.
