Embracing Cultural Diversity in Community

This summer the Congar Institute had the opportunity to collaborate with the Canossian Daughters of Charity in Albuquerque, N.M. to facilitate a workshop on Intercultural living. The sisters’ goal was to deepen their own understanding of culture and cultural differences to gain new insight, knowledge, and tools to forge interculturality as a way of life among themselves and for the people they serve.

The Conossian sisters are an international community. The sisters who participated in the weeklong workshop entitled, “Interculturality: A Way of Life” represented eight different countries with their own culture and language. Throughout the week, the sisters shared and celebrated the rich cultural diversity among them. They delved deeper into multidisciplinary theories of culture and faith to gain a better understanding of the cultural dynamics that playout within their multicultural community. The Conossian sisters ended the workshop with a renewed sense of charity for each other as they learned about their own and each other’s cultural preferences. They identified for themselves and for the community a way forward to becoming an intercultural community that values cultural diversity within their community and in their ministries. 

Today the Church calls for all pastoral leaders, ordained, religious, and laity to build intercultural competency for the mission of evangelization. In fact, missiologists and theologians believe that the future survival of international religious communities depends on the ongoing process of becoming intercultural. No longer can a religious community expect the newcomers to be assimilated, rather through the praxis of intercultural living, every member has the opportunity to be fully integrated into the community and in the process of integration the community is transformed.