South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 30, No. 43, Ed. 1 Friday, December 11, 1987 Page: 4 of 16
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: Texas Gulf Coast Register/South Texas Catholic and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the UNT Libraries.
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December 11, 1987
4
Conference Homily
Third North American Maritime Ministry Conference
Editor’s note: The following is a homily given by
Bishop Rene H. Gracida at the Third North American
Maritime Ministry Conference in San Pedro, Ca., on
Sept. 21, 1987. Bishop Gracida is National Episcopal
Promoter of the Apostleship of the Sea in the United
States.
I suppose that many, if not most of you have from
time to time had an opportunity to watch the televi-
sion series which for a long time was the most
popular television series in the United States. I am
referring to M.A.S.H. Some of you who are less than
30 might not remember that the M.A.S.H. series
grew out of the movie Catch-22. Those of us who are
over 30 perhaps recall some of the outlines of that
movie.
The movie drew its title and its theme from the all
too frequent human experience, the reality that we
are faced frequently in life with an apparent no-win
situation. We are damned if we do and we are damn-
ed if we don’t. The alternatives, no matter which one
we choose, seem to be unproductive; we are faced
with insurmountable difficulties. I don’t remember
the exact details of the ‘catch-22’ in the movie since it
was 20 some odd years ago, but I do know that there
are many such ‘catch-22 situations in our society, in
our life today, a couple of which I can point to, which
illustrate the point.
A seafarer needs a work card to get a job, gain ex-
perience so he can win promotion, but the ‘catch-22’
situation is that he needs the experience of the job to
get a work card, so you see his situation. He cannot
get a job because he doesn’t have a card and he can’t
get a card because he doesn’t have a job. That kind of
situation is all too often repeated in our society where
bureaucracy, rules and regulations of government
place human beings in impossible situations.
There is another example I can cite; one which is
very current. If you watched the hearings forjudge
Bork during the past week, those hearings which will
continue, you know that Judge Bork finds sometimes
himself in a ‘catch-22’ situation. He is condemned on
the one hand because he is labeled classified as an
ideologue, strict, unbending, unyielding in his
ideology as expressed in his speeches and writings as
a college professor, but as a judge, and especially
during the hearing, he has taken back some of his
previous positions and has indicated a certain flex-
ibility.
So while on the one hand he is condemned as being
rigid and unflexible, he is condemned on the other
hand as being unpredictable because of his changing
views. It is truly a ‘catch-22’ situation and no-win
situation for him.
In the Gospel which was just proclaimed, Our
Lord Jesus Christ presents us with another no-win
situation, a ‘catch-22’ situation. He contrasts the
ministry of John the Baptist with His own. As you
heard in that reading from the 11th Chapter of Mat-
thew, verse 16-19, he says: “what comparison can I
use to describe this breed of people. They are like
children, squatting on the town square, calling to
their playmates: we piped you a tune but you did not
dance, we sang you a dirge but you would not weep.
In other words, John appeared neither eating nor
drinking and people say he is mad. The Son of Man
appeared eating and drinking and they say he is a
glutton and a drunkard, a lover of tax collectors and
those outside the law. It was a no-win situation. Our
Lord could not please some people of His time, no
matter what He did! If he abstained as did John from
food and drink, they would have called him mad also.
If he indulged in food and drink as he did, then he
was called a drunkard and a sinner. Well, these ex-
amples of John the Baptist and Our Lord offer us
food for thought as we reflect upon our own
discipleship in our call to be ministers of word and
sacraments, that is, ministering to others in the
economy of salvation of Our Lord Jesus Christ as we
seek to bring others into a closer union with Him.
We might ask ourselves, how does this apply to us
as disciples? Well, we must be disciples who act with
assertiveness in the face of the difficulties which we
have in our ministry; and our difficulties are many as
you well know.
One of the difficulties in our ministry is the brevity
of our contact with those to whom we minister. They
are increasingly in port for a shorter and shorter
period of time. They are available to you for contact
for a shorter and shorter period of time with each
passing year. The turnaround time of most ships in
our ports is increasingly being diminished and so the
availability of the seafarer for you to have contact
with is growing less and less.
That’s a serious difficulty when you seek to pro-
claim the Gospel and bear witness to Christ.
Then, there is difficulty of access. How do you
gain access to seafarers when your port is scattered
along hundreds of miles of a river, as is the Port of
New Orleans, for example, and ships are berthed out
-in the delta as well as along the river and it is almost
impossible to get to every ship. It is extremely dif-
ficult in some ports, the larger ports, to have access to
the seafarer.
There is a difficulty of communication; how do we
communicate with so many different people from so
many different lands, so many different cultures,
speaking so many different languages, having dif-
ferent frameworks of reference for the message that
we share with them?
There is the difficulty of the context of the struc-
tured social sin that we live in the midst of. The struc-
tured social sin is of course the exploitation of the
seafarer by the maritime industry: flags of conve-
nience, work rules, employment contracts, all of
these things are all too familiar to you and you know
that the context of structured social sin within which
we exercise the ministry to seafarers presents to us
formidable obstacles, formidable difficulties.
There must somehow be a way for us to see the
clear outline of a method for ministry, a method
which will necessarily involve assertiveness, courage,
boldness in proclaiming the Gospel and living the
Gospel in our witness in a way which overcomes the
apparent ‘catch-22’ situation in which we find
ourselves.
James and Evelyn Whitehead in their book,
Method Ministry, offer us some reflections on the
principal elements of an effective method of ministry
in our situation. First of all, they define assert ion-in-
ministry as assertion in our life of faith in pastoral
reflection represents the act of witnessing to the word
that we have heard, aware of God’s Word and its im-
pact on our life we feel called to announce this Good
News and to challenge others to hear and accept it.
They go on to describe the outlines of this kind of
theological pastoral reflection which results in an
assertive kind of ministry. They say “the considera-
tion of assertiveness as an interpersonal and
theological skill addresses the question of how the
Christian effects this sharing; assertiveness guides
Christian witness so that it is neither weak and self-
effacing which would be a non-assertive witness nor
intolerant which would be an aggressive witness.”
Assertiveness becomes a necessary theological skill
as we recognize that our witnessing takes place in a
context or others’ convictions and insights and for us
engaged as we are in the maritime ministry that con-
text of others’ convictions and insights applies first of
all, to the seafarer himself or herself where they are in
their journey of faith toward God and secondly, it ap-
plies to each other, our fellow ministers and where we
are in relationship one to another in terms of our
bearing witness to our faith.
“A witnessing not possessed of any final or ab-
solute understanding. We must remain open and
listening even as we witness, for a witnessing that is
closed to new information is not assertive but is
disrespectful and intolerant,” the Whiteheads assert.
And of course that is what we are about in
ecumenism; as we seek in an ecumenical relationship
of ministry to work in bearing witness to the Gospel
message, we must constandy keep in mind this need
to respect one another’s convictions and insights and
to employ a kind of assertiveness which is neither a
non-assertive witness, self-effacing and weak, nor an
intolerant witness which is aggressive. The challenge
then interpersonally and theologically is to find a
balance by which we can present our own insights
and beliefs forcefully without forcing them on others.
Two characteristics of the contemporary life of
faith underscore the importance of assertiveness in
any theological reflection on ministry. In the first
there is religious pluralism. Well, that's what we are
about today and this week. We recognize the fact that
we engage in ministry in a pluralistic society and in a
pluralistic setting within the ports of the United
States.
That we work in close relationship, if not in actual
relationship, with one another representing different
churches, different frameworks of credal belief. This
pluralism is not just a contemporary experience; the
Christian witness of faith has been pluriform from
the beginning. Its diversity again is a sign of the
richness of the Good News for humankind. Certain-
ly, we Roman Catholics are increasingly aware of
this pluriformity.
This richness of diversity is evident within our own
Church, as we witnessed during these past 10 days as
Pope John Paul II went around the United States.
His contact with Catholic laity, Catholic clergy and
Catholic Religious represented a wide-ranging spec-
trum of concerns, wide-ranging spectrum of pastoral
application of commonly held doctrine. This diversi-
ty, this pluriformity is common to all of us within our
respective churches and certainly within our society
in the United States.
A second characteristic of the contemporary life of
faith adds to the need for assertiveness in our
ministry. This is the reflective Christian’s need to be
not only a child of God, but an adult in faith. Mature
Christians properly remain children of God
throughout all their adult lives. We are all too
familiar with the injunction of Our Lord Jesus Christ
that we must be as little children if we are to enter the
Kingdom of God.
The French philosopher Jacques Maritain put that
thought very cleverly when he said that what we see
in the world all too often these days is people with
hard hearts and soft minds. What the world needs
more of is people with soft hearts and hard minds.
That saying I think applies to the Gospel message of
Our Lord Jesus Christ: that we should be as little
children, that we should remain soft hearted as we
were as children, loving and being open filled with
awe to the mystery of God’s presence in creation and
especially the creation of the human person of one
another.
But we must have hard minds, we must grow, not
only in knowlege of the secular sciences and all of the
secular knowledge which we have available to us, but
See Maritime Conference, page 6
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Freeman, Robert E. South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 30, No. 43, Ed. 1 Friday, December 11, 1987, newspaper, December 11, 1987; Corpus Christi, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth840840/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .