At times a single issue defines a group's stance within the wider culture. Today abortion has become such an issue for many Catholics in the United States and Australia. It divides them in the attitudes that they take to the state and to their church.
For many young Catholics in the 1960s the defining issue was poverty. An idealistic social activism was part the contemporary culture, and the Vatican Council had stressed the commitment of the Catholic Church to the poor. But these emphases were sometimes met with scepticism by older Catholics whose approach was more analytical.
Brian Stoney, who was buried last week from St Canice's Church in Kings Cross, was a significant figure in shaping ways of accompanying the poor. For over 40 years he embodied and fought for a commitment to the poor that was based on sharing their lives.
In the 1960s he was a Jesuit, and worked in suburban communities in Melbourne and Adelaide. He later directed Corpus Christi Greenvale and shaped the spirit of its work. In more recent years he lived in communities with marginalised people in Redfern and Surry Hills. During this time he left the Jesuits.
In his life and work he represented many of the tensions that faced Catholics generally, and particularly Jesuits, in the 1960s. By then, in a Catholic community that had become more affluent, Jesuit engagement with the poor was less direct than it had been.
It was easy for the poor to become the object of analysis, of assistance, of pastoral strategies, of theological reflection. This was consistent with a use of mind that privileged analysis over intuition, detachment over involvement, reflection over experience, the lasting over the transient, and general principles over the demands of particular situations.
The second Vatican Council provided a more concrete image of human needs. It coincided with the Romanticism of the 1960s, which emphasised the claims of experience, of the immediate, the affective and the experimental. Together these movements in church and society shaped a powerful spiritual rhetoric whose stories were dramatic, claims unbounded, and promises high. It also provoked a sceptical and often anxious response.
The Council invited Catholic religious congregations to re-examine their way of living and their pastoral priorities. Often their deliberations focused on poverty and on how they should address the poor in their works.
Brian Stoney was naturally at home in the rhetoric of the 1960s. Among