Bridgefolk is a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other's traditions, explore each other's practices, and honor each other's contribution to the mission of Christ's Church.
Karen Rose, OSB, was installed as the 18th prioress of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in Saint Joseph, Minnesota on Sunday, June 4, 2023. In recent years Sister Karen served as a Bridgefolk board member. Although her new responsibilities prompted her to resign from that position soon after her election by the monastic community on February 25, she hopes to continue participating in Bridgefolk.
S. Karen previously served as the director of mission advancement at Saint Benedict’s Monastery and succeeds Sister Susan Rudolph, who served as prioress since 2017.
The prioress is elected for a six-year term and is the spiritual leader of the community, which currently has 157 sisters. She is also the chief executive officer of the corporation and represents the monastery on the corporate board of the College of Saint Benedict and the corporate board of St. Cloud Hospital, two institutions founded by Saint Benedict’s Monastery.
S. Karen was born in the northwest of England. As she was growing up, she grew to love the arts and humanities and considered a career in ancient and modern languages, but as she went off to pursue higher education, she decided to study philosophy and theology in the hope of finding the meaning of life. When she didn’t find it, she felt called to do something that would help ease the suffering of humanity. That call ultimately led her to move into the field of health care. She holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford University, a doctorate in nursing from the University of Manchester, as well as other degrees and certificates.
An insatiable thirst for knowledge and discovery led S. Karen to participate in Studium, the monastery’s scholars’ program, in 2005. With no plans to enter religious life, she never expected to stay more than a few weeks. However, she felt God kept calling her back, until she made first monastic profession on July 11, 2009 and perpetual monastic profession on July 11, 2012.
The Rite of Installation took place at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 4 in the presence of her monastic community, members of the Monastic Congregation of Saint Benedict, and several special guests. She was installed in the office of prioress by Sister Nicole Kunze, Vice President of the Monastic Congregation of Saint Benedict.
Later that afternoon at a special celebration of the Eucharist, the Most Reverend Patrick Neary, Bishop of the Diocese of Saint Cloud, bestowed upon Prioress Karen Rose the blessing of the universal church in the presence of family, friends, oblates, Benedictine associates, clergy, representatives of religious communities, colleagues, benefactors, staff, members of the Order’s sponsored institutions, and persons representing the wider community.
Writing in Anabaptist World, the denominational magazine of the Mennonite Church USA, leading Mennonite historian John D. Roth has called upon Mennonites to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement that birthed their church in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness. Ecumenical “steps toward reconciliation in the past two decades” with Lutherans, Catholics, and Reformed churches “make it clear that the commemorative events … will need to look different” from the way that Mennonites once presented themselves in ecumenical encounters.
For example, if earlier accounts of Anabaptist beginnings depicted the movement primarily in heroic, even triumphalist, language, the 2025 commemoration will need to include space for confession. For many Mennonites our impulse in ecumenical settings is to claim our distinctive theological themes — community, discipleship, nonresistance — as if they were talismans that secure our moral superiority. The principle of “right remembering” calls us to also recognize shadow sides of those distinctives — the way in which our focus on distinctives can blind us to other theological truths — or to the gaps that exist between our precepts and our practice.
Second, a focus on Anabaptist origins in 16th-century Europe can easily overshadow the global reality of the church today. History matters, but almost all of the growth in MWC-member churches during the past 50 years has been in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The renewal of the Anabaptist tradition today is happening in the Global South.
Finally, our commemorations in 2025 will need to acknowledge the significant ecumenical relationships forged since 2004. These have spiritual significance and call on Mennonites to revise how we tell the story of the 16th century.
Roth is professor of history at Goshen (Ind.) College, director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism and editor of Mennonite Quarterly Review. His article is available in the March issue of Anabaptist World.
After years of pressure and following up on Pope Francis’s 2022 visit to Canada, the Vatican issued a statement on March 30 repudiating the 15th-century concepts known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which were used to rationalize colonization. Recent Bridgefolk conferences have examined the “Doctrine of Discovery” as part of mutual learning that Mennonites and Catholics in the grassroots movement for dialogue and unity believe necessary in order to strengthen just peacemaking practices in both traditions, and in both the United States and Canada.
“In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being,” states a two-page text released jointly by the Vatican’s Dicasteries for Culture and Education and Promoting Integral Human Development. “The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery.’ ”
The declaration acknowledges that some scholars believe the basis of the doctrine is rooted in papal documents, but states that the bulls were “written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, [and] have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”
At the same time, it states that the papal bulls “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples” and that the they were “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities.”
The Vatican statement has been a leading news story in Canada, reports Bridgefolk board member Gilbert Detillieux of Winnipeg. According to the CBC, indigenous leaders have welcomed the news, though with warnings that the statement will remain symbolic unless it leads to further concrete action by the Church, and by the governments on both sides of the border that converted the “Doctrine of Discovery” into the policies, laws, and court rulings that stripped indigenous peoples of their lands and led to the assimilationist efforts and abuses of residential schools.
We are created out of Love and for Love. Conflict is a regular part of this human journey and an opportunity to grow. How do we grow into the persons and communities that God calls us to become? How do we construct a more sustainable just peace?
In October the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International, offered a series of virtual lectures on gospel nonviolence:
Why ‘Nonviolence?’ (includes 2 young adult speakers)
Returning to and Exploring the Power of Nonviolence
Christian Foundations of Nonviolence
Embracing Nonviolence: A New Moral Framework
Embracing Nonviolence: Transforming the Church.
These lectures are now available for personal or group study. All five videos are divided into speaker chapters, and the presentations run from between 15 to 29 minutes. Immediately following each presentation is a slide that has three discussion/essay questions.
A one-stop web page for these resources is available at https://cniseries.info. The page includes find brief lecture and presentation summaries, a link to each video and a downloadable study guide.
PRESS RELEASE RE: Bridgefolk 2022 conference 21-24 July 2022
Collegeville, MN (BRIDGEFOLK) – Participants in the Bridgefolk movement for dialogue and greater unity between Mennonites and Roman Catholics have long made the phrase, “Proceed through friendship,” their byword.
Celebrating their 20th annual conference under the theme, “Standing at the Crossroads,” as they met at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota July 21-24, Bridgefolk found reason to hope that the steady relationship building that is basic to its “charism” or gift might also help their churches face a challenge that their traditions share. Both are at a “crossroads,” after all, reminiscent of the one where the prophet Jeremiah told Israel to “ask for the ancient paths” and walk “the good way.” The challenge is to find ways to repent and repair the legacy of harm done to indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States through historic removal, European settlement, and misguided mission efforts.
How to seek just peace through racial justice and indigenous/settler encounter has been an ongoing theme in recent Bridgefolk conferences. This year’s theme proved particularly timely when the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would take an apology just days after Bridgefolk’s conference to the Metis, Inuit, and First Nations peoples of Canada for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools from the late 1800s until as late as 1990.
Though church collaboration with governments in running residential or boarding schools did not last as long in the United States as in Canada, churches south of the border – including Mennonite ones – also face the legacy of their own mission efforts. Rather than sharing the Christian message as an uncoerced invitation consistent with host cultures, too often churches have joined in colonializing efforts to assimilate native peoples and strip children of their cultures and languages. Furthermore, Mennonites whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. and Canada have begun to grapple with the fact that policies of Indian removal made possible their very presence on the continent, even if those ancestors participated unwittingly.
Introducing these challenges, Sister Pat Kennedy OSB of Saint Benedict’s Monastery and Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota, shared the story of their communities’ collaborative project to reckon with their history. From 1878-1945 the Sisters of Saint Benedict operated schools on three sites, including the monastery itself, along with the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations. The Sisters have officially apologized for their complicity in the boarding school program, but Kennedy and Arsenault both insisted that this can only be a beginning.
Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation
“My work on historical preservation for White Earth is future-oriented,” noted Arsenault, while Kennedy underscored that her community must now work to build relationships of trust with White Earth and Red Lake. Sharing long-forgotten documents and photos from monastic archives offers one opportunity for healing to indigenous descendants. Artifacts are still being discovered among the archives, and even if they were originally given to the community as gifts, the community is working with Arsenault to return them to families and communities where they will be treasured far more for their material and spiritual connection with ancestors.
Boarding schools and forced assimilation were part of a much larger set of policies aiming to strip indigenous communities not only of their culture, insisted Arsenault, but of their resource-rich lands. In the following session, Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation stated the implication bluntly: “For white congregations there is no pain-free path forward in this. Reconciliation will cost you something. It should cost you something because it cost me everything.”
In what may be the most revolutionary text in the New Testament, Jacobs explained, Jesus told his followers that making repair when someone has a grievance against them is even more important than “bringing your gift to the altar” in worship (Matt. 5:23-24). Jacobs called on every congregation in every denomination that was complicit in boarding schools “at the very least” to “commit a significant amount of your church budget to indigenous language and cultural reclamation projects” not simply as charity but as something “you wrestle with at every quarterly business meeting” just like salary obligations and light bills.
Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation
Jacobs also called on congregations and parishes to assess the stories that their buildings tell through their iconography, flags, symbols, stained glass windows, and especially their portrayals of Jesus. “Does he look like a good old-fashioned Swede? Or might I find a Jesus with brown skin?”
Jacob’s challenge was paired with a presentation by Dr. Jeremy Bergen of Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario in a session that asked, “How Does a Tradition Repent?” With expertise on the theology of church apologies, Bergen is regularly called upon to comment on the residential-school scandal in Canada and the Catholic Church’s response. But he also notes ways that the stories of his Mennonite ancestors’ flight as refugees from war and persecution in Europe has long blinded Mennonites to the realities and histories of the indigenous people unto whose ancestral lands they settled.
That churches have begun to make official apologies both to one another for past persecutions and mutual recrimination, as well as to the descendants of enslaved and displaced peoples, said Bergen, is a noteworthy historical development and sign of the Holy Spirit’s work – but never sufficient. Tests of whether apologies are authentic and appropriate include: Are they vague or do they confess specific sins? Do they use a request for forgiveness as a way to control relationships or do they invite those receiving the apology to move toward reconciliation at their own pace, on their own terms? Do they merely seek to alleviate a sense of guilt, or do they contribute to a longer process of action and repair?
Dr. Jeremy Bergen, Conrad Grebel University College, Ontario
Perhaps the hardest task of repair for white settlers and their descendants is to actually return stolen land or the resources indigenous communities need to recover land. “It may be unrealistic to return all the land,” noted John Stoesz in a final session on the topic of repairing the legacy of harm to indigenous peoples, “but it is unjust to return none.”
Erica Littlewolf, Indigenous Visioning Circle Program Coordinator, Mennonite Central Committee-Central States, and a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, elaborated on that legacy of harm and injustice. The Doctrine of Discovery by which Europeans rationalized their displacement of indigenous people from the American continents can seem “cerebral” at first but its consequences continue to impact her people and their very sense of identity. “If you fail to see the roots of social ills, you will always blame the oppressed for their oppression.”
Repairing 500-year wrongs may seem daunting, but as an advocate for land recovery, Stoesz has practiced what he preaches. When his family sold its farm near Mountain Lake, Minnesota, he turned over half of his share in the proceeds to the Makoce Ikikupe organization, which seeks to reconnect Dakota people to the homeland from which they were expelled in Minnesota in the 19th century. His personal story and his elaboration of the work Makoce Ikikupe is doing to return Dakota land, revitalize Dakota culture, and renew the natural environment, underscored that the work of repair really is possible.
More than possible, the work of repair is joyful when it is grounded in deepening friendship, suggested various speakers. Speaking warmly of her relationships with the Sisters of St. Benedict to whom she often brings wild rice or sunflowers, Arsenault told of her hope to return a hundred-plus-year-old pair of moccasins with a floral design to a family she knows in the White Earth community. “No matter how difficult things get, there will be moments like that peppered throughout this experience – I guarantee you. How interesting that I brought flowers to the sisters to bring joy and that flowers might return to equally bring joy back.”
Whether “reconciliation” is the right word for this work was a question that some speakers at the conference took up, since indigenous people see no time of right relationship between their ancestors and Europeans in the past to which they can return. When those who have benefited from past wrongs are willing to live with their discomfort, relinquish their need for control, and do what they can to repair past wrongs in tangible ways, however, new and deeper relationship can bring healing for all.
Friendship itself may help us navigate a crossroads, after all. Bracketing the 2022 Bridgefolk conference were two sessions commemorating the movement’s history and anticipating further work, and yet key themes and lessons carried through. The progress that Catholics and Mennonites in Bridgefolk have made by “proceeding through friendship,” noted Bridgefolk co-founder Marlene Kropf, may seem slow but is real. Even when our unity is incomplete, noted Bridgefolk co-chair Abbot John Klassen, new rituals like annual hymnsings and footwashing celebrate our work and relationships so far. Surely, they agreed, these Bridgefolk gifts have something to offer to other dialogues and processes of healing.
Bridgefolk has announced a theme for its 2022 conference, to be held at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota July 21-24, that will both look back at the movement’s 20 years of dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics, while committing to further work together. “Standing at the Crossroads: Mennonites and Catholics in Dialogue” will continue the ongoing exploration of what it means for Mennonites and Catholics who seek a Just Peace to address issues of racial justice, which it began at its 2018 Conference.
The current crossroads in this work find Mennonites and Catholics engaging with indigenous communities, acknowledging the legacy of injustice and harm done by the historic removal of indigenous communities from traditional homelands by European settlers and the forced attendance of indigenous children at residential schools. That task is all the more urgent and timely in light of Pope Francis’s recent apology to indigenous peoples in Canada for the abuse of church-run boarding schools, debates over whether apologies are enough, and discernment concerning next steps for Christian churches.
Pope Francis makes historic apology to Indigenous of Canada for church abuses
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Friday made a historic apology to Indigenous Peoples for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools and said he hoped to visit Canada in late July to deliver the apology in person to survivors of the church’s misguided missionary zeal.
Francis begged forgiveness during an audience with dozens of members of the Metis, Inuit and First Nations communities who came to Rome seeking a papal apology and a commitment for the Catholic Church to repair the damage. The first pope from the Americas said he hoped to visit Canada around the Feast of St. Anna, which falls on July 26 and is dedicated to Christ’s grandmother.
More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior. … To continue reading, click here.
But is it enough? Here are representative responses:
Murray Sinclair – Ojibwe lawyer, judge, and senator from Manitoba who chaired Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission – calls Francis’s expression of contrition “a major step” but argues that the Catholic Church must go on to address deniers.
Jeremy Bergen – Mennonite theologian who studies church apologies for historical wrongs – elaborates on needed next steps and insists that the Catholic Church must not only apologizes for the actions of sinful Catholics but take responsibility for harms it has inflicted as an institution.
Associated Press reporter Peter Smith anticipates that US churches to will now face their own reckoning concerning boarding schools.
Father Drew Christiansen SJ died on April 6 at the Jesuit community in Georgetown University. Christiansen was an early participant in Bridgefolk and an enthusiastic supporter of Mennonite-Catholic dialogue at many levels. In a 2003 article entitled “An Exchange of Gifts” that summarized various streams of that dialogue and recounted the influence of Mennonites on his own theological reflection, Christiansen expressed confidence that “Catholics and Mennonites have begun to become sources of renewal for one another” through this unexpected but holy exchange.
Fr. Drew Chrstiansen SJ, 1945-2022
When the first Bridgefolk conference at Saint John’s University in 2002 compared key beliefs and practices of Mennonites and Catholics, Christiansen summarized Catholic social teaching on peace and war. He was also a major panelist at a 2007 conference at the University of Notre Dame assessing the final report the of Mennonite World Conference and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, “Called Together to Be Peacemakers.”
Christiansen had participated in that international dialogue, which took place from 1998 and 2003, and had helped to draft the report. His extensive writing on Catholic social teaching and peacemaking was informed not only by his theological education but by years of work representing both the U.S. bishops’ conference and the Vatican in global peacemaking efforts, especially in the Middle East. At the time of his death he was Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.
Read more:
America magazine’s obituary. America is the leading Catholic magazine in the United States, edited by U.S. Jesuits. Christiansen served as its editor-in-chief from 2005-2012.
The Board of Bridgefolk is delighted to introduce Joetta Handrich Schlabach as the newly-appointed Executive Director of Bridgefolk. The Board confirmed Joetta’s appointment at their meeting in early March 2022.
Joetta retired in 2018, following eleven years of pastoral ministry at Faith Mennonite Church in Minneapolis, MN. Previously she worked as a program coordinator at the University of Notre Dame, Bluffton (OH) University, and at St. Catherine University (MN), where she completed an MA in Theology and Certificate in Pastoral Ministry.
Together with her husband Gerald Schlabach, Joetta served with Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua and Honduras in the 1980s. She is the author of Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook. Since retiring, Joetta and Gerald divide their time between Grand Marais, MI, where she grew up, and Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, where Gerald developed friendships during 20 years of taking students to Guatemala. Joetta also serves as a long-term volunteer with Mennonite Disaster Service.
Joetta has been an active participant in Bridgefolk events since its inception, giving presentations at two of the annual conferences. Her sermon, “Communion and Peace” is included in the Bridgefolk website anthology We Are Each Other’s Bread and Wine.
“We look forward to Joetta’s leadership and contribution to the work and vision of Bridgefolk as we enter the third decade of the organization’s existence,” comments Bridgefolk co-chair Muriel Bechtel. “We hope all Bridgefolk participants will join us in welcoming her to her new role.”
Joetta can be contacted at coordinator@bridgefolk.net.
