People’s History: ‘A Community of Communities’ (Fr. Richard Renshaw)
As Call To Action begins its Advent activities, I took a few moments amidst the business of the season to sit down and reflect on a conversation between my fellow Re/Generator, Kascha Sanor, and Holy Cross Father Richard Renshaw. One of the most distinctive things about Call To Action is the intergenerational community, which is sometimes unusual in activist spaces, and it was a delight to see this interaction as Kascha interviewed Richard.
Calling from Welland, Ontario, Richard spoke about his memories of Vatican II and how the values that he saw in the Council impacted the rest of his life.
Shortly after college, Richard entered the Holy Cross Fathers, a religious order, and continued his studies by studying theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. Richard arrived in Rome one week before the opening of Vatican II, and stayed there until about six months after the council ended. Being in Rome as a seminarian during the council was a unique experience, and Richard’s recollections of the time are full of stories of luminaries within the Church. Richard stayed in a house of priests, and “a whole slew of bishops” passed through over the four years of the council, including some who played major roles. “We kept in touch with the people who were at the sessions. We had some extraordinary visitors at our house during that period,” including both bishops and prominent theologians. One of the priests Richard lived with was the council’s liaison to the English speaking press. He would bring home the documents (translated from the Latin) that he shared with the press and put them in the house rec room to read.
It was an exciting time to be a seminarian in Rome. On the Council, Richard reflects, “Nobody could realize the impact it was going to have, but I certainly knew it was a big event, and I certainly knew that it was going to open up a whole bunch of questions… It wasn’t scary at all. I was all for it.”
Much of his enthusiasm was due to the charismatic leadership of John XXIII. “I fell in love with the man from the very beginning,” Richard shared. “My first encounter with him [John XXIII] was at the beginning of the Council. I’m out in the square, and it’s jammed with people, just this immense crowd, and there are two thousand bishops passing in procession into the St. Peter’s Basilica, in all kinds of regalia I had never seen in my life, because these were people from all over the world, all the different rites that the Church recognizes. It was a festival of diversity. Bishops don’t all dress like they do in the U.S… It was a theater of diversity as they all paraded in. And the Pope was the last. He was carried in. And he went right by in front of me, and he looked down at me, and I was enthralled with the man.”
The opening up of the church to a diversity of backgrounds and beliefs was a major theme that would impact Richard’s life and work for years. Thinking about what he wanted to bring back to North America when he returned from his studies in Rome, Richard felt that it was a scandal that the Christian faith is so divided. He became involved in the ecumenical movement in Canada. “When I came back… the ecumenical movement was already strong in Canada, but it didn’t include Catholics” because of the Church’s historic lack of interest in doing ecumenical work. That all changed after the Council, and Richard became involved with an inter-church committee about issues facing Indigenous people, working with representatives from different churches. Richard saw his work as directly flowing from the direction of Vatican II. “We did what was decided at the end of the Council… in Canada… Probably we went further in that than anywhere else in the world at that time.”
Richard also became involved with the re-emerging movement of Christian intentional communities, both in Latin America and in Canada. “Then I went off to Latin America, and I was very involved in developing another way of being church through small communities. We didn’t call them base communities, although they were quite similar, we called them intentional communities. And they were ecumenical… We had a network of intentional communities, and it was ecumenical, and these were generally people who, in little houses, were living together, trying to live their Christian life, and often working with immigrants.”
Work like these projects wasn’t always easy. Reflecting on his relationship with the institutional church, Richard shared, “We broke all the rules, and I made considerable enemies among the hierarchy. I was very outspoken about social justice issues, and they did not like that because they had their diocesan social justice person, and besides, I was pushing the agenda quite a bit. I was going beyond what the Church officially said. For example, on the death penalty, I was very strong on the death penalty, and at one point I remember a journalist asking me, ‘Is your church against the death penalty?’ and I said ‘Well, not officially yet.’” Comments like these did not endear Richard to some church authorities. But on that issue, at least, he was ahead of his time.
Thinking about the church as a whole, Richard noted, “The church is a community of communities of communities all over the world. And just because we read the Gospel and just because we were baptized does not mean we all think the same way.” Discussing the future of the church, Richard pointed to a fear of alienating people as a motive that keeps leaders in the Vatican from making dramatic changes. “[Leaders in the Vatican are] very careful to try and work toward consensus, or at least a position that won’t totally alienate another whole sector of the Church. So they work very slowly. Rome works slowly, and they always tend to work from the bottom up. It’s not top-down. It really isn’t. And when it is, usually it doesn’t work. The Curia’s another story. There’s a lot of people in the Curia who are really into working from the top-down, there’s no doubt about that. It’s actually the worst element. Whether it’s progressive or it’s reactionary, top-down doesn’t work in the Church. It’s a community.”
Richard sees clericalism as the largest issue facing the Church, and the root of many other problems. He voiced that his own status as a priest made him feel less free than laypeople to speak out about issues in the church. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and other issues are hot topics within the church, but for Richard, “the overriding issue is the clergy. Clericalism. It’s a disease. The clericalism in the church… has to be dealt with… There’s a little crowd of old white men who run everything.”
When Kascha asked why Richard continues to be a priest, he shared, “If all of us leave, it will never change. They’ll have to throw me out. And even then, I won’t leave. The only point where I would leave is if it was going to break me. I haven’t gotten to that point yet. I’ve always had a little bit of fire left.”
Listening to Richard speaking about his memories of Vatican II, the excitement and importance of the historical moment was palpable. It really seems there has been no moment like it in my lifetime. Lately, it feels like the sense of possibility within the Church has diminished. And reflecting on Richard’s words, I wondered if a large part of that was because of our collective inability to be honest.
Richard has been a lifelong advocate for justice, yet he felt that his status as an ordained person made it more difficult for him to speak. In every institutional church space I’ve been in, people are afraid to address issues of justice in our communities. We fear “getting in trouble.” We fear disapproval. We fear getting fired. We wonder what we’re allowed to say. The issues that affect our small communities are the same issues that affect the Catholic community as a whole.
For progress and healing to take place within the Church, we need a spirit of boldness similar to the one that animated Vatican II. We need honest conversations to take place that truly address the deep evil that exists within our communities. We need to create spaces in which people are no longer afraid to speak.
