Reflecting on the contributions of Msgr. John “Jack” Egan, who died May 19 at the age of 84, Dan and Sheila Daley, co-directors of Call To Action, said in a joint statement, “We think of Jack Egan as CTA’s godfather, both because of the important role he played in the original Detroit meeting, and because of the early support he gave to the organization. His was one of the first significant donations which helped fund the first CTA News. Over the years, his affirmation, enthusiastic support and challenges were important gifts to us. His tireless work for justice to the very end inspired us all. We will miss him.”
Indeed, Egan, who was co-chair of the Catholic bishops’ Call To Action assembly in Detroit in 1976, nurtured the vision of a church open to its people and calling everyone to share responsibility for both the world and the church until his last day. Speaking at a Chicago CTA meeting several years ago, he said, “We are called to a new sense of Christian responsibility.” And he added, “The church cannot call itself just unless it purges itself of its own injustices.”
Egan was impressed with the hearings in some 152 dioceses which preceded the Detroit meeting. “When we listen,” he said, “we learn what Christ intended the church to be.” It is ironic that Chicago, one of the dioceses that did not cooperate in the original assembly, kept the dream alive long after the Call To Action initiatives were considered dead in most of the U.S. Egan saw the handwriting on the wall very early. After the very first session in Detroit, as he told the story to his biographer Margery Frisbie, then Bishop Bernard Law met him in the hall and said, “We have to adjourn this meeting right away! Certain resolutions are coming to the floor that Rome is not going to like.”
“The people have a right to express their minds,” Egan replied. “You go back and sit down. We are not going to adjourn this meeting.”
In the 25 years since Detroit, Jack Egan scarcely ever missed a meeting of CTA, when it was strictly a Chicago operation or after it became national in 1990. In November 1986, he was given CTA’s leadership award for his unique contributions.
For over 58 years Egan was an outspoken force for justice in church and world. In numberless campaigns he confronted politicians, business tycoons and civic leaders, usually on behalf of the have-nots. He was a pioneer in interfaith efforts and one of the first priests to march with Dr. Martin Luther King in the Selma, Ala., civil rights marches. He was the founder of a national alliance of social action leaders, and never tired of encouraging and counseling those working in this field. Even as his health faltered badly in recent years, he remained on the firing line. He was almost single-handedly responsible for persuading Chicago church leaders to launch a metropolitan-wide community organization called United Power for Action and Justice. And he was determined to curb the widespread practice of currency exchanges giving payday loans — a practice, he was convinced, that leaves the working poor subject to exorbitant interest payments.
Ordained in 1943, Egan seemed destined for a successful ecclesiastical career. Outgoing and energetic, with a keen memory for names and faces, he was politically astute, sensitive to limitations, personal piques, and private agendas, and he seemed to have an invisible ear permanently attuned to the goings on in high places. Above all, he was an organizer and motivator. But as one of his early disciples, Nicholas Von Hoffman, observed, “Jack Egan forsook ecclesiastical ambition to champion and pioneer the cause of the poor. He had to choose between becoming a social action priest or a bishop. I think he made the right choice.”
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| Msgr. Jack Egan, center with CTA's Dan Daley and then U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, at a Catholic Social Ministry meeting on Capitol Hill in 1998. Egan and Herman co-chaired the original Call To Action conference for the U.S. Bishops in Detroit in 1976. (Photo: Barbara Stephenson) |
Here, slightly abridged, is the late Msgr. Jack Egan’s op-ed piece sent to the New York Times shortly before his death on May 19.
I am 84 years of age. I have served the Catholic Church and the Archdiocese of Chicago for 66 years. I look back with gratitude for the opportunities to work in marriage education, ecumenical affairs, race relations, social justice, community organizing, and as a pastor. Now I look at my church and I am troubled. I feel I must speak out. Why are we not using to the fullest the gifts and talents of women who constitute thc majority of our membership throughout the world? Even to raise aspects of this question, I label myself a dissenter, for the present leadership of the church sees no reason to change or even to ask this question. Yet prayerful, responsible dissent has always played a role in the church. It is part of who we are.
The position of women in society has changed radically. They are now seen almost universally as equal, no longer subservient. When I was born, women were just beginning to get the right to vote. Today they are heads of their own companies, chief administrators of hospitals, presidents of nations. Yet in my church, women are still invisible in positions where they could contribute the most.
Recently Pope John Paul II elevated 44 men to the rank of cardinal. They have only one mission: to select a new pope, who will make decisions that affect the universal church, the majority of whose members are women. Is it so far fetched to have some distinguished women in this conclave of men? Are there any theological reasons against such a bold step, or only the tired reply that “we never did it that way before.”
In early March, my archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, gave a retreat to the pope and some 160 members of the Vatican Curia. The men in the Curia control the workings of this immense church. Couldn’t the Curia benefit greatly from the wisdom some distinguished women would bring?
I now want to address the most sensitive matter regarding women in the Church. We are in crisis because of the decline of male clergy in the U.S., in Europe, South America and elsewhere. I have come to believe the church must consider the ordaining of women (and most certainly married men) as priests in order to meet an essential need. I say this because of Pope John Paul’s repeated insistence, reflecting the Vatican II decree on the sacred liturgy, that “the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit” is the liturgy, the Eucharist, the Mass. If this is the source and it cannot be obtained because of the priest shortage, then the true Christian spirit is lost also. And this is a disaster.
In the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1999, we lost 31 priests in death and 20 more through retirement, while just six priests were ordained. To the best of my knowledge, in the Archdiocese of New York, five priests were ordained in 2000; in San Francisco, one; Los Angeles, seven; Detroit, five; Boston, 11… Last year for the first time, the U.S. bishops formally looked at the problem of fewer priests. A study the bishops commissioned showed that between 1950 and 2000, the U. S. Catholic population increased by 107 percent, while the total number of priests grew by only six percent. The average age of the present priest population is about 60. There are far more priests over 90 than under 30. So 15 percent of U.S. parishes do not have their own resident priest pastor. I’m aware of the great number of laypersons (both men and women), of sisters and of deacons (men only), who have come forward to serve the needs of parishioners. But in Catholic theology and practice, only an ordained priest can celebrate Mass — the primary source of the Christian spirit. The Mass is becoming less and less available. The bishops’ study did not even mention the ordination of women or married men as a possibility, and the two or three bishops who raised this question were met with stony silence.
In the early church, women served as deacons, and there may be evidence they even presided at what we now call the Mass. Tradition does not stop at a designated point in history; it embraces the present also. And we are fortunate to live in this era when women’s equality with men has at last come to be recognized as a God-given truth. It is time to present this matter to a wide audience in order to learn the sense of the larger church. The arguments that women cannot be ordained because Jesus selected only men to be his first apostles or because tradition has restricted the priesthood exclusively to men are no longer persuasive to the majority of Catholics, or to many theologians.
Even if there were no shortage of priests, the Catholic church would still be required to rethink its exclusion of women from Holy Orders. It is a matter, I believe, of social justice. A great part of my priesthood has involved working on thorny problems of justice — social, economic, political. Now I have to ask our church to lift its voice on another justice issue — the church’s commitment to the broadest possible inclusion of women in positions of leadership and authority in the church, including further study and discussion of the ordination of women. The church has the obligation to use all the gifts God has given it to fulfill its mission.