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Kind of in the Spirit of Vatican II

Call to Action Blows Into Los Angeles

By Christopher Zehnder

Addressing the Holy Father and his brother cardinals in May at the extraordinary consistory in Rome, Cardinal Mahony succinctly summarized the chief problem facing his archdiocese. Los Angeles archidiocese, said Mahony, "now numbers well over five million Catolics and that number is growing significantly year after year. As my priests and religious try to minister to such large numbers of Catholics, one reality we face is that so many are not fully and deeply evangelized, and, in too many cases, are barely catechized."

Barely catechized? This might be surprising, since the archdiocese hosts annually its Religious Education Congress, one of the largest such gatherings in the country. This year, over 37,000 lay and religious catechists and others registered for the congress, 18,220 from California. But, perhaps, the Congress is part of the problem. Both this year and in past years, the Religious Education Congress has featured presenters associated with the group Call to Action, which calls for the admission of women as priests, the full acceptance of homosexuality as a valid orientation, and a change in Church teaching on artificial contraception, among other issues. More importantly, Call to Action seems to question the very supernatural character of the Catholic Church.

This summer, Los Angeles will host (August 3-5) one of Call to Action's national conferences. In the past, said Carrie Maus, public education director for Call to Action in Chicago, the organization has had only one national conference; this year -- the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United States bishops' Call to Action meeting in Detroit -- it will have three. (The other two will be held in Chicago and Philadelphia).

Maus said the Call to Action conference will feature speakers, performing arts, and a café for young people. At the Los Angeles conference, actress Lisa Wagner will portray Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, in a one-woman play, Haunted by God. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker community will also be present, to receive a Call to Action award. Says the conference brochure: "For decades, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker has served the poor and homeless of the inner city, carrying out its mission with hospitality and love in the tradition of Catholic Worker co-founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. The community has also lived its commitment to peace and social justice, mounting non-violent protests that raise a prophetic voice both to the Church and to civil society."

Call to Action, which Carrie Maus calls a "social justice" organization ("kind of in the spirit of Vatican II") dates its beginnings to the bishops' meeting of the same name, held in 1976. Following the 1971 international synod of bishops, the United States bishops launched a "creative consultation process" in which, through two years of hearings, over 800,000 Catholics testified. These hearings culminated in the 1976 Call to Action meeting, attended by 1,350 voting members (100 of them bishops) and 1,500 observers. According to the Call to Action website, after much debate, the conference declared that the Church must stand up to the racism, sexism, militarism, and poverty in modern society; "and to do so in a credible way the church must reevaluate its positions on issues like celibacy for priests, the male-only clergy, homosexuality, birth control, and the involvement of every level of the church in important decisions."

Donna Steichen, whose research into Call to Action and other dissident groups, culminated in her book, Ungodly Rage, told me that, though she lived through the period of the consultation, she "didn't know what was going on at all." It wasn't the laity who were consulted, she said, "it was the church bureaucracy. It was their conference, and it was the intention that it should be their conference." Steichen, who now lives in Ojai, was then living in St. Paul, Minnesota. "When I found out what happened, after the conference," she said, "I went to our bishop (who was orthodox, but not strong) and said, why did you not appoint some of us to go there? He said, it was just terrible, Donna. We voted by standing, and when I stood, they sat, and when I sat they stood.' And I said, why didn't you appoint some of us? Because he had the authority to do so."

"The body of bishops, the National Council of Catholic Bishops, did not accept the report from the Call to Action meeting," said Steichen. "The attendees had the idea that they would write a report on 'what we want as church,' but the bishops wouldn't accept it. So, it was just languishing."

In 1978, a group of Catholic priests, sisters, teachers and laity in Chicago formed Call to Action Chicago to further what they called "church reform" based on the Call to Action report. The organization's goals, then as today, said Carrie Maus, are "social justice in the Church and in society." Social justice in the Church entails, said Maus, making the Church "more democratic" where the "laity is listened to and takes part in Church councils and they have a kind of collaborative model where everything is not coming from the top and saying, 'this is the answer.' Most Call to Action members aren't running around saying the Church has to be a democracy. I think a lot of people just feel like, maybe, their voice needs to be heard when the Church, as a whole, makes decisions."

I asked Maus if making the Church more democratic entailed a different role for the pope? "I don't know if I can really answer that for every member," said Maus. "I don't necessarily think it [the papacy] needs to go away. We would not say that at all. People are continually talking about it, and there have been instances where the Church has changed its mind on things."

In 1990, Call to Action tried to make their voice heard in a full-page advertisement run in the New York Times. The advertisement, called "A Call for Reform," elicited 25,000 signatures after dissident theologian Hans Küng endorsed it. Call to Action became a national movement with this statement, which called for the incorporation of "women at all levels of ministry [read priesthood] and decision making," and an "extensive consultation with the Catholic people in developing church teaching on sexuality" [that is, a removal of the birth control "ban"]. Throughout the 90s, membership in Call to Action grew, until, by the year 2000, they boasted over 20,000 members.

Donna Steichen says one reason she thinks Call to Action has grown -- and their numbers (she said) are "nothing if you compare their size to Concerned Women for America" -- is because "many other organizations have collapsed. These other reform organizations and Call to Action have a coalition called Catholic Organizations for Renewal, which contains other groups that work in collaboration with Call to Action."

According to Call to Action's website, Catholic Organizations for Renewal "is a coalition of Catholic groups, inspired by Vatican II, to further the reform and renewal of the Catholic Church, and to bring about a world of justice and peace, reflecting the sacredness of all creation." The coalition includes CORPUS, an organization of illicitly married priests; the Women's Ordination Conference; Dignity USA, which calls for full social and legal recognition of the goodness of homosexuality; and, most ironically for folks who want to reflect the "sacredness of all creation," Catholics for a Free Choice, a pro-abortion group.

Since 1990, despite its continued concern with societal issues such as sweatshops and the death penalty, Call to Action has concentrated on women's issues, such as women's ordination, and sexual issues, such as contraception. The chief enemy for Call to Action, it seems, has become "patriarchy," and the Catholic Church, which, they say, has institutionalized patriarchy.

Carrie Maus invited me to surf the Call to Action website. There I found a talk given by Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, delivered as the keynote address at the 1997 Call to Action conference in Chicago. For Chittister, "patriarchy is a very effective philosophy. It allows the people on top to rape nature, to nuke the world, to colonize peoples, and to rape, beat and marginalize women, however benignly. They [the people on top] destroy men as well as women and they destroy God, too." Feminism, on the other hand, declares Sister Joan, "speaks.from the Mount of the Beatitudes, not from Sinai, from the mount of compassion over control, of feeling over reason, of empowerment for all rather than power for the powerful; from a commitment to the patient effectiveness of non-violence over the destructiveness of aggression; from the freedom that comes with the self-knowledge of humility over the imprisonment of pride."

Chittister thinks the Church "theologizes institutional patriarchy" by forbidding women to serve as priests. The question of women's ordination is not closed, she says, despite what Pope John Paul II has said. "Women's Eucharists may well begin to break out all over now," she notes, "just as communion in the hand became common when people realized that what was at issue was authority and not the nature of eucharistic devotion, just as universal language did when people realized that male pronouns were not of the essence of God's message to humankind."

If Chittister seems to deny the supernatural character of the Church, another Call to Action convention regular, Rosemary Radford Ruether, makes no bones about it. In her talk, "Church as Community" (which Call to Action lists as one of its foundational documents), Ruether states that the "legitimizing myth of apostolic succession needs to be reexamined. It is historically false that Jesus founded or intended to found such a historical church with a hierarchical government based on the model of the Roman empire. The institutional church of episcopal hierarchy is not the successor of this apostolic church, but it arose by suppressing this apostolic church.. Thus what is to be rejected is not institutionalization as such, but the myth of institution; namely, that a particular institution has been founded by Christ, and it and it alone can transmit grace through its material forms simply by performing ritual acts. The Christian churches, in all their historical expressions, need to accept their historical relativity. There is no original right church structure founded by Christ which alone transmits grace. Christ did not found a group of apostles to be bishops of dioceses (the term diocese itself is a fourth century term for a province of the Roman empire). Much less did Christ found the papacy, itself modeled after the Roman emperor and his bureaucracy in Rome."

A frequent presenter at the Los Angeles archdiocese's religious education congresses, including the 2001 conference, Father Michael Crosby, told Call to Action conference attendees that, when he was young, "we got our piety from the women religious, who just gave us all the images they themselves had been taught, before Sister Formation. They had started teaching right after high school, and the piety they had was right out of the 1800's. The images of Mary were used to reinforce papal patriarchy and various power positions in the Church. They were dysfunctional images, but we didn't know it. They seemed to function very well for us at that time." Crosby told his audience he had presented this same talk at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. "Two weeks later," he said, "one of the protest groups in Los Angeles published a report in a newspaper called Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, denouncing the whole congress and saying, 'The only thing missing was the golden calf!' About my talk they wrote, 'Crosby said traditional Marian piety is a dysfunctional spirituality.' I didn't say that, and I can tell from your reaction that you don't believe that either. What has been dysfunctional is a spirituality based on certain images and concepts that really are not life-giving to the Church and to the people of God."

For Crosby, true Marian devotion, as seen in the Magnificat, is "about a world in poverty that is pregnant with hope that everybody is going to have a life that will be reordered. Power, possessions and prestige will be transformed to benefit not those with the wealth but those in poverty."

Such views of the Church and her traditions are reiterated by Diana Hayes, another frequent speaker at the Los Angeles congresses, who, according to the December 1997 CTA News, believes that, in its beginnings, "the church was a lay movement; ministry was not aligned with power and authority but with simple service, largely by the poor, the slaves and the women. These early believers understood the 'radically naive, subversive' nature of Jesus' message, she said -- a message that contradicted old assumptions with the news that 'the Kingdom of God is already among us.' That subversive tradition, in Hayes' view, continues in black liberation theology and in the black sense of 'a sacred cosmos' (a sense of the holy encompassing all creation)." Hayes is also affiliated with the Women's Ordination Conference.

Since such views are hard to reconcile with any semblance of Catholicism, one wonders -- where do these Call to Action folks come from? Donna Steichen thinks "they are mostly church employees. They're insiders. It's the treason of the clerks. Those are the people who always start revolutions. To the best of my knowledge, they believed that Vatican II was going to turn them loose; they were going to be free to do whatever they wanted. Why they thought that, I do not know, but they were disappointed. They thought they could force it to happen; they could force the Church to become what they wanted.

Before the Second Vatican Council, said Steichen, "the Church looked so healthy, at least in the United States. And yet, people who were around then, went to Euopre and were horrified to find that modernism was rife in institutions in Europe, and there were centers for spreading it, like Louvain. Obviously it was underground, and growing. There's a parallel with the Arian heresy, which was analyzed and condemned at the Council of Nicaea at the beginning of the fourth century -- and then for 60 years afterwards, the Church was racked with Arianism. And that's what happened to us with modernism. It was condemned in 1910 by Pope Pius X -- and that's what we've got today."

But how did so many nuns, brothers and priests fall into modernism? The nuns, said Steichen, "lost their faith because they received bad religious education from people holding workshops for sisters in which they explained that it was all a mistake: scripture isn't true; it's a myth. The single biggest reason, I discovered, why nuns lost their faith was their understanding that scripture isn't true. If it isn't true, then the whole thing -- the Church, their religious lives -- is based on lies, and they had given their lives for nothing. Then they had to find something else to live for, or get out. And a lot of them got out, and it wasn't the worst who got out. The ones that stayed made their lives the destruction of what they saw as the bad old false Church."

The sisters who lost their faith, continued Steichen, "are really tragic figures. You know, anywhere you have human beings -- even in convents and monasteries -- you have original sin, you have troubled personalities -- and the structure that held them up fell apart."

So far, the archdiocese of Los Angeles has issued no statement on the August Call to Action Conference. One priest to whom I spoke in May said he has received nothing from the chancery office alerting him to the coming conference and encouraging priests to warn their people against it. Carrie Maus, when I asked her if the archdiocese of Los Angeles was welcoming to Call to Action, said, "We've never had somebody say, don't come here, we don 't want you." Call to Action, she said, chose Los Angeles because of its location and for the proximity of accommodations to the airport.

In the past, though, the archdiocese of Los Angeles has seemingly welcomed regional Call to Action conferences. The CTA News, in September 1998, reported that the Call to Action West Coast meeting, held near San Francisco, "enjoyed significant respect from the official Church. Ads for the event appeared in the diocesan newspapers of Los Angeles [The Tidings], Sacramento and San José, and the head of ministry formation in the San Francisco archdiocese was a speaker." In 1997, The Tidings ran an article on the West Coast regional conference, listing the seminars that were to be held, along with the speakers. The Tidings noted that Call to Action's goals include: "opening the priesthood to women and married men...open dialogue, academic freedom and due process in the church." The article ended with information on where the conference would be held, the costs involved and phone numbers to contact for more information.

Sidebar: It Will Fade Away

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