Poor can ‘bank’ on lay leader’s sense of mission

Joan Neal, 55, is embarking on a new adventure as she takes the position of Deputy Director of U.S. Programs for Catholic Relief Services after a career in banking and a stint as a consultant for not-for-profit organizations.

Her resume also includes a master’s degree in pastoral studies from Catholic Theological Union and leadership on several archdiocesan and national Catholic boards, committees and commissions, including the National Black Catholic Congress. Perhaps working for the church isn’t as much of a leap for the Catholic-educated active lay leader as moving to Baltimore for the lifelong Chicagoan. Neal will take her new position Sept. 1.



The Catholic New World: What will your new job entail?

Joan Neal: CRS works in 80 countries around the world, but (when they called) I wasn’t sure what they were doing in the United States. At the end of the conversation, I thought I would really like to pursue this. … The responsibility is to really develop not only a sense of solidarity among U.S. Catholics with people around the world who are in need, but to provide some programmatic ways in which that can happen. Currently, CRS has Operation Rice Bowl in the U.S., Communities of Salt and Light, and the Global Solidarity Partnership Program, which is just really getting off the ground. The way I understand it, it’s like the Sharing Parish program here in the archdiocese. It’s an opportunity for dioceses to connect with cities or other dioceses around the world where CRS works and to have some exchange programs going on. There appear to be a couple of partnerships already in existence, but I see that as an opportunity to expand greatly across the United States.



TCNW: What was it that appealed to you?

JN: The mission. CRS is really about not just responding to people in need, but building capacity and helping people to empower themselves to find solutions to the issues that challenge them in their lives, whatever those issues might be. It connected with me because of who I am, because of how I see my life, which is to be a voice for the voiceless, to be concerned not only with helping people individually build their capacity, but in attacking structures that continue to create these situations.

Even my corporate career was really focused on that. I was a banker for 25 years, and for the majority of those years, I was in the retail banking area, so I dealt directly with individual customers.

I was a personal banker, and I managed personal banking groups and I managed a branch bank. I always felt that what I was doing for customers was helping them figure out the best way of handling their finances and managing their lives and giving them the tools to do that.

In the latter part of my career, I managed the public affairs and community outreach division for Harris Bank, and part of my responsibility was for the corporate contributions program and the Harris Bank Foundation. That really was all about helping the community, working with non-profit organizations and providing funding and connecting them with access to resources. There was a systemic aspect to that as well, because we funded advocacy efforts and we funded capacity building efforts.

In my volunteer work, particularly with the church, that really has been a focus for me. I had worked on the archdiocesan Task Force on Schools, the Task Force on Racism, I was vice-chair of the first women’s commission under Cardinal Bernardin, and the subtext of all of those efforts has been helping people build their own capacity, empowering themselves. That’s what I saw in terms of where I would fit in the mission of CRS.



TCNW: When and why did you leave banking and start a consulting company?

JN: Six years ago. I had come to my 25th year in the industry, I had done pretty much everything I wanted to do, and there was just a sort of nagging voice in my head that there was something else I wanted to do in my life. So I said goodbye to my banking career, and I was already on the board of CTU, so I decided to take some courses.

One of the first things I did was to take a trip to the Holy Land with (CTU’s president, Passionist Father) Don Senior and some other friends of CTU. That was an amazing experience to be in the Holy Land. It was an opportunity to connect my soul and my roots with those Christian roots. I came back and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I continued to take a course at a time.

Then I decided that I had some business skills that would be helpful for non-profits. Because I was interested once again in helping people help themselves, I thought this was a good thing. This was an opportunity for me to be of direct service to not-for-profits. So I helped them do strategic planning and to help build leadership capacity.



TCNW: I’m interested in this abrupt shift from the banking world to getting an education in pastoral studies.

JN: It seems abrupt, but it really wasn’t. For several years in my banking career, there was kind of a desire to be more involved with … I don’t know if I’d really say “church,” maybe more involved with spirituality. Subconsciously, I was looking for ways to do that, and the opportunity to join the board of CTU was really the door for me. I joined the board before I left my banking career. That was the way to smooth the transition from my corporate career to something else. And the something else was undefined. I didn’t know what that was going to be.

God has a way of calling, and sometimes you don’t listen because you don’t want to necessarily hear the call, but it doesn’t go away. That was what I was feeling.



TCNW: Are you a lifelong Catholic?

JN: I’m a convert. I was baptized when I was 7. Pretty much up to that point, most of my family was Baptist, and several of my great-uncles were pastors. It was different for me to want to be Catholic. But when it was time for me to go to school, my parents really wanted me to get the best education I could get. At the time, it was in Catholic schools, so my parents enrolled me at Holy Angels, and the rest is history.



TCNW: Given your experience with the National Black Catholic Congress and the Black Catholic Convocation here in Chicago, what do you think the state of the black Catholic world is now?

JN: I think what’s good is that we’re beginning to have a sense of solidarity here in the Archdiocese of Chicago. That movement began maybe seven years ago when we really began the conversations about the state of black Catholics in Chicago, relative to ministerial preparedness and availability, relative to schools, and what was happening in terms of outreach, evangelization within our communities. Those conversations really led to the Black Catholic Convocation in November of 2000 and the recommendations that came out of the convocation.

We’ve had these years now of really looking closely at these issues that are life and death issues for our community and for the archdiocese as a whole. That has fostered friendships, it has fostered an attitude of “We’re all in this boat together.” It has engendered a more critical look at our lives as black Catholics, particularly in this archdiocese. I think that’s good, and I see it as a continuing opportunity for growth.

There are a lot of things that still challenge us. One of the big things is our relationship as a group with the rest of the archdiocese and with the Pastoral Center. There are many of us who are trying to change that relationship, the perception that the church in the black community is poor, that it is without assets, that it is continually depending on the rest of the archdiocese to be propped up. The fact is, when we looked at some statistics from the Office for Research and Planning, in terms of our annual giving as a whole, on a per capita basis we actually gave more than the rest of the archdiocese. That was an eye-opener for us, and I think it’s also an eye-opener for other people, to know that there is capacity within our community.

Perhaps what we need is a different way of being church. Some of the ways the Pastoral Center has related to the black community in the past need to change. We continue to have conversations about October counts, how many people are in the pews in the month of October, which gives some indication of total parish registration. And typically, our parishes are small—250 to 300 or 350. That’s an average African-American Catholic parish. In many instances, the churches that have been built recently have built to hold only 400 people, some even less. And yet the Office for Planning and Research is telling us if you don’t have 500 people as an October count, you’re not a viable parish. That isn’t true in our community, and we have numbers to prove it. We have communities that are less than 500 people, and their bills are paid and they have money in savings.



TCNW: Is the problem with the parishes that have inherited old churches, built for 1,500 people?

JN: We have a lot of those. Maybe some of those communities have to come together, cluster. One of the other challenges we’re facing is the priest shortage. Maybe if we have two communities or three communities that are small, they can come together and be one community that is larger. They’ll increase their financial capacity, as well as their evangelization capacity and their sense of fellowship and community and they’ll be able to function with one pastor and some additional ministerial staff. There are new ways of looking at church. We need to continue this conversation, and begin to implement some changes and see how these models work. I’m hopeful about that.

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