by Matthew Canter

A covered wagon train forms a protective circle to camp along the Oregon Trail in eastern OregonThere is a common perception at work in the Church today that suggests the best way to maintain a strong family life is to adhere to what I call the “Catholic kibbutz mentality.” Kibbutz* is the Hebrew word for a collective community. The Catholic commune mentality largely draws on a vibrant faith tradition among like-minded families. They live next to each other and pool their resources together in order to best accommodate and encourage their Catholic faith.

Seeing danger from the morally relative, and at times perverse culture, faithful Catholic parents have attempted to remove their children from the grip of secular forces by moving them into an environment where Catholic principles, tradition and morality can be adhered to. These families are rightly trying to regain a culture that supports faith and family. The culture as a whole used to do that for us. But in a hostile culture, Catholics feel the need to create a sub-culture that offers the needed support. And to a degree there’s nothing wrong with that! Catholic families absolutely should support each other. But there is also a degree to which circling the wagons becomes a problem. While such efforts can bolster a family’s faith, these Catholic communities need to be careful about becoming too exclusive and shutting themselves off from the world.

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity” Pope Francis, La Civiltà Cattolica.

By having a Catholic kibbutz mentality, parents are in danger of unintentionally teaching their children that Christianity is weak and must be protected from outside pressures. Likewise, instead of conquering evil, this walled mentality suggests that Christianity may fall victim to the very forces it came to combat. Instead, families that engage the culture show that the faith is meant to transform the world rather than be transformed by the world.

Naturally, we want the very best for our children, and we know that the best to be found is in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, is the kibbutz mentality the best way to embrace our apostolic faith? How does this way parallel the way of the saints and martyrs of the Church through the ages? We many times hear our pastors talk about ‘the struggle’ of taking our faith seriously.  The struggle is not merely how we walk in relationship to God, but how we make that walk in the company of other people.

“I see clearly (…) that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.” Pope Francis, La Civiltà Cattolica

Remember, Christ came for sinners, not the righteous, and we become Christ when we go about seeking those who are lost. The moral of this analogy to kibbutzes is to remind all Catholics who take our faith seriously that the primary evidence of our faithfulness is taking our faith beyond our comfort zone, all the while recognizing potential dangers. We can make this recognition and not condone the actions of secularism, but to evangelize and heal the wounds of the world we must have that ‘proximity’ our Holy Father talks about. The times in which we find ourselves can be precarious, especially to our faith. Of course, we must hold fast to our Catholicity, but we must not for a moment think that it belongs exclusively to us.

Another way of thinking about our relationship with the world, is to ask if we view it as us versus them? If so, we endanger the validity of the Gospel. Perhaps the key to overcoming the danger of a kibbutz mentality is to constantly remind ourselves and our children, that it is never ‘us vs. them,’ rather it is ‘us’ for ‘them.’ When we see others through the eyes of Christ, or within the embrace of our Blessed Mother, we must be compelled to see a brother, a sister, a daughter, and a son. The ideal of Catholicism is not to view the world in a tribalistic fashion of Catholics and non-Catholics, but to see the Body of Christ as active members and potential members. Once we get over the idea that we have the corner on the market for faithfulness, we can then let faithfulness work to draw the world into the embrace it does not know it needs.


*The Israeli kibbutz movements began in the early 20th century before the formation of the state of Israel. These communities of immigrant Jews lived in isolated, walled compounds isolated from the native Palestinian and Bedouin tribes in British Mandate Palestine. Outside the walls was an Islamic-dominant society steeped in Arab/Middle-Eastern culture, whereas with the walls was a Zionistic, often European culture very different from its surroundings. Inside the walls the kibbutz organized its own government, security, education and religious-social culture. The kibbutz was a part of the Palestinian landscape, but very much not of it.