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 his heroes were Robert Kennedy and Sally Trench, the young English woman who lived close to the streets. In his conversion to the poor through contact with the Matthew Talbot Hostel he recognised that reflection on the plight of the poor must begin in accompaniment, and that the poor are teachers, not topics.
He also discovered that accompanying the poor could reveal, and perhaps heal, personal anguish.
As he explored ways of engaging personally with the poor he attracted many young people who instinctively resonated with his vision. They found him a compelling spiritual teacher.
But when he represented his vision among Jesuits and other religious groups, he often felt marginalised. He relied on experience and intuition and was constrained by the disciplines of discursive argument. He was passionate but not articulate. He resorted to the rhetoric of gesture and of silence.
These often shut down conversation, but his presence and the quality of his life ensured that others could not evade the claim that the poor made on them.
Both the strength and the dangers of Brian's vision lay in the blurring of boundaries. He challenged and crossed boundaries between subjective and objective, between the reputable and disreputable, between the religious and the secular, between sinfulness and goodness, between the self and the other.
Those wishing to share the lives of people who are marginalised in society, as Brian did, have no choice but to test these boundaries. It also placed him in a position from which he could invite people to go beyond the boundaries that protected their comfort but threatened their happiness.
But an older wisdom also held that people need boundaries if they are to nurture the springs of the self and to protect the health and balance necessary for living. Brian had discovered that if we enter the lives of the poor and marginalised on their own terms we shall discover our own weakness and come to accept it.
That demands a strong sense of self. Traditional wisdom would insist that if we blur the boundaries between the self and the other, we shall cease to engage with others as persons. We project our own weaknesses on to them. We find, not healing but enervation and depression, and we neglect the ordinary disciplines that protect others from the consequences of our weakness.
Brian necessarily lived in the no-man's land between the received wisdom and what he had discovered. It is understandable that he showed little care for his health, and felt estranged from many people who cared for him. His leaving the Jesuits was one part of this story. But even in his leaving, the boundaries remained blurred, so that strong bonds remained on both sides.
His funeral revealed the depth of connection he had enabled deeply vulnerable and isolated people to make. It spoke of his affectionate and quirky personality. It also pointed to unfinished business: the shaping of a Jesuit and Catholic presence with the poor that corresponds to the harshnesses of our society.
Andrew Hamilton SJ is Eureka Street's consulting editor. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne.