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Volume 1.1 January 2003 Books Columns Companions Food Jesuits
Letter from the California Provincial on the SOA Ignatian Family Teach-in
Just Good Company Papacy Poetry Rome Diary Sex Women |
JUST
GOOD COMPANY WILL BE A PROPHETIC COMPANY
Denis
Collins is a Jesuit on the faculty of the University of San Francisco who is
helping us elaborate our editorial policy. He ventures here to give a rationale
for Just Good Company's plan -- to take a prophetic stance vis a vis the Church
and the world in the spirit of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
Father Collins did his
doctoral dissertation at the University of Southern California in the early
1970s on Freire, a towering figure in the post-conciliar Church best known for
his development of a concept he called conscientization, a difficult word for
Anglophones that could have been made easier, we think, if translators had only
used the phrase "growing up."
For those who wonder what
Freire might possibly have to offer readers of JUST GOOD COMPANY, read on.
JUST GOOD COMPANY WILL BE
A PROPHETIC COMPANY
Denis Collins, S.J.
I'd like to offer some
reflections on the notion of prophetic speech by referring readers to the
thought of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Catholic educator (1921-1997) who spoke
out of the hopes that were enkindled in the very first years after Vatican II.
Freire dared to denounce what he believed was hurting humankind and to announce
caring alternative strategies to help people, not hurt them. He went on to
suffer for speaking out (no good deed goes unpunished) but he stood by his
words through imprisonment and exile from 1964 to 1983. To the end of his life
he developed his prophetic vision as an educator and communicator, and he left
us a wonderful last will and testament, Pedagogy of Freedom, a book that was
published in 1996.
Freire was
born into a middle class family that lived in dire poverty during the Great
Depression. His experiences in childhood and adolescence told him what it was to
be fatherless and hungry, attended by real stomach pains and severe headaches,
and they gave him his passionate commitment to freedom from every form of human
oppression -- intellectual, spiritual, physical, religious, and political
oppression.
Freire was a
prophet who spoke tellingly about hunger. For him, hunger to become is a normal
human state - something he called our "ontological vocation to be more." Freire
argued that it is impossible to meet that hunger unless we understand that we
have a daily duty to risk speaking out - authentically. Freire's prophets are
not content with thinking that is mythical or magical. They must have a
critical consciousness that helps them read the world as it is, and then summon
the courage to denounce what needs to be corrected or improved, and announce
alternatives that free us to become the humans our Creator intended us to be.
If we find elephants sitting in our living rooms (or in our Church vestibules),
we hope we will have the gumption to say, "Hey! What the do you think you're
doing here?" Following the Roman poet Terence's declaration, that nothing human
was alien to him, we hope JUST GOOD COMPANY will entertain prophetic voices that
denounce what stinks to high heaven and announce whatever Good News seems to
apply.
We hope that contributors to JUST GOOD COMPANY will find a cybernetic
environment where they can exercise the freedom of authentic prophets,
unfettered by institutional gatekeepers or ecclesiastical spies and emboldened
because they are in good company. We hope they will speak in the open spirit of
the Second Vatican Council, and dare to risk thinking creatively, even
unconventionally, in the face of the problems that threaten humankind and the
planet we'd like to call home.
Dialogue was one of the key concepts that emerged from the Second Vatican
Council. Dialogue has been held out to us by friend and foe as an ideal,
too often presumed by either side in a controversy to be a behavior that
requires no asceticism. Conservative understandings of dialogue too often
end up as "Don't hesitate to tell the authorities your needs, then abide by
their superior power to make decisions about your way of thinking and living."
An opposite presumption is sadly the case with many who speak in the name of a
freedom that means "all ideas are equally valid."
This is not
what Freire meant. He said we need to undergo an "Easter experience" of dying to
our own convictions before we can engage in the kind of constructive dialogue
that can help fill our many hungers for freedom. Many nations champion these
basic freedoms in their constitutions -- freedom of speech, of association, of
religion (which includes freedom from abuse in the name of religion). But what
good are these freedoms if we choose not to exercise them? JUST GOOD COMPANY
will try to encourage these freedoms by promoting dialogue - which entails
active reading and active listening, as well as speaking out against the
oppressive forces that stop us from being all that we can be. As Paulo Freire
(and a good many Old Testament prophets) taught us, we have to risk being
misunderstood, denounced, even punished for daring to do that.
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