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.
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.
Videos from the 2022 Bridgefolk conference, “Standing at the Crossroads” are now available online at Bridgefolk’s website. The conference “stood at the crossroads” in two ways: It offered the opportunity to look back in gratitude and forward as participants discerned a future path for Mennonite-Catholic dialogue and peacemaking.
Additionally, the conference continued 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. In particular, Bridgefolk sought to engage 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. The conference featured stories, including indigenous voices, of this work of repair and healing at the institutional, community, and personal levels.
We invite you to linger prayerfully at the crossroads by sharing videos of the conference sessions in parish or congregational settings and discussing how you and your community are called to respond.
Videos from five conference sessions are available on the 2022 conference website, along with the discussion questions used at the conference. Click here to visit.
Bridgefolk participant and former board member Margaret Pfeil will speak on intercessory prayer in Mennonite and Catholic traditions at Seton Hall University on October 19 at 5 p.m. EDT. Her talk will be available virtually. Pfeil is co-editor of the recently published book Intercessory Prayers and the Communion of Saints: Mennonite and Catholic Perspectives, based on a conference and a colloquium organized by Bridgefolk. In the first, many witnesses described the story of Jun Yamada, and the circumstances surrounding the miracle of his healing. The second explored Mennonite and Catholic theological perspectives on the key theological themes which help to interpret what happened, namely intercessory prayer and the communion of saints. For more information and a link to join the event, click here.
It was 2003 and Bridgefolk had publicly launched, the summer before, with its first annual conference. Within our founding circle we were aware of the worldwide Sant’Egidio movement based in Rome. Sant’Egidio is a lay-led, Vatican-approved, “ecclesial movement” that has been active in peacemaking and solidarity with the poor since the 1960s. It gained international attention when it helped mediate an end to a 16-year civil war in Mozambique in 1992. As Mennonites and Catholics looking for models of how to combine the best of our traditions, Bridgefolk leaders felt great affinity for Sant’Egidio.
Following the Mozambique peace agreement, the Sant’Egidio community in Rome had sent a married couple, Paola Piscitelli and Andrea Bartoli, to New York to monitor United Nations compliance with the accord, while encouraging new Sant’Egidio chapters in the United States. When I learned that Andrea would be visiting my campus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I jumped at a chance to meet him. We shared professional and vocational interests in international peacemaking, but what I really wanted to do was pick his brain about this hybrid ecclesiological category of “ecclesial movements” – officially recognized in the Catholic Church yet grassroots and participatory like Mennonites.
Gerald Schlabach (right) and Andrea Bartoli (left) wash one another’s feet at 2003 Bridgefolk conference.
“Proceed through friendship.” That was Andrea’s response. As we took a stroll around my university, I wanted to talk about canon law and historical precedents and ecclesiology. As a co-founder and then-co-chair of Bridgefolk, I hoped to map out some kind of master plan for Bridgefolk participants like me who wanted somehow to identify as both Mennonite and Catholic. Instead, simply, “Proceed through friendship.”
Andrea’s counsel reflected Sant’Egidio’s sense of its own charism or spiritual gift. The movement sees friendship as key to its own bridgebuilding through service to the poor, peace-building, and prayer (see here and here). In turn, both Andrea’s counsel and Sant’Egidio’s charism surely reflect the Italian culture in which Sant’Egidio was formed as well. Though he didn’t say so, I suspect that Andrea found my American preoccupation with planning and projects bemusing. Instead, he was gently nudging me toward a more relational – indeed a more organic – approach. As a theologian and Christian ethicist, I should have recognized this already; friends of mine have placed friendship at the very center of the Christian life.
After I shared Andrea’s counsel with other Bridgefolk leaders, “proceed through friendship” quickly became a motto of our own. We didn’t have to solve everything doctrinally or structurally. We weren’t going to anyway – that should have been obvious – but the motto helped us relax.
Theologians and practitioners of interreligious and ecumenical (or interchurch) dialogue emphasize that dialogue can and should happen in multiple ways. In the standard list of different types of interreligious dialogue, the “dialogue of theological exchange” is only one. “Dialogue of religious experience” happens as we share prayers, spiritual practices, and life stories without expectation of conversion. “Dialogue of action” happens as we work together for the common good through service, peacemaking, and mobilization for justice. And then there is the simple and basic “dialogue of everyday life” in which people of different faiths learn to know and trust one another as neighbors. And friends. The counsel to proceed through friendship has guided Bridgefolk intuitively into all four forms of dialogue.
This is not to say that Bridgefolk has achieved nothing more concrete than warm fuzzies and good vibes. Through the Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium, Bridgefolk offered resources to the international bilateral dialogue between representatives of Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity – then helped disseminate its findings. Even while strengthen friendships, Bridgefolk’s annual conferences have explored tough issues, from obstacles to sharing Eucharist to racial injustice and land reparation. Some of these have led to real breakthroughs, as with Bridgefolk’s development of a Mennonite-Catholic liturgy of footwashing to celebrate the unity we have come to experience despite obstacles to intercommunion. A case could be made that Bridgefolk has been freer to contribute creatively both to the international dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics, and to the wider ecumenical movement, precisely because it has depended on friendship not on an official mandate.
Friendship can devolve into insularity and cliquishness, of course. As the Bridgefolk movement moves into its third decade, this is a danger that will require self-awareness to avoid. When old friends at a party greet each other with warm bear hugs, they do well to keep their eyes open for newcomers hanging back shyly in the corners and draw them into conversation too. When conversation turns to reminiscing, old friends should work backstories into their stories, in order to initiate rather than exclude.
When a “friend group” is mindful of such dangers, however, friendship can remain invitational. Indeed, in a break-out session at Bridgefolk’s most recent conference, the moderator asked how participants had gotten involved in the movement, and many said that a friend had simply invited them. So long as the accent in “proceed through friendship” is as much on invitation to interested newcomers as on old timers sharing old times, friendship can be its own antidote to insularity.
Over the years, proceeding through friendship has been a way for Bridgefolk to expand its network more through word of mouth than through marketing itself. The 20-year history of Bridgefolk has coincided with the rise of social media as a way to maintain virtual communities and friendships – insofar as any virtual friendship can really be deep and authentic. Like many movements and organizations Bridgefolk has made use of social media as a tool to stay connected. But we have not depended on social media to advertise ourselves and grow thereby. Given all the toxicity that has gotten baked into social media over the last 20 years – religious social media as much as political – that may be for the best.
Some of us in Bridgefolk still dream of a day when it might be possible to find a canonical model like “ecclesial movement” that would make it possible to formally identify simultaneously as Mennonite and Catholic. Many of us long for a day when some form of intercommunion or Eucharistic recognition becomes possible. Even if such hopes only ever find fulfillment beyond our lifetimes, we can hope to be preparing the way now.
But ecclesial movements, like religious orders, only have reason to exist if they embody and channel a charism – a spiritual gift that God has called them to share in a particular way. In friendship, Sant’Egidio was willing to share its charism of friendship with Bridgefolk. So whatever else comes from Bridgefolk’s own way of proceeding through friendship, we will hold on to our own charism in the only way that anyone holds on to God’s gifts – by sharing and them giving away.
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.
“This miracle will be one of the bridges between Roman Catholics and Mennonites in an ecumenical point of view,” said Pope John Paul II in 2003 on the occasion of the canonization of Joseph Freinademetz, S.V.D. He was speaking of the miraculous healing of Jun Yamada, son of a Japanese Mennonite pastor, through the joint intercessions of Catholics and Mennonites united by faith in Jesus and love of God. That miracle, as John Paul predicted, has inspired ongoing ecumenical friendships, dialogues, and engagements between Mennonite and Catholics, leading to this volume. Moved by this healing story, Bridgefolk, a Mennonite-Catholic ecumenical movement in North America, centered its annual conference in 2015 on that story. Following that conference, the Mennonite Catholic Theological Colloquium convened in 2016 to consider the Christian practice of intercessory prayer and doctrine of the communion of saints from the perspectives of both traditions. This volume collects the presentations from those two events, including the personal and theological reflections of Nozomu Yamada, brother of Jun, and Alfonso Fausone, S.V.D., who initiated the intercessions for Jun.
Praise for Intercessory Prayer and the Communion of Saints
“In a culture where the “praying hands” emoji is nearly ubiquitous, this mind-blowing collection—narratives surrounding an amazing healing and carefully articulated theological reflection—is a must read, whether or not we have an established prayer practice. Here we are offered the fruit of decades of Mennonite-Roman Catholic conversation. And although the volume does not directly address this, Intercessory Prayer reminds Euro-American Anabaptist descendants of rich and faithful insights blossoming among siblings in Christ in other cultures.”
—Nancy R. Heisey, Professor at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and Past-President of Mennonite World Conference
“This book constitutes an excellent contribution to what was once thought to be church-dividing and off limits: the communion of Saints and intercessory prayer. While written as part of Mennonite-Catholic dialogue, and not least, stemming from the ecumenical conversations of Bridgefolk, this work is of benefit to all Christians. Clear articulations of both Mennonite and Catholic positions in dialogue add to the value of this book. I highly recommend it.”
—Maxwell E. Johnson, Professor of Theology, The University of Notre Dame
