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Nov. 27, 2019
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Catholic San FranciscoThe church today can be compared to two forms of minority, says the newly elected master of the worldwide Dominican Order -- one that feels like a “tired, aged” minority in formerly majority-Catholic countries, and the other a “confident and hopeful” minority.
“(Their) confidence comes from a conviction that what they are doing is meaningful for them and for the people and for society,” Dominican Father Gerard F. Timoner III said in an interview with Catholic San Francisco at St. Albert’s Priory in Oakland. Father Timoner was in the Bay Area to visit the Western Dominican Province’s local ministries.
This past July, provincial superiors of the Dominican order, representing more than 5700 friars, elected Father Timoner, 51, as the next master of the order during their general chapter in Bien Hoa, Vietnam. A native of the Philippines, Father Timoner is the 88th superior of the 800-year-old Dominican Order and the first Asian to lead it. He had previously served as the second in command for the order’s Asia-Pacific region and as the provincial for the Philippines.
Father Timoner was appointed by Pope Francis to the International Theological Commission in 2014.
Recapturing the confidence now often seen in countries where Catholics are the minority requires Catholics in Europe and the U.S. to rethink how they view their situation, Father Timoner said. While there are fewer people attending church today, the children of lapsed Catholics represent a new area for missionary work, he said.
“It’s true there are a lesser number of people who are active in the church, but even if they came from Catholic families, they did not grow up as Catholics,” he said. Because “many of the young people are part of a generation whose parents decided not to educate them in the faith or bring them to church,” he said, evangelizing them can be an opportunity to renew the faith in a family.
What is most important for Catholics today, he said, is to “become aware of our own conviction.”
Where the church is a minority, like Indonesia or Vietnam, that process occurs more naturally because Catholics’ convictions set them apart. Father Timoner added that a minority church also is “more acutely aware that we are truly one body: If you inflict pain on one part, it’s the entire body that feels pain.”
The Catholic Church’s growth in Vietnam, where it makes up 7 percent of the population, shows the strength of a committed minority, Father Timoner said. Vietnam is the fastest growing province of the Dominican order, ordaining nearly 50 Dominicans in the past year. More than 117,000 Catholics in the country are lay Dominicans.
On the other hand, being in the religious majority can lead to taking faith for granted, he said. “I’m not saying we need a minority to be committed, but when we are a majority, we need to remain committed,” he said. “The temptation to take things for granted is greater because you just assume that everybody else is like that."
Father Timoner said that part of building that conviction means rediscovering “the importance of baptism and our baptismal promises and duties.” Initiation into the church through the sacraments of baptism, Communion and confirmation makes each Catholic a missionary disciple, he said.
“Since the majority of Catholics are the lay people, the church should be felt through the lay people,” he said.
Laity are already involved in Christ’s ministry just through their lives, he said. A doctor “is not just a doctor but a baptized and committed Christian participating in the healing ministry of the Lord. You don’t have to be ordained to do that.”
After Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in 2013, he said, some voices were raised about how the church should be doing more. Father Timoner said that for him, the laity on the front lines of responding to the disaster “are members of the church and what they do is what the church does.”
“What the church does in the United States is not just what the bishops and the priests and the sisters and the nuns are doing, it is what many lay people are doing,” he said.
Another important aspect of lay involvement in the church is through popular devotions, Father Timoner said, noting that where popular devotions have dwindled, people’s faith has also become diminished. Both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI, he said, have highlighted that popular devotions are some of the “greatest treasures of the church.” Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe or San Francisco’s St. Jude shrine all show that devotions are a place where people encounter God, he said.
“We cannot deny in countries where popular devotions are alive, the faith is alive,” he said. “In countries where the faith has been reduced to intellectual musings, the faith has become cold, and I think that’s something to think about. So, I’m glad the Dominicans promote the rosary.”