1.2 JEDIISM AND PASTORAL CARE IN THE SECULAR COMMUNITY

JEDIISM AND PASTORAL CARE IN THE SECULAR COMMUNITY

Pastoral care, simply put, is not confined to TOTJO nor any other Church. There is now pastoral care in the workplace, at social services, instutions or secondary schools where personal tutors replace teachers. The more commonly known figure heads of pastoral care, the clergy and especially the parish priest, have been replaced by worldly trained listeners. It has become so wide spread it would not be even far from the truth by speaking of society`s new world religion. Just to underline, most people tend to first turn to their General Practitioner than to the local Clergy. This is a change which has turned the Pastoral Care since the pre-modern world on its head.

As well as the development of Pastoral care being the new world religion we are also witnessing a loss of participation or to put more bluntly moral on the part of those more traditional representatives, the clergy.

\"American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate.They are not leaving their Churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the Church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. What they do with their time under the guise of of pastoral ministry hasn`t the remotest connection with what the Church`s pastors have done for most of the twenty centuries...\"

- Keneth Leech

This US specific comment is also true of the rest of the world. As a consequence of clerical failure the fundamentals of prayer, scriptural study (in our case menology), and spiritual direction have been sacrificed. Opting for counselling and social work the clergy have opted to become therapeutic clergy.

\"They become a species of semi professional therapist, with a roving brief, generic case workers for the parish with a mild spiritual aura.\"

- Bernice Martin

This development goes to prove the importance of holding both past and present, tradition and secularisation, cultural and social, together in order to truly justify Pastoral Care.