The Rev. Dr. Walter J. Smith, S.J., on identity and ongoing efforts to trust each other

Developing Further Professional Friendships

My Jesuit superiors encouraged me 14 years ago to accept the invitation of the trustees of The HealthCare Chaplaincy to lead this multifaith pastoral care, education, and research organization across the threshold of the twenty-first century. To succeed in fulfilling The Chaplaincy’s mandate, two things have been essential. As an organization we had to turn our attention inward and strengthen the core programs, build a faculty to educate a new generation of leaders and researchers for the pastoral care movement, secure the infrastructures and finances, and plan strategically for the future. At the same time, we also had to look outward to build effective partnerships among constituencies in the corporate and philanthropic world, and engage collaboratively with others in the cognate worlds of pastoral care, education, and research, both nationally and internationally.

For the past several years, each of the pastoral care and counseling organizations in North America has consciously or unconsciously turned its attention to similar inward and outward struggles. The very future of the profession of pastoral care has been on the line.

In these recent years we have accomplished some rather important objectives, which naysayers and skeptics might have predicted could never have been achieved. Our histories bear eloquent witness to our preference for “inward-directed” agendas, our penchant for not becoming mired in denominationally-centered issues and our preoccupation with the internal struggles in efforts to define our separate missions, visions, and values. Identity and mission, traditions and purpose are not issues that lend facilely to reconciliation.

In our own denominational pastoral care organizations and in the wider field of professional pastoral care, a perceived need is forcing us to become sojourners. Otherwise, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, along with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other faith traditions might not have found themselves in places like Toronto, Ontario, Nashville, Tennessee, and Portland, Maine trying to find common meaning and purpose and a new way to live together.

Last November, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in London, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, spoke about the topic of ecumenical and interfaith dialogue during the past 40 years. [1] His comments could equally be illuminating to our interreligious collaboration as professional chaplains. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor noted that we are “no longer enemies or indifferent neighbors … (we) meet as brothers, sisters, friends.”

The Cardinal continued: “There is no question that this pilgrimage is in difficulty. In a certain way we can speak of a crisis. I mean ‘crisis’ in the sense of the original Greek—when things are hanging in the balance, on a knife-edge. This state can be either positive or negative; both are possible. A crisis is a situation in which old ways come to an end but there is room for new possibilities. The crisis presents itself as a challenge and a time for decision.”

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor reasons that the crisis of the ecumenical movement is paradoxically the result of its success. The Cardinal noted that: “The closer we come to one another the more painful is the separation. . .we are hurt by what still separates us and hinders us…and we are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo.”

Especially poignant for me were his remarks that: “The closer we come together, the more important questions of identity become. Every denominational group wishes to have its own identity and not be absorbed in a faceless, bigger whole.”

For me this is the heart of the matter. The professionalization of chaplaincy in North America is inextricably yoked to our ability to sustain and develop further the friendships we have made with each other and the degree to which we shall succeed in our ongoing efforts of trusting each other.

We have gotten so much closer in our debates and discussions, in our conjoint meetings and assemblies, in our day-to-day collaboration in the work of pastoral care, education, and research. But as Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor noted, as we get closer, the issues of our identities become more delineated, and the fears of assimilation more pronounced.

The pastoral care movement in North America is at a moment of choice. We have embarked together on a journey, and many of us share anxieties about where we are going and how it will end.

Regardless of the choices we shall make, we all know that this is a critical time for choosing, and intuitively we know that the choices we elect to make will shape the outcome.

[1] Address given by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor to the Churches Together in England forum on 6 November 2004, reflecting on 40 years of ecumenical growth since the Vatican Council’s decree on ecumenism was promulgated.

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