4,000 meet to give laity a voice
Chuck Colbert
National Catholic Reporter, August 2, 2002
Since its inception last winter here, the largest lay-led, church-reform
advocacy group to emerge in the wake of the Catholic church sex-abuse
crisis has expressed its mission in six words: “Keep the Faith,
Change the Church.” By design, the group, Voice of the Faithful,
is centrist, with leaders and members reaffirming on many occasions
their intention to build up the church through change from within.
But July 20 at a daylong gathering 4,200 people heard speaker after
speaker hammer away at the hierarchy, its culture of clericalism
and the millennia-old ecclesial power structure of the worldwide
church.
The meeting, called “Response of the Faithful,” garnered the support
of national survivor groups such as Survivors’ Network for Those
Abused by Priests and Linkup, and major national figures like David
Clohessy, Barbara Blaine and Mark Serrano, who attended the convention
and have long advocated for the rights of abuse victims.
Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle received Voice of the Faithful’s Priest
of Integr ity Award. Doyle was a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy
when he co-authored a 1985 report on the impending crisis, urging
the U.S. bishops to form a national policy (NCR, May 17).
Accepting the award, Doyle suggested that some of the hierarchy
suffer from “unbridled addiction to power.” The laity, he proposed,
are called to help free those bishops and priests from the “chains”
of their addiction, helping “them to find the joy and happiness
of sharing.”
“Sexual abuse has been a symptom of a deeper and much more persuasive
and destructive malady: the fallacy of clericalism,” Doyle said.
The current crisis marks “the beginning death throes of the medieval
monarchical model that was based on the belief that a small select
minority of the educated, privileged and power-invested was called
forth by God to manage the temporal and spiritual lives of the faceless
masses on the presumption that their unlettered status equaled ignorance,”
he said.
But “that was 1302,” Doyle said. “This is 2002, and that model
is based on a myth that certainly is long dead, if it was ever real
in the first place.”
Still, he expressed optimism. “Out of this disaster has emerged
hope,” Doyle said, and “the realization that we must have a deep,
probing and painful scrutiny of the governmental system that caused
this to happen and real change.”
Primarily laity
Those who converged on the Hynes Convention Center were primarily
members of the laity -- Catholics with deep roots in their local
parishes and associated ministries. Priests and women and men religious
also attended. Overall, the gathering had representatives from 36
states and seven countries.
Dan Daley, co-director and a founder national Catholic reform group
Call To Action, was in attendance. “It is remarkable that this new
group could, using volunteers, draw 4,000. We put on conferences
every year and we know what is involved. It is a wonderful coming
of age of a strong lay voice movement.”
Noting that many of those at the gathering were members of Call
to Action Massachusetts, Daley said he had begun conversation with
leaders of the new group about possible collaboration in the future.
“The major difference between CTA and Voice of the Faithful is
that Voice is not yet taking positions on issues apart from lay
participation,” he said. “For instance, they don’t yet have positions
on a married priesthood or women’s ordination, positions we have
been clearly advocating while they are focused on lay voice. So
there is some difference of agenda at this point.”
Major highlights of the convention weekend included:
- Announcement of a monitoring process, or report card, enabling
the various parish-based Voice of the Faithful chapters to evaluate
the U.S. bishops based on their compliance with the Charter for
the Protection of Children and Young People, adopted by U.S. bishops
at their June meeting in Dallas (NCR, July 5). Spokesperson Paul
Baier said at a pre-convention news conference July 19 that Voice
chapters would soon begin to evaluate their bishops and that reports
would be posted on the Internet by fall.
- Establishment of a “Voice of Compassion Fund,” designed to accept
charitable contributions from people unwilling to contribute directly
to the cardinal’s annual appeal in Boston. The following Monday,
Cardinal Bernard Law said the archdiocese would not accept money
from the fund; however, Catholic Charities of Boston said it would
not turn down any donation. (See accompanying story.)
- Overwhelming approval of a declaration, or charter, affirming
the role of the laity in “constant renewal of the Catholic church,
as proclaimed in Lumen Gentium and other Vatican II documents.”
The declaration also petitioned “the Holy Father to support this
charter and to hold accountable any bishop who reassigned an abusive
priest or concealed his crimes, and any member of the curia who
participated in these practices.”
“It was an amazing day to see all our efforts come together in
such a wonderful way for so many people,” said Mary Moran, of St.
Gerard’s Parish in Canton, Mass., who joined Voice of the Faithful
in April.
“When the crisis came down, I like many others felt a range of
emotions, torn among anger, hurt and sorrow for the victims,” she
said. “Voice has been a means of dealing with and working through
my anger.”
Added Moran, a retiree who served as a diocesan director of religious
education: “It’s been my salvation, providing me, a Catholic woman
who dearly loves the church, a way toward a future church.”
Right and responsibility
In his welcoming remarks, Voice president James E. Post outlined
the group’s agenda. “Today, we assert our right and our responsibility
as baptized Catholics to participate in the decision-making processes
of each parish, each diocese and the whole Catholic church,” he
said.
“The hierarchy that failed to protect our children cannot be trusted
to exercise sole control over the property, money and fate of our
church,” he said.
“We want our bishops to talk with us,” he said. “But let me be
clear about the terms of this dialogue: We will not negotiate our
right to exist. We will not negotiate our right to be heard. We
will not negotiate our right to free speech as American Catholics.”
Founding president James E. Muller, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning
cardiologist, in addressing the crowd, offered a hopeful sign for
continuing dialogue. Bishop Walter Edyvean, vicar general of the
Boston archdiocese, “has told me that Cardinal Law and the bishops
are unanimous in their support of the ongoing conversations between
Bishop Edyvean and the leadership of Voice of the Faithful,” Muller
said.
Muller detailed the group’s “great progress” to date, including
19,000 members in 22 nations and 75 chapters, called “parish voices,”
nationwide.
“Nineteen hundred years ago, the divine message of Jesus Christ
was fresh, clear, ethical and uncorrupted --when the laity had a
voice in selection of bishops,” Muller said. “We must build a church
that Jesus would survey with a smile.”
During plenary sessions and smaller workshops, convention attendees
heard from theologians. Moral theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston
College pointed out that while reforms of Vatican II came from the
top down, current calls for change push up from the bottom. She
also called on the Voice movement to include all the diversity of
the church, noting how well off, white and senior many of the participants
were.
Francine Cardman, an associate professor of historical theology
and church history at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge,
Mass., referred to Luke’s Gospel and the parable of the sower and
the seed, after which Jesus admonishes his followers to “pay attention
to how you listen,” since, she said, “parables both reveal and conceal
God’s kingdom to those who hear them.”
Stressing the urgency of paying “attention to how we listen,” she
said, “The bishops have journeyed to Rome, they have met in Dallas,
they have agreed on a policy. They want the story to be over, its
meaning sealed, the questioning stilled.
“But in Boston,” she said, “a state superior court judge, educated
at Sacred Heart College, tells Cardinal Law that he can’t hide behind
his diocesan finance committee in order to renege on the financial
settlement he agreed to for 86 victims,” Cardman said.
“Here and elsewhere grand juries are being convened to consider
the legal culpability of bishops for shuffling around and protecting
sexually abusive priests. The press has put aside the deference
it once showed the church, a deference that enabled abuse and endorsed
unaccountability. And everywhere revelations of abuse will continue
to come to light as more victims/survivors, including the still-invisible
little girls, speak their truths,” she said.
Survivors spoke at the convention, giving compelling witness to
the anger and pain, isolation and needs of sex-abuse victims.
Susan Renehan told participants, “When I was 11, I was sexually
molested by a priest; and for three years I was repeatedly stalked
and sexually abused. I left the church as soon as I got my driver’s
license at 17. ...
“We do not want your voice. We want your shoulders next to ours
outside your churches in solidarity against crimes committed against
your children and vulnerable adults and demanding of your church
leaders truth and justice for survivors and survivors’ families.
“We don’t want your priests of integrity. We want their voices
telling what they know.
“You need our voice to teach you that you need to heal before you
can forgive, and you need the truth before you can heal.
“We do not need your voice. We want your hearts. We want your compassion.
We want your humility.”
Splendid but too late
A small group of survivors stood outside holding placards -- as
they have done outside the cathedral on Sunday mornings for many
months -- bearing witness to the scandal.
Art Austin, another survivor, told the gathering during the closing
plenary session that for the protesters, “quite legitimately, your
splendid conference is too little too late, and too much about you,
when it should always and urgently and long since, have been about
them. For them, this event is a shadow play, a thing without substance.
And before you begin to grow indignant with me for saying this,
let me ask you. How many of you took the time to even find out the
name of one of those angry survivors?
“Quo vadis? Where are you going?” Austin asked the Voice gathering,
referring to the risen Christ who posed that same question to Peter,
who was fleeing from his life in Rome. “The time has come when Voice
of the Faithful must make a similar choice between its desire for
mere public and churchly respectability before all else, or the
extremely unmanageable, unpredictable, and often alarming, radical
grace of God in the world,” he said.
“The time has come to walk with us, after the liturgy, from this
convention hall, with me, to the cathedral to stand in solidarity
with each survivor victim who trusts you enough to let you walk
with them. “You can walk away from this. We cannot. Ever.”
After the celebration of the Mass, between 700 and 800 people --
more than double the other two previous public street demonstrations
of solidarity with victims -- assembled on the steps of the Cathedral
of the Holy Cross.
The next day, Austin, along with two other members of the Coalition
of Catholics and Survivors, stepped inside the cathedral long enough
to receive Communion from Law.
Law said to them, “Pray for me,” the Boston Herald reported.
Austin told the Herald, “It was a very healing moment because it
was not the archbishop or the cardinal who spoke to me. It was my
brother, Bernie, who responded to me. I touched him literally and
I touched him figuratively. And he was able to receive that. That’s
the radical grace of God in the world.”
Freelance journalist Chuck Colbert writes from Cambridge, Mass.
|