Reinventing Commonweal Local Communities

Updated 10/30/2024

Reinventing Commonweal Local Communities

What do you see as the potential value of Commonweal Communities?

A four-year experience in the 1980s as a voluntary member of pastoral staff of a parish in Toledo formed my ideal of a small community.  Most of the pastoral staff members were volunteers. We were diverse in our parish responsibilities, professional backgrounds, and spirituality. 

Parish responsibilities included social justice minister, youth minister, accountant, maintenance.  Professional backgrounds included a Black woman with a state level award for her public-school teachings who told stories that allowed children to think about values. We had a union shop steward.  A couple who gave Marriage Encounters were our RENEW program leaders. The leader of woman’s organization had lost her daughter to suicide. Several of the staff had backgrounds in the charismatic movement. 

We took turns leading opening prayers by sharing our spiritual diversity. We functioned as a group of equals supporting one another’s gifts rather than competing for the pastor’s attention. He functioned very much as a first among equals, letting the group discern its way before summarizing conclusions.    

The experience of that parish leadership community changed my life in at least three ways.  It led me outward, beyond the parish to first consider opportunities that were opening for lay leadership at the diocesan level, and then to a renovated commitment to serving the mentally ill as what Jesus would do.  

Secondly, my habit of functioning with a group of equals in parish leadership transformed how I exercised senior leadership at both the agency and board levels.  

Finally, when I came to Lake County, I saw mentally ill people volunteering in the agencies. When the state announced grants for innovative ideas, our volunteers had so many that I proposed a leadership development grant to help them do all of them.  That began a process of increasing consumer leadership that eventually resulted in annual award by the mental health board for consumer achievement. The background to my confidence in the leadership of the mentally ill was my confidence in the ability of volunteers to lead a parish.

Over the first three-years of the Cleveland Commonweal Local Community, I experienced a great diversity of work backgrounds and life experiences, both in those who came to the meetings and those who were in contact with me by e-mail.   Unfortunately conflicts and long travel times discouraged many people from attending. We never saw much of that rich diversity in place at one time.  Several nights we were a group of couples, actually completely different couples. One night we were mostly men with seminary experience who had (as one put it) either spit out clericalism or had been spat out by it.  While on paper our greatest potential were women members, women who were not part of couples tended either not to show up, or not return.

What are the strengths and weakness of the original Commonweal Local Community Model? How might they be remedied?

The great strength of the Commonweal Local Community model is that it began as a grassroots movement; its reinvention should continue that model.

Communities that were beginning to form around the country asked Commonweal for assistance. That assistance came in the form of a place on the Commonweal website where people could register for local communities, and Commonweal’s promotion of that page.  This had disadvantages as well as advantages.  The page tended to foster dependence upon Commonweal for recruitment. That overemphasized Commonweal subscribers without giving the CLC direct access to local subscribers.

Why limit our membership to Commonweal subscribers?  I invited Betty to our third meeting although I had just met her. I had seen her function in discussion group on a topic and with members similar to those of the CLC.  After discovering that we have many things in common, we became best friends. 

Could we recruit non-Commonweal subscribers in our parishes?  Most of our meetings were at Saint Noel.  Our announcement always appeared in its bulletin but required people to register in advance. We got no response for the first year. When we set up a table in their narthex, we began to get a few people, mostly people who knew Betty because she was a cantor in the parish choir.  If you recruit in your parish, you will probably recruit people whom you already know.  

Could we recruit more Commonweal subscribers from our area?

In September 2018, there were 165 Commonweal subscribes within 30 miles of downtown Cleveland.   That may seem to have great potential. However, like our membership they are scattered across the whole metropolitan area. Four local communities would be needed so that everyone would be within a reasonable driving distance. At twelve members each, that would mean recruiting about a third of those subscribers. That is a daunting task; especially since Commonweal we did not have access to the local mailing list. They did agree to send a one- time e-mail to their Cleveland subscribers with our website address. No evidence of any response.  

COMMONWEAL HOME COMMUNITIES

When CLCs were first announced, my first thought was that I wanted a small, 6-8 person CLC that would meet regularly in my home and listen to my collection of liturgical music before and afterwards.  That is what I had done in the RENEW program as RENEW for music lovers.  

I decided to use participation in the Cleveland CLC as a preparation to having one in my home at age eighty.  I am now eighty-two, and therefore will focus upon developing a Home CLC, mostly from among friends in the area.

The first meeting of the Cleveland CLC was held in a bar. Someone offered his home as a meeting place.  Those attending preferred a Catholic setting such as church or school rather than in a home. In the first year a new person offered her home. I declined since one of our members was dying of cancer; he lived close to Noel and his daughter was bringing him to meetings. Finally on the night before he died, we met in his home.  I found it the ideal meeting place and wished he had offered it earlier.

Commonweal magazine and Commonweal Home Communities have great potential for empowering Catholics without making us dependent on institutional support including Commonweal and networks of local subscribers as well as parishes and schools. Anyone with a Commonweal subscription can recruit family, friends, neighbors and parish members to a meeting in their own home or elsewhere. The other people do not need Commonweal subscriptions since Commonweal generously offers five free articles per month.  One could even have weekly meetings if so desired!

Two persons who prayed the office suggested we pray Vespers before our meetings.  At the beginning of the pandemic Betty and I began collecting YouTube resources on the internet in a blog called the Virtual Divine Office.  I have now distilled those resources into a blog more usable to others, Saint Gabriel Hours. 

COMMONWEAL VIRTUAL COMMUNITIIES

Commonwealth had a virtual (online blog) community long before it began promoting Commonweal Local Communities.  It was widely known as one of the most civilized blogs. Commonweal contributors made posts and invited comments not only to their articles that made it into Commonweal but also to posts that did not, and to posts that commented on articles of interest elsewhere, e.g., America, National Catholic Reporter, New York Times, Atlantic Magazine etc.

Commonweal closed down that blog at the same time they started CLCs. Why? Although the blog was successful, basically the same 30 to 50 people were responsible for 90% of the comments.  That had the advantage of creating a great sense of community among those who commented regularly. Encouraging Commonweal communities in places like Cleveland where 30 to 50 people could actually meet and get to know each other seemed a better idea.

The commenters on the Commonweal blog did not take closing down lightly. They(we) started our own blog. It was up within about a week. We had no desire to compete with Commonweal by attracting new people, we merely wanted to continue our community.  Many of us who were commenters became posters. Only a few contributors joined us. Many of us had the habit of writing long comments that were really a rebuttal post or a new post on the same topic. 

The blog began with about a dozen posters with perhaps another dozen persons who gave an occasional comment. Over the period of more than five years those numbers have been cut in half through various forms of attrition. Many of us post at least once a week, and comment daily on the other’s posts.  There are about the same number of people with similar levels of participation in our CLC.

Why can a Virtual Community succeed so easily?

First like TV, which has grown to absorb so much of people’s lives, it is accessible 24/7.  One can do a post anytime, taking as much time as necessary in bits and pieces.  One can respond with comments anytime. No need to travel or be anywhere at any specific time.

Why does this Blog continue?  There is a lot of boring television that hits the dust in less than a year. It helps that we have the Commonweal framework and experience that shape choices of posts, but that is not sufficient.  My answer is that we are a very diverse community in our professional backgrounds, where we live, our experiences of church and our political views.  A popular best seller Friends has made the case that that the human brain evolved to deal with the complexity of human interactions. Its author Dunbar argues that most of us can only manage about 150 persons. Even then much of our time is spent with concentric circles of 5, 15, and 50 people whom we see regularly. The smaller the circle, the more important the relationship, and greater amount of time that is required.   A virtual blog allows people to understand complex people in a complex world in a very efficient manner without much cost.

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