Vatican upholds Lincoln excommunication:
CTA’s new JustChurch program responds

Hundreds of CTAers spent part of their conference weekend listening to the stories and learning the ways of nonviolent resistance to injustice and abuse of power within our own Catholic Church. The sessions launched CTA’s new JustChurch Project, and within days a JustChurch Response Network was begun on the CTA website.

The timing was fortunate. Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 8 released a letter from a Vatican official upholding his 1996 threat of excommunication of Call To Action members in his diocese. The same day CTA/USA and CTA Nebraska issued a joint press release promising to appeal the letter, and insisting they will not be silenced in their work for justice.

Rachel Pokora, president of CTA Nebraska and a university professor in Lincoln, had told the story of CTA Nebraska’s 10-year nonviolent resistance against the Bruskewitz ban at the CTA conference. She now told the media she considered the excommunication process medieval, discriminatory and unjust: 10 years without any Vatican response or due process — Bruskewitz’s crude attempt to silence CTA. “But we will not be silent,” she said.

Breaking the silence has quickly become a CTA national strategy. A letter to Bruskewitz with a copy to USCCB president, Bishop William Skylstad, is gathering signatures on the CTA website, www.cta-usa.org. It not only denounces the excommunication as unjust, but also identifies Bruskewitz as the only bishop in the U.S. who does not allow girl altar servers, and the only diocesan bishop who has not complied with the 2002 Dallas Charter to protect children in the wake of national revelations of clergy sexual abuse. The letter says he is “out of step with the rest of the Catholic Church” and “is doing so at the peril of our children.”

Action alerts in other locales

Go to the CTA website and click on “JustChurch,” and a U.S. map appears with red pins marking Lincoln and five other sites of current nonviolent action against church injustice. The other flashpoints are Boston, Syracuse, New Orleans, St. Louis and Brownsville, Tex. Each story was told at the CTA conference by local leaders in the struggle.

The Brownsville diocese includes Holy Spirit Parish in McAllen, Tex., where a new pastor has fired staff who had union contracts, barred CTA Rio Grande Valley members from all parish ministries, and closed down scores of lay ministries vital to the neighborhood. Jose Moya told their story at conference. Now a national CTA letter campaign through our website is asking Brownsville Bishop Peña to send a mediator to help bring justice between pastor and people.

Syracuse, N.Y. diocese is home to parish priest Fred Daley. Shortly before he was to leave for Africa to assist with Catholic HIV/AIDS ministry, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) told him he will not be allowed to minister with them because of his public identity as a gay priest. He told conference audiences that neither his own bishop nor the one who would welcome him in Africa sees his sexual orientation as a problem.

CTA’s JustChurch recent Action Alert by e-mail and website urges you to write a letter to CRS and ask them to issue a statement that they will not discriminate against anyone who applies for or serves on their programs who has publicly acknowledged their sexual orientation.

Applying King and Gandhi

The JustChurch Project relies entirely on creative nonviolence to pursue justice. National board member Ken Butigan and others from Pace e Bene Franciscan Nonviolence Service in Oakland, Calif., are providing the training, both at conference and with CTA chapters and members in the field. Ken joins his two hands together to illustrate to his audience, “Creative nonviolence has two hands that are in creative tension: noncooperation with injustice AND steadfast regard for the opponent as a human being.”

In New Orleans this approach has had some success. After weeks refusing to meet with the parishioners of St. Augustine’s, the historic black church he intended to close, Archbishop Alfred Hughes brought in a mediator, and conditions were mutually agreeed upon to keep the parish open. Parish leader Sandra Gordon in her remarks at conference invoked Gandhi: open communication breaks down the us-vs.-them attitudes to pursue a common cause. Or, as Dr. King taught, only love restores community. In fact, the news got even better a month later, when Hughes issued a powerful pastoral letter committing the archdiocese to new initiatives against racism and white privilege, and apologized to St. Augustine’s for his mistaken efforts to shut the parish down.

In St. Louis results have been less promising. Archbishop Raymond Burke insists the board of St. Stanislaus Kostka Polish Parish must hand over its 1891 deed to the land and parish buildings, now worth about $10 million. Rather than talk or seek mediation, he has excommunicated the board members and the outside priest they hired, Fr. Marek Bozek. They are appealing the penalty at the Vatican. Meanwhile parish membership and attendance has doubled. Bozek and board member Roger Krasnicki represented St. Stan’s at the CTA conference.