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 Fr. Bill Clark has spent some six years living in Kingston,
Jamaica. He has done pastoral work there, in St. Thomas Aquinas
Parish. He has been a teacher of history at St. George's
College and a lecturer at St. Michael's Theological
Institute and at St. Michael's Seminary.
This was by no means easy duty.
"It's a fascinating place, Jamaica," Fr.
Clark remembers. "The strain of it was in trying to
stand upright in all the cultural crosscurrents that are
down there. And, of course, that involves the church very
much."
From 1989 to 1993, he was the music director at St. Matthew's
parish in Dorchester, Mass., in a church about which he ultimately
wrote his doctoral dissertation, with a congregation that
had shifted over time from mostly Irish to mostly Haitian.
Both at home and abroad, he has had the experience of being
the only white person on the bus.
Given some of the multicultural debates that have roiled
campuses nationwide for several decades now, one might think
that this set of experiences would credential him to speak
from a point of view rare for someone of his background:
he is a white man who can talk about what it is like to be
part of a minority group.
But that's not the way in which Fr. Clark has found
these experiences useful.
"What it does for me," he says, after a pause, "is
not to give me a sense that I have a voice of authority to
speak in these situations. What it does for me more is give
me a sense of the need to listen."
It is a gentle, nuanced response, one which someone else
might deploy in a tactful display of political correctness.
Fr. Clark's scholarly work, however, bespeaks the depth
and sincerity of his words. The dissertation he wrote for
his doctorate in sacred theology was a study of the Dorchester
church in which he worked, titled: "Authority, Intimacy,
and Local Church: The Local Community as Foundational for
the Universal Church."
He describes his focus this way, "My big interest,
theologically, academically, has been what happens in the
local community in terms of an authoritative voice within
the tradition … One of the spurs to that in my own
thinking was the experience in Jamaica of seeing how much—perhaps
without even realizing it—people took it on themselves
as a local community to reinterpret and to re-express the
faith that was given to them."
As is true with most of the other Jesuit faculty members,
Fr. Clark finds the issue of orthodoxy not so much vexing
as diversionary and rather beside the point.
"As long as I'm manning the barricades defending
my orthodoxy," he says, "I don't really
see how I have a lot of time left for real worship or real
faith. One thing that I often say to people in a penitential
situation is that ‘God is a pretty big guy; He can
deal with this stuff.'"
What he is examining in his research and his thinking, his
pastoral work and his scholarly pursuits is the way in which
power in the church flows in multiple directions, from the
bottom up as much as it does from the top down.
"The thing that I would like to be able to do in theology," he
says, "is to find room for that kind of grassroots
faith expression, in terms of acknowledging the kind of authority
that that has—that this is a genuine expression of
religious faith."
In the end, Fr. Clark points out, he isn't so much
making new arguments about how the church functions as he
is analyzing reality on the ground. "The authority
is there whether you want to acknowledge it or not," he
says. "Whether you ever give it a name, it's
having an enormous impact."
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester,
Mass.
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