Refound in the Franciscan Tradition

5. Choices for the 90s

5 Choices for the 90s At the Provincial Chapter of 1987, seven assumptions for planning our future were approved.1 The Provincial Council and I made many difficult ministerial decisions based upon these capitular assumptions, now neatly tucked away in memory. My task, at the Chapter of 1990, was to tackle the issue of choices made based upon the by-now forgotten assumptions. W h i l e somewhat revised, I am not unaware of this (and other chapters) lack of inclusive language at times. Since I am presenting t h e material as a case study, I ask the reader's understanding. August Wilson's Pulitzer prize winning play The Piano Lesson is about choices.2 Boy Willie, its central character, travels from 1The seven assumptions are: 1. It is an appropriate responsibility of the chapter to address itself to the development of policies and strategies which are expected to guide the Provincial Council in making specific executive decisions on where and how we deploy and commit province manpower. 2. Even with healthy fraternities and friars committed and available to be sent anywhere in ministry, the Province still has to ask itself where we want to deploy our ministerial personnel, whom we will choose to serve, and what kinds of service we intend to provide. 3. Declining numbers represent God's call to us to reflect on the changing reality of the Church He wills to build, and are therefore a challenge to our creativity in fashioning new forms of ministerial response to a new kind of Church. 4. We will not be given sufficient new vocations to maintain a replacement level of friars in the near future; the number of men available for ministry in this Province will decrease. 5. It is getting increasingly difficult for the Provincial Administration to find qualified friars to cover all the present ministerial commitments of the Province. 6. We have accepted certain ministerial responsibilities as a Province that require talents and skills that not every friar can possess even with training; this means that some constraints on the flexibility of our manpower pool are built into the demands of commitments we have made. 7. In the field of parish ministry, the issue is not simply our Province's ability to provide priests, but rather to supply men who have the competence to minister in today's parish, and, in particular, the competence to serve as pastor of the parish. 2August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (New York, N.Y.: Plume, 1990); also (New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 1990). 44 Anthony Carrozzo, O.F.M. the deep South to Pittsburgh to persuade and, if necessary, force his sister Bernice to sell a valued carved piano. Boy Willie also values this family treasure, but wants to sell it to buy land. His stubborn sister will have none of it, adamantly insisting that the piano's carved figures represent the family's history. Boy Willie gets fired up because he feels a need to work directly on God's good earth. After all, he reasons, people can make more pianos but God will not create more earth. The audience becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the dilemma, seesawing back and forth: Sell the piano so the earth can be renewed through toiling and tilling, providing work and food; no, keep the piano because its joyful songs to the Lord can move hearts to remember treasured family traditions. Originally August Wilson left the choice unresolved. But audiences were not satisfied with the apparent cop-out. After all, they seemed to say, life itself is a concatenation of choices; even reasonable ones like selling a piano can generate heated arguments. So audiences demanded a suitable lifelike solution. And the playwright devised one. Thinking of choices reminds me of Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovakian poet-president as he spoke before our Congress. We watched and listened in awe as he fulfilled before our eyes his dual role of artist and statesman. And what did Havel talk about? Responsible choices! He asserted that "the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility." He commented further: the only genuine backbone of all our actions — if they are to be moral — is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where a l l our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only...