What is more traditional than mission?

By Patrick Schmadeke 
Evangelization in the World Today
Published in the Catholic Messenger

A personal practice I’ve engaged in over the last couple of years is whenever I hear someone use the word “Church,” in my head I fill in: “people of God.” I end up doing this most days of the week. A few things inspired this practice. First, this is simply Catholic theology. The Church is, in the first place, not a building or the pope but the people. Second, it is etymological. The Greek term that is typically translated as “Church” in English versions of the New Testament, ἐκκλησία, meant a public meeting or an assembly for deliberation and decision-making.

My personal practice has been an intriguing way to pay closer attention to what people mean when they use the term “Church.” Meanings range and intermingle but they often include the building, the ordained, the pope and authoritative teaching documents. It is rarer, in my experience, that people mean “people of God” in the holistic way that Vatican II invites us to recognize.

A similarly valuable exercise could be done with the words “tradition” and “traditional.” Like Church, these indispensable words to our Catholic vocabulary are freighted with ambiguous meanings. I have heard the words tradition and traditional referred to as a style of music, a mode of liturgical style, a set of moral or community values.

More generally, I’ve heard it as a substitute for “what I’m used to,” “what things were like before,” or “the right way to do things.” The problem I’ve observed is that when it comes to the faith life of a community, invoking the words tradition or traditional in these ways more often functions to end a conversation rather than to start one; think of Tevye’s absolutizing and devastating appeal to “tradition!” in The Fiddler on the Roof.

In Catholicism, we refer to the tradition in the same way that Peter referred to God in Matthew 16:16: it is living. This living tradition unfolds in the midst of our own living through the discernment of the Spirit. That brings us to our Diocese of Davenport. From the listening sessions that occurred during the winter and spring of 2022, we gained a three-year focus that has moved along one year at a time.

The themes are welcoming and belonging (year one), youth and family engagement (year two) and now we are now entering year three, Church teaching and tradition. Each year, questions have arisen: what does it look like to welcome? Why do some people not feel like they belong? What are the culturally stereotypical images of family life and do those hinder people from joining our faith communities? We would do well to create space for similar questions and greater awareness of self and others in the year ahead.

One way we are nurturing this is through a grant the diocese received to purchase 500 copies of the book “Becoming the Good News.” Pastors were invited to identify a leadership group (pastoral council, evangelization committee, etc.) in their parishes to walk through the book from fall through spring.

During this process, participants will discern how to more fully become the Good News that God is calling them to be. Such missionary discipleship is a process, not an event; a journey, not a destination; a relationship, not a transaction. Discipleship invites the whole person — the heart, the hands, the head — into a creative fidelity to the greatest story ever told. This rootedness in the person of Jesus and the living tradition that followed him, is what animates and guides our action.

The need for this is urgent. Statistics on the disaffiliation of young people, as well as adults, need not be rehearsed here. Nor do the problems of our present cultural setting. But these kinds of considerations are guiding the Church in formulating a missionary response. What we need to remember, in such hours, is that the Church is all of us together on mission.

(Patrick Schmadeke is director of evangelization for the Diocese of Davenport.)