(RNS) — The Catholic Church in America is experiencing great flux — with profound potential and the pain of reckoning and responsibility. Thirteen percent of Americans, in response to Pew Research, are former Catholics, while the parish Masses are crammed with growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Women are rising to recent roles of leadership as directors of non secular education and pastoral associates, at the same time as the highest leadership roles remain reserved for male priests. Likewise, Pope Francis has officially supported ministering to LGBTQ people and encouraged their embrace inside Catholic families — creating recent possibilities for in-reach.
This time of great change affords Catholic clergy the prospect to adapt to recent needs and serve people in recent ways. At the same time as some may feel constrained by vows of obedience that obligate leadership to line up with papal directives, others are finding support for brand new areas of ministry and outreach to underserved and marginalized groups.
Few have done so with the success of the Rev. James Martin, S.J., who serves as editor-at-large of “America” magazine and is a public theologian who encourages and serves hundreds of thousands online, in print and in person. Martin brings a way of Catholic belonging to many who had been disaffected or unchurched, particularly LGBTQ people.
With greater than 645,000 followers on Facebook, 309,000 on Twitter and 81,000 on Instagram, Martin ministers to people wherever they’re — through social media, bestselling books and frequent television appearances.
Martin also leads smaller in-person trips to the Holy Land with leaders from “America” magazine.
With this multifaceted approach, Father Martin brings his ministry outside the standard institutional framework to directly reach the people he seeks to serve. His work provides a recent model for clergy leadership throughout the Catholic Church, modeled on the instance of Jesus.
At a time when most teachers would wait for college kids to come back to them, said Martin, Jesus went out into the community of Nazareth to call his first disciples. An identical approach works today.
“Possibly they’re not on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so that you go some other place,” he said. “They’re on Facebook, they’re on Instagram, they’re on Twitter. That’s where I am going.”
But that’s just a primary step.
“Whenever you go there, you speak of their language, Martin said, adding that Jesus took the identical approach. When he met Peter, Andrew and James, who were fishermen, he used terms they’d understand slightly than the language of a carpenter.
“He doesn’t say ‘Allow us to lay the foundations of God’s reign’ or ‘Allow us to construct the reign of God,’” said Martin. “He doesn’t say ‘Allow us to construct the House of Mercy.’ As an alternative, Jesus says ‘Come after me, and I’ll make you fishers of individuals.’”
Jesus desired to help people understand God, said Martin, and doing that meant using images from first-century Jewish and agrarian culture.
Father Martin’s work emulates these two key steps: “To go where individuals are and speak their language.”
And if it’s not beneath Jesus to do it, it shouldn’t be beneath us,” he said.
Martin found that in the course of the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of community life shifted online. While online ministry can’t replace the in-person experience of going to Mass and encountering Christ within the Eucharist and communal worship, other gatherings, like book clubs, offer a probability to assemble online and construct community.
Martin now runs a Facebook Bible study every Friday that attracts roughly 500 people. “That’s a form of community,” he affirms. Beyond this, Martin said he interacts with “communities of people that follow me online on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter,” in addition to more “informal communities.”
Particularly, Martin prides himself on ministry to the LGBTQ+ community lately within the wake of the mass shooting on the Pulse, a gay nightclub where 49 people were killed in 2016.
“I felt like I needed to say something,” said Martin. “Only a few bishops said anything when 49 people were killed. And , in a comparable shooting or natural disaster or tragedy, the church says something. It dawned on me that even in death, these individuals are invisible. That’s what kept coming to my mind: Even in death they’re invisible to the Church.”
Martin found the situation and lack of formal responses from the Catholic community intolerable. That led to a Facebook video, to speaking opportunities after which to a 2017 book entitled “Constructing a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter right into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.”
That book led to an ongoing ministry to LGBTQ people, something Martin said God led him to. A part of that ministry includes a web site called Outreach that serves as a resource for LGBTQ Catholics.
“Not everybody agrees with this ministry, and I got quite a lot of pushback … but I even have the support of the Pope (Francis), and I even have the support of my religious order, the Jesuits,” Martin said. “I don’t reach out to LGBTQ people since it’s so controversial, but because that is what God has in mind for me, and I’m completely satisfied to do it.”
by Joshua Stanton, rabbi of East End Temple in Manhattan and a senior fellow at CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and Benjamin Spratt, senior rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan.
