Volume 25, Number 3    December 2003

 

Fed by Eucharist, 2003 conference reaps harvest of hope

“I recommend every Catholic join the ranks of Call To Action and attend one of its annual gatherings. Like a Muslim who treks to Mecca, every adult Catholic should at least once be enriched by the intellectual and emotional lift that comes from mingling with several thousand hope-filled, renewal-minded Catholics.”

So wrote publisher Tom Fox in the NCR after spending all weekend at the CTA national conference Nov. 7-9 in Milwaukee. He got it just right. Although the 2,800 attendees spent hours confronting the darkness — clergy sexual abuse, an authoritarian hierarchy, Bush's war against Iraq — the dominant mood was hope.

Edwina Gateley set the tone in her keynote address Friday evening. After engaging her audience with typical humor (“Every word of this talk is being recorded -so that The Wanderer can quote me out of context”), she proclaimed, “The prophetic voice inside us tells us we are not helpless. Hopelessness adapts. Hope resists.”

Gateley was banned from many dioceses after wearing a stole at the CTA eucharist in 1993. Ten years later, she was still wearing one. “We find within ourselves the energy of love, and we dare to believe in new possibilities because we know who we are. We are the Church, the people of God.”

Hope for Eucharist
The people of God becomes the Church through Eucharist. Every CTA assembly finds its true self in liturgy, from the first reading Friday night to the communion rite Sunday. But the Catholic hunger for Eucharist took new urgency this year, after 163 Milwaukee priests in August set off a new national clamor for discussing married as well as celibate priests as a way to ensure the availability of Eucharist. Three Milwaukee priest leaders were given a standing ovation. In a parallel effort begun by three women of CTA Wisconsin, regional activists gathered hundreds of signed letters to the U.S. bishops. A new Campaign for Optional Celibacy was launched.

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Hope for women
And what about women priests? Plenary speaker Garry Wills encouraged CTAers to keep speaking out, because the hierarchy's opposition is based not on theology but on its ideology of opposing modernism at every turn. “Even archconservative Richard Neuhaus concedes that there is nothing in Scripture against women priests,” said Wills. “But he says ordaining women would be giving in to the world. I say, what's wrong with that? Why can't the church learn from the world? It has done so again and again in history.”

Equality for women is the biggest social revolution in the last 100 years, said Wills. “The bishops think feminism is just a fad that will pass — like Galileo's astronomy,” he quipped. “The hierarchy opposed modern science, modern democracy, even literacy and the printing press. When they reject new movements, it's up to the people of the Church to refuse to go along.” Wills said the greatest value of the women's movement is theological: “Women can break us out of the prison of a uni-gendered God.”

“Called to be Peacemakers”
The conference theme of peace was pervasive. Peace and nonviolence lessons came from Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Arun, and from plenary speaker James Lawson, who first taught Gandhian nonviolence with Dr. King in the South in 1957. Fresh from her latest trip to Iraq, Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness addressed an outdoor peace rally, two workshops and a young adults' forum. Accepting CTA's award Sunday morning, she sang in Arabic a peace hymn to the Sibelius melody of Finlandia: “…O hear my song, thou God of all the nations, a song of peace for their land and for mine.” Shortly after her friends at the Baghdad School of Folk Music had translated the song, American bombs completely demolished the school.

Young people bring hope
As usual, this year's conferees were overwhelmingly mainstream Catholics, including 17 percent women religious and six percent priests. Over 72 percent are active as parish volunteers. Twenty-three percent are church employees. And the recent trend toward younger people continued. Eleven percent of participants were in the 18-42 age group, and played visible roles, especially in prayer sessions and liturgy. That number will likely grow: half of the offertory collection at Sunday Eucharist went to fund next year's conference scholarships for young adults. Said Tom Fox: “That's an organization looking to the future!”