By Carol Cornelius

Father Eugene C. Kennedy of Maryknoll College delivered the Worship Congress’ Keynote address, “Roots of Community,” a paper concerning the possibility of building community through acts of worship.

Father Kennedy said he’d come to Atlanta to “share notions about a celebrating church in which you are increasingly conscious of your responsibilities and the true nature of which we see reflected so well in this gathering here today.” The church is “a worshipping community,” with members finding life “through giving themselves to the world” and not just a legal entity or army. Father Kennedy said “Nothing failed the church like the Crusades and nothing serves it worse than the notions of military discipline or martial law.” The “Church is a people of God, a serving people on pilgrimage together through salvation history,” he continued.

“The Council Fathers chose to discuss the Church as a mystery of men and women struggling to share life together and to hand life to others.”

“A people on pilgrimage,” he said, “in whose caravans there is room for everybody; not a conquering army bent on acquiring territory or persuading people against their will to accept membership in it, but rather a people who understand the essential characteristics of life and the conditions under which life is really shared and who have nothing else to give to the world except that life through giving themselves to the world; and their worship becomes a celebration of reality of life by those who are open enough to it to be touched and transformed by the Spirit, and it is this vision of the Church...always straining to hear the cries of mankind and to reach out and touch...the illness of man,” the noted author continued.

He said, “It is the vision of this Church that our generation is called to bring more closely into reality a vision of community, a worshipping community.”

Father Kennedy said community “arises out of struggles to give ourselves to the struggles required of those who would give life to other people,” and that the greatest danger, which he termed understandable, is “that we who are members of this generation may succumb to the idea of building community just for ourselves.” Quoting Cardinal Suenens, Father Kennedy reminded the approximately 2,500 people there, “we are a family or we are nothing.” He said this is reassuring because things in a family are seldom orderly, usually chaotic. “The meaning of community is not something self conscious and stylized, but is rooted in our determination to try to live together in

the light of the gospels.”

“You know,” he continued, “the family that prays together frequently doesn’t stay together--it’s the family that stays together that really learns how to pray.”

Robert Frost wrote that “home is a place where when you have to go there they have to let you in,” and, the priest said, “that’s really the kind of place the church ought to be -- a place that lets everybody in.”

“It’s very unbecoming for a church to be writing rules that throw people out,” he charged. Instead, the church should be a place where men can “find those who are willing to understand and struggle with a compassionate sense of what it means to live by the gospels.”

Saying that “man is hungry, thirsty, naked and in prison all around us now,” the priest said man has “a new found knowledge that he has numbered days in which he can survive on this planet and men all around us look desperately for those who can minister to them at this time with some sense of values that can give meaning to life as the year 2000 approaches.”

While some consider the gospels irrelevant, Father Kennedy said the “greatest danger comes from our relevance, because we have something men need, something that says there is a way to live, that Christ has lived and died and redeemed us and the spirit is made available to us and we can redeem each other and celebrate this great journey of struggle together,” and, he continued, “the answer is not from clean air or purifying waters because we can still be shut off, distracted from the great terrible problems of racism and war that are the signs of a human community that is disintegrated and that can find itself only if we understand that it is our generation’s challenge to be the church to the world in this hour of need and to put aside our petty arguments about the way we dress or the way we live because something far more important beckons us.” The priest said we will “save ourselves together or we will not be saved at all. This giving ourselves to a common struggle is the community that was meant to precede life and give life to the liturgy which was meant to symbolize and celebrate.”

“We do disservice to the liturgy if we do not see there is a life that we must bring to it -- not a life that we must demand of it,” he insisted.

“An exciting challenge,” Father Kennedy said, “that the churches have opened to the spirit and it is up to us to give ourselves to building that human community which is truly to be a home for man.”

“One generation is not much time, but it is some time and it is our great task to see that it is enough time,” he concluded.

Christianne Brusselman of Fordham University, part of a responding panel, noted that with many Catholic schools closing, the Church depends more and more on schools of religion, where young people must be challenged if they are not to reject the Church.

Dr. Theodore Runyon of Emory University began with a tribute to women in the Church, a remark met with enthusiastic applause and cries of “right on” from the women and “thumbs down” signs from many of the men - mostly priests.

Dr. Benjamin Mays, Atlanta school board chairman, called for social awareness and action on the part of the church.