December 2002 Call to Action News

Conference aglow in rainbow of diverse races, religions

"I stand here as a Korean, Protestant, eco-feminist woman who refuses to be colonized by anyone." Smiling broadly but dead serious, Friday keynote speaker Hyun Kyung launched 2,800 CTA national conference attendees on a mind-blowing three-day orbit around a world of racial, cultural and religious diversity.

To open her talk, Hyun Kyung watched as African American Melvin Miller, a professional dancer now her theology student at Union Seminary in New York, danced solo to the music of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (photo, page 7.) The "somewhere" of a new rainbow vision for humanity and the church is already in our midst, she said, if we "heal the illness of our white, Eurocentric enlightenment with an en-DARK-enment" - seeing things from the perspective of people of color, "the dark people of the two-thirds world."

CTA chose its conference theme, The Gifts and Challenges of Diversity, in response to the 9/11 tragedy. Led by Hyun Kyung, many presenters brought contrasting religions, races and cultures to the table. They included Muslim scholar Farid Esack, Asian human rights activist Basil Fernando, Latinas Suyapa Perez of El Salvador and Cecilia Zarate-Laun of Colombia, and a panel of Buddhist, Sikh and Muslim representatives arranged by the Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions.

The final speaker was black liberation theologian James Cone, who brought the focus back home. He told his liberal Catholic audience that racial segregation in America has gotten worse, not better, since the 1960s, and a new movement for interracial dialogue is imperative, "not to feel good, but to wrestle with the evil of white supremacy."

Clergy crisis and power
Like all of CTA's work since the scandals broke in Boston last January, the conference was also preoccupied with the sexual abuse crisis and the underlying abuse of clerical power. Speaker after speaker said lay Catholics like those in CTA must assume more leadership for running the church. "Only the laity can restore the credibility of the bishops now," said Tom Fox, NCR publisher. "The disease is clericalism and the unbridled addiction to power," said Tom Doyle, the canon lawyer whose warnings of the crisis went unheeded by the U.S. bishops in 1985. "The virus is obedience," said Hyun Kyung. "If you don't give energy to an oppressive system, it cannot continue. The Vatican is a dictatorship in the name of God. What we need is a coup d'etat!"

Award for nuns' "obedience"
The Erie Benedictines and their prioress, Christine Vladimiroff, received CTA's 2002 leadership award for courageously resisting Vatican pressure and allowing their own Joan Chittister to address the worldwide Women's Ordination Conference in Dublin last year. In acceptance remarks and two crowded workshops, Vladimiroff explained that their decision was not disobedience but fidelity to the spirit speaking within, "listening with the ear of our heart" as Benedict taught 1,500 years ago.

James Carroll further challenged a plenary audience to help dismantle the autocratic structures of the church, and not only because of "the fresh outrage of child rape." He argued that "democracy is the latest gift from God" which respects freedom of conscience and values diversity and religious pluralism - the theme of the weekend. He called his CTA audience "the Lech Walesas, the Nelson Mandelas, the Corazon Aquinos of Catholicism, the prophets of democracy." Eugene Kennedy also saw CTA in a prophetic role. "Organizations like Call To Action are the new religious orders in the church of our time, " he said.

Young and old share hope
As usual, the 2002 attendees were overwhelmingly mainstream Catholics, including 20 percent women religious and five percent priests. Over 71 percent are active as parish volunteers. Twenty-four percent are church employees. And the recent trend toward younger people continued. Twelve percent of participants were in the 18-42 age group, and played visible roles, especially in prayer sessions and liturgy. Aging veterans took hope from the young faces in the crowd. And vice versa. Loyola University undergraduate Karen Gargamelli wrote in a campus newsletter: "Blessed be the grey-haired women at the CTA conference. I am learning to speak with your courage. Your struggle is now my struggle."

Dancer Melvin Miller may have summed up the spirit of the weekend. "If I had experienced this when I was 17, I never would have left the Catholic Church."