To Love a Neighbor
Michael V. Brewer ‘07 said he’s “always felt the CSA to be a home away from home,” and it shouldn’t come as a surprise: he started talking to members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student Association (CSA) at Model U.N. tournaments back in high school. “It seemed like a comfortable continuation,” Brewer says of the work he had done in his home parish before college. “I had my sights on getting involved.” Just a few years later, Brewer has become the president of the CSA, an organization that counts its membership in the high hundreds.
Jacob L. Bryant ‘07 didn’t settle down quite as fast, jumping from group to group for much of his freshman year before he finally put down his roots at the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship (HRCF). Kathleen M. Goodson ‘07, on the other hand, dove in to HRCF at the very outset of her freshman fall because she wanted to immerse herself in a fellowship right away. But though each member of the HRCF board— Bryant, Goodson, Kristin T. Lee ‘07 and Keneshia D. Washington ‘07— found the organization in slightly different ways, they all agree that the HRCF challenged them and helped them to grow in their faith. Now, they lead a group that serves as a vital resource and spiritual center for almost 100 Harvard Christians. HRCF will take you no matter what denomination you belong to; according to Bryant, “there are almost as many denominations as members.”
CSA, by contrast, is comprised only of Catholics. Which isn’t to say they’re the only ones allowed to join—it just so happens that they’re the only ones who seem to want to. Brewer points out that the CSA has “a total non-discrimination policy,” but Roman Catholic doctrine limits full participation in its church services to baptized Catholics.
There are only a handful of Catholics in HRCF— hardly anyone double-bills with the CSA. Mostly, the groups stay separate, and considering how similar they are in terms of purpose and rhetoric, they’re surprisingly insular. CSA doesn’t work with HRCF on the annual Veritas Forum, for instance, and HRCF members don’t come to the CSA’s weekly mass at St. Paul’s Church.
But student leaders on both sides say their organizations aren’t really that different. Both HRCF and the CSA host regular Bible study groups, for instance, and they both offer weekly religious services. They even seem to use the same words when describing their collective mission: think “growing faith” and “love of God”—challenging one’s spirituality in the name of Christianity.
By all counts, CSA and HRCF are of the same mind, but for some reason, these two bastions of Christianity at Harvard don’t walk their journeys of faith together. Call them parallel lines; it’s not that they never meet, it’s that they both have things to do.
That won’t last, if the current leadership has anything to do with it.
LIKE LOOKING IN THE MIRROR?
“The lynchpin” of HRCF, Bryant says, “is Christianity. The idea is to understand Christianity, and its implications for our life and our community.” Most of this work is done in small groups which meet for about an hour-and-a-half each week in a student’s room. There’s “an element of hanging out, an element of bible study and discussion,” Bryant says. No rigid rules govern how the meetings are structured, and the informal atmosphere facilitates bonding among the membership.
This sense of community is essential to their mission, according to members of the HRCF governing board. Even the Friday night large group meetings strive for openness and don’t follow any rigid rituals. As tightly knit as the HRCF is, they try to make their meetings as welcoming as possible. “We don’t want to be a clique,” Lee says.
The HRCF is totally non-denominational, and meetings play host to a range of speakers, and depending on when you walk in, you might hear a baptist hymn, a Southern spiritual, or a piece of high church music. They even avoid using language specific to any particular denomination to avoid excluding visitors of different faiths.
Over at the CSA, the biggest night of the week comes on Sunday, when hundreds of students attend mass in the basement of St. Paul’s Church on Bow Street. Aside from this weekly gathering, the CSA also offers lectures, social events, and service opportunities, with “a very active core group of about 200 people.” But the CSA places great importance on the student mass and its role in building community through communal worship. “The lifeblood of our organization,” Brewer says, “is our fellowship in Christ and through the Mass.”
Lifeblood, lynchpin? Bible study, fellowship in Christ? You’d think Brewer and Bryant were reading from the same script. And their similarities go beyond vocabulary—their missions, also, seem essentially identical: Lee says that the HRCF helps “people to know Jesus Christ better,” while Sarah E. Stein ‘08, the CSA’s Vice President of Communications and Finance, says that CSA’s mission is “to provide a place for Catholics to grow in their faith.” Both organizations emphasize spiritual growth through community and service, but by their own admission, the ties between the two organizations are not nearly as strong as they would like.
DRIFTING APART
“We’re pretty independent of other Christian groups,” Stein says, adding that she would like to see more interaction. The HRCF board feels the same way, but to date, contact between the two organizations has been largely informal. “On an individual level, there’s lots of interaction,” says Washington, but institutionally, the two groups stand apart. Their reluctance to join forces, even on an occasional basis, is all the more mystifying considering just how closely they work with other campus religious groups.
The CSA interacts with other religious groups primarily through the Interfaith Council. Stein points to the group’s “Belief in Action” event, where members of various religious groups work together on community service projects. Brewer named Harvard Hillel and the Harvard Islamic Society, among others, as the most involved participants in the Council, but admitted that “there isn’t quite as large a Christian participation” as he would hope. Indeed, Brewer says the CSA’s “relationship with Hillel is considerably strong,” and might be stronger than the relationship the CSA maintains with other Christian groups.
The HRCF, on the other hand, maintains a close working relationship with other Christian groups, including their sister organization, the Asian American Christian Fellowship. For whatever reason, though, not the CSA.
In fact, when FM asked Bryant who we should talk to about the Christian landscape on campus, he recommended about 20 people—not a single CSA member among them.
“The largest opportunity [for cooperation] would be co-sponsorship of the Veritas Forum,” Brewer says, referring to the week-long symposium of Christianity-themed speakers, workshops, and entertainment. The CSA was invited to become one of the many co-sponsors of the event, Brewer says, but because the CSA bylaws require the group “to be involved in planning from the ground level up,” the leadership had to turn down the offer.
The CSA also turned down membership in Harvard Christian Unity, a group formed a few years ago to facilitate the planning of the Veritas Forum. “We initially expressed reluctance at joining,” Brewer says, “because they wanted to establish a definition for membership.” When the Harvard Latter-Day Saints were told they couldn’t join, the CSA refused to participate.
MENDING A SCHISM
But Brewer says that while “there have been minor issues that have prevented the CSA from getting as active with other Christian groups as we could have hoped,” those issues no longer exist. Brewer says that the CSA hopes to co-sponsor next year’s Veritas Forum, and the HRCF insists that CSA would be welcome to participate. Both organizations speak of a desire to increase cooperation amongst Christian groups this year. And both are extremely optimistic about the state of Christianity at Harvard.
“I was surprised by how vibrant the Christian community is,” Lee says, when she first realized the extent of participation in groups like HRCF. “Students from nearly every group,” Bryant says, “are meeting every night to pray together.”
People in HRCF and the CSA alike express a desire to work more closely together. Still, it remains to be seen if inertia will keep the groups apart, or if Harvard’s Christians will be one body before long.