Bishop Joseph N. Perry

That was the message Bishop Joseph N. Perry of Chicago brought to the 2004 Heartland Conference March 1, co-sponsored by the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in western Missouri, and the adjoining Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.

The conference pulls together priests and lay ministers from several Midwestern states.

Speaking to a general session on the first day, Bishop Perry said parishes today are being challenged to create "communities of Jesus that represent the diversity that was there that first Pentecost in Jerusalem."

Bishop Perry, as an auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Chicago, is the episcopal vicar of 75 parishes.

The church began at the first Pentecost, described in the Acts of the Apostles, "with people with different shaped noses, different colored eyes and skin hues, speaking different languages yet understanding one another while confessing faith in Jesus Christ and his resurrection," he said.

If religion is to be "more than just a hobby tacked onto our lives," or an endorsement of the status quo in society, he said, "we have to carry forward this blueprint" by addressing the racial and other separations that still characterize both society and the church at the parish level.

People naturally tend to drift into comfortable and familiar patterns, congregating with people like themselves.

"That we are clannish seems to be written in the human condition," he said, a trait that is also found in the animal world.

"Place of origin, skin color, language, culture and customs define each of us and can be cause for misunderstanding and even outright rejection," he said. "The human condition exacerbates these differences when we see them as problems instead of spice, obstacles instead of opportunities."

But, he said, "discipleship in Christ urges us to transcend these social barriers" in shaping the kingdom of Christ.

The civil rights movement mellowed the country somewhat, Bishop Perry said, the product of many people's work, "none more than the work of the apostle of social justice, Martin Luther King."

But there is more work to be done before King's dream materializes. "Thanks be to God, so many Americans of all hues are trying earnestly to help achieve that dream," Bishop Perry said.

While the church often reflects the racial partitioning of society, "the Catholic Church is also a force for good in an era of narrow mindedness, neo-nationalism and racial separation," he said.

"We want to construct life and ministry and worship and education in our dioceses and parishes to be all-embracing of everyone because the church is supposed to be a model of and a leader with inclusion. In the church, no culture is the norm, no language is the rule. We work to give credence to everyone's customs, everyone's language, everyone's Catholic traditions," Bishop Perry said.

Christians ought to lead in breaking out of society's comfort zones "to keep the church faithful to its Pentecostal template," he said. Patterns of separation "are neither Gospel constructions nor Gospel values," he said. "The Sunday assembly should everywhere be a visible proclamation of Pentecost."

One way to combat separation is to bring members of minority groups in mostly white, mostly black or mostly brown parishes into the leadership group. In the early church when Greek-speaking Christians protested that their community's widows were being neglected, "the apostles chose seven Greek appointees as a remedy."

This solution came to be known as the diaconate, he said, "the earliest recognition by church leaders that all groups need to participate in leadership and decision-making in the church."

In bringing together Jew and Gentile in the early church, St. Paul emphasized their shared faith, their shared need for grace, their shared ministry to the world.

"In other words, Paul urged them to overlook their different backgrounds and turn their attention instead to their common humanity, their common hunger for God, their common mission in the name of Christ," Bishop Perry said.

He urged every diocese to arrange links between parishes separated by race, economic levels or ethnicity, so they can share fellowship, worship and ministry with another parish.

"We should bring our communities of Jesus together this way," he said. "Otherwise we are complicit in the social sin of our day. A parish's identity, first and foremost, is to foster unity and forge us into oneness in the Body of Christ."

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