Church’s ministry to those who’ve lost a spouse: The opportunities, challenges

The apostle James made it all seem so simple.

In his canonical epistle, he wrote: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before our God and Father is this: care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (1:27).

Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

But it’s not. At least not necessarily. Just ask those in the Church charged with carrying out one of those tasks — ministering to the widowed — and they’ll tell you that honoring that command isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. In fact, they’ll likely tell you that honoring it happens to be one of the Church’s more difficult pastoral challenges.

How can something that seems so simple be so hard?

Unchanging needs

Answering that question starts with understanding the needs of the widows and widowers themselves, the needs that the Church must strive to meet.

Two thousand years may have passed since St. James first endorsed caring for the widowed, but when it comes to the spiritual needs that such care is designed to meet, not much has changed. To start with, those who have lost their spouse still need help coping with grief.

“You haven’t just lost your spouse,” said Steve Smith, who lost his wife four years ago to a sudden illness and now helps lead a group for grieving spouses in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. “You’ve lost your future. What you thought was your future is gone. You’ve also lost your past. My wife was with me 40 years. There aren’t many people who’ve known me that long.”

Another constant is the fear many widows and widowers experience in those first weeks and months after the death.

For example, said Smith, there’s the fear of forgetting, of losing one’s memories of one’s spouse and dishonoring them in some way. There’s also the fear of being on one’s own, of having to relate to the world as a single person after years or decades of relating to it as part of a couple.

On top of that, widows and widowers still need help dealing with all the practical realities of life they now have to face without their spouse. For those widowed young, that can mean raising children, providing for a family or taking over a business. For others, it can mean suddenly having to assume “the jobs” of the other spouse — managing the finances, managing the meals, managing the maintenance — and those are often jobs for which the surviving spouse simply isn’t prepared.

“After four Christmases, I still don’t know where the Christmas stockings are,” Smith wryly confessed.

Throw in the exhaustion felt by those who have cared for their spouse through a long illness and the guilt those same widowers and widows often feel when relief is mixed in with grief, and it’s evident why St. James, for those reasons and more, placed such emphasis on the Christian community providing solace and care for its widowed members.

Postmodern loss

When St. James took down the Holy Spirit’s instructions, however, what he couldn’t know was how new needs would compound old needs in 21st-century America.

For example, whereas once upon a time the widowed had rituals for grieving and mourning, those rituals have been all but abandoned in the post-modern West. Black is now worn only at funerals. Mourning wreaths that once hung on families’ doors are rare. And it’s expected, not considered indecent, for a grieving spouse to socialize as soon as possible after the death.

The banishment of those exterior signs of mourning have deprived people of the small routines that once helped people navigate their grief. But, more importantly, said Kathleen Murphy, executive director of Beginning Experience, a Catholic grieving ministry for the divorced and widowed, their disappearance reflects contemporary culture’s desire to see those who grieve “move on, and move on fast.”

“People want you to get over it, to get out there and live life again as soon as possible,” she said. “But it’s not that simple. It takes quite a lengthy adjustment process.”

Pressure to “just get over it,” whether from friends, family, the culture or themselves, can cause grieving spouses to ignore their pain or slap a Band-Aid on it, Murphy said. But that never works in the long term, she added, because “the pain always resurfaces.”

That same desire can cause those close to the grieving spouse to forget just how long the grieving process lasts and neglect his or her emotional and spiritual, not to mention practical, needs.

“What you hear from the widowed people is that at first there’s a lot of support from the Church community, but after while, after a month or so, support diminishes,” Murphy said.

Accordingly, both those desires and the neglect that often ensues from them compound the struggles of the widowed. They feel more alone, more abandoned and unable to talk through their pain.

And those people, Smith pointed out, are the lucky ones, the ones who actually have close friends and family members to feel neglected by — which is another big change from St. James’ day.

“I talk to a lot of people who are alone,” Smith said. “They had fewer kids than their parents or grandparents did, and those kids aren’t local. Others relocated with their spouses right after retirement only to have their husband or wife die unexpectedly. So, they’re in a new town where they don’t know anybody. The sense of isolation is immense.”

Which, of course, makes the need for the Church’s ministry (as well as the task itself) all the greater.

Reaching out

The Church recognizes that. Which is why in any number of dioceses and parishes, despite budget cuts, vocations crises and volunteer shortages, some Catholics are at least trying to reach out to their widowed neighbors.

One of the most successful ways they’ve done this is through Beginning Experience.

Founded in 1974 by Sister Josephine Stewart and a divorced friend Ann Maria (Jo) Lamia, Beginning Experience is an international outreach to the separated, widowed and divorced that aims to help those who have lost a spouse through the grieving process. Currently operating in nine countries and 76 dioceses, Beginning Experience offers weekend retreats and evening meetings featuring presentations by those who have lost their spouse, as well as time for the newly grieving to talk and write about their loss, go to confession and hear Mass.

About six weeks after his wife died, Steve Smith was invited to attend a Beginning Experience retreat in Pittsburgh. For him, it was the first step in a long healing process.

“Everyone there knows what you’re going through,” he said. “That makes it a safe place where you can feel as bad as you need to feel.”

Like Pittsburgh, the Diocese of Wichita, Kan., also invited Beginning Experience into its diocese. There, along with the weekend retreats, program volunteers also conduct an eight-week Coping Through Loss Program, which meets on weekday evenings.

According to Kathy Hannemann, a volunteer who coordinates the program, the weekly meetings are a little “less intense” than the weekends, and offer those grieving a spouse time each week where they can socialize with others in similar situations as well as receive practical and spiritual advice from professional speakers. That advice includes dealing with loneliness and stress, adjusting to being single, dealing with changes in relationships and being in right relations with God and the Church.

Thirty years ago, the Archdiocese of St. Louis developed a similar program, although, according to Lee Schellert, who helped develop the program, there they maintained separate programs for the widowed and divorced in the initial stages of grieving. They then brought the two groups together in the later stages for socialization and fellowship, as well as ongoing education about the more practical problems that arise from losing a spouse, such as budgeting, financial planning and understanding the tax code.

That arrangement, Schellert said, worked well for a number of years, but in the late 1990s, budgetary constraints and an offer from a local funeral home to take on the work of running the grieving ministry led the diocese to shut down the part of the program that assisted widows and widowers through the initial stages of loss. Bereavement groups continue to exist on the parish level, as does the diocesan-wide fellowship and education program.

The Diocese of Peoria, Ill., has likewise chosen to develop its own program for widows and widowers. The diocese’s main outreach to widowed Catholics comes in the form of an advisory board, set up in 2007, that oversees how the Church in Peoria can better meet the needs of the divorced and widowed. According to Craig Dyke, who works in the diocese’s Office of Family Life and chairs the board, the advisers’ main focus is planning the events the diocese sponsors for divorced and widowed Catholics — an annual Mass, as well as a conference and day of reflection held alternately each year. The board also disseminates information on various parish support groups so that those who need more ongoing help can find something near them.

Limited reach

As those responsible for those various ministries and apostolates will tell you, to an extent, programs such as these are working. People are being reached and they’re being helped. But, again, they’re working only “to an extent.” What you’ll also hear from nearly everyone involved in ministry to the widowed is that they’re not reaching nearly the amount of people they want to reach or giving them nearly the amount of help they want to give.

Much of that, however, has little to do with the programs themselves. It’s more about the culture.

To start with, even where there is a good program in place (and there isn’t everywhere), reaching the people who most need to come and then convincing them to come poses a major challenge.

“I’m lucky if I can get a third of the people to whom I talk to come to the retreat,” Smith said.

Some of that he credits to difficulty spreading the word and marketing. He also credits some to “individualism.”

“Most people just want to tough it out,” he said. “There’s this idea that they should just be over it, that they shouldn’t need to come.”

Likewise, given people’s busy schedules, getting away for a whole weekend can be hard. So can finding the time (and these days, money) to travel weekly to a central diocesan event such as that in Wichita.

“Over the past couple of years, attendance has been declining at the Coping Experience nights, possibly due to the increasing number of grief groups at the parish and community level,” Hannemann said. “It’s simply cheaper and takes less time to go to a local parish.”

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the reason many dioceses became involved in widowed ministry in the first place, instead of just leaving the work to the parishes, is that it’s difficult for most parishes to maintain a bereavement group over any length of time.

“People tend to be very enthused at first,” Schellert said. “But within five years, that enthusiasm burns out, and they move on. They meet somebody and get remarried, or they get burned out because they and a handful of others have been doing the majority of the work. Then the group falls apart.”

That’s a problem, however, at both the parish and diocesan level. As a result of tight budgets and staffing cuts, most bereavement programs are staffed primarily by volunteers … who happen to be in short supply these days, regardless of the ministry.

“There’s a real shortage of people who want to get out there and volunteer to lead a group,” Dyke said. “Either they don’t think they can lead or they’re too busy with their own lives.”

Likewise, despite each bishop’s endorsement of the various outreaches, Pittsburgh’s, St. Louis’ and Wichita’s programs all operate without funding assistance from the diocese. They’re supported instead by donations, which is one reason why St. Louis eliminated its program for grieving widows and why Pittsburgh can’t add a series of weekly meetings to accompany its weekend retreats.

“We’d like to do more,” Smith said. “The need is immense. But the money, not to mention the volunteers, just aren’t there.”

Nor are they likely to be anytime soon. But, as Dyke pointed out, that doesn’t make the needs any less real, nor does it make Catholics’ obligation to try and meet those needs any less imperative.

“You can just see the hunger and need of these people,” he said. “They’re such an underprovided-for group in our Church, and we have to find a way to help. We can’t forget them.”

Emily Stimpson is an OSV contributing editor.