CTA: 25 years of Spirituality and Justice

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of "A Call to Action: Liberty and Justice for All," the 1976 bicentennial conference of the American Catholic Church in Detroit. The culmination of a two-year national consultation involving over 800,000 people and 100 dioceses, the Detroit event brought over 2,500 lay people, religious, priests and bishops together for three days to approve 182 recommendations to the nation's bishops.

The entire project was sponsored and staffed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). The bishops were asking the Catholic people themselves to set the Church's agenda for justice. It shouldn't have surprised the bishops that when asked to surface issues of justice, many Catholics would start with justice within the church. Said Cardinal John Dearden of Detroit, who chaired the two-year process and hosted the conference, "We cannot preach a justice to the world that we do not practice ourselves."

A new way of being church

The process of consultation was unique in the annals of the church. Cardinal Dearden called it "a new way of doing the work of the church in America." When he called the meeting to order on Oct. 21, 1976, in Detroit's giant Cobo Hall convention center, 1,351 delegates, most of them appointed by their bishops, sat under placards naming their dioceses. They represented the church's "middle management": 64 percent were church employees. Over 100 bishops participated personally. Over 1,000 observers sat in bleachers on both sides. Interest groups as diverse as Dignity, the Women's Ordination Conference, and Catholics United for the Faith were there. Staff director for the whole enterprise was Sr. Margaret Cafferty. She recruited two co-chairs for the three days: Msgr. Jack Egan of Chicago, and Ms. Alexis Herman, an African-American social service leader who later served as President Clinton's Secretary of Labor.

The U.S. Bishops' announcement said: "The 1,200 delegates will constitute the first national assembly of the American Catholic community," implying that there would be a second, and a third. The process relied upon open debate and honest sharing of ideas. It was an act of trust. But the bishops were frightened by the results, and never called another such gathering.

When the delegates left Detroit on Oct. 23, they had approved a host of resolutions for both societal justice and church reform. On societal issues, the assembly advocated peace and justice offices in every diocese, condemned nuclear deterrence, and championed economic justice. On these the U.S. bishops would subsequently move forward with leadership. They produced their pastorals on peace (1983) and the U.S. economy (1986), and even did so with a process of public hearings and consultation something like the Detroit experience. They also brought Detroit resolutions into later pastorals on racism, cultural diversity, and Hispanic concerns.

But the 1976 resolutions also told the bishops to reconsider some matters of church teaching and discipline, such as married clergy, the ordination of women, local participation in selecting bishops, sacraments for divorced/remarried Catholics, and birth control. Secular press coverage focused almost exclusively on these issues. On these church reform items - where priesthood, power and sexuality were at stake - the bishops balked. Before leaving Detroit, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, the NCCB president, told reporters that "too much was attempted at the meeting." The NCCB never took steps to implement the church reform resolutions.

But even more fundamental than the resolutions was the process. The delegates went home to their dioceses with a new model of church governance, open and collaborative - a willingness to listen to the people and include them in decisions.

People ask me why I come to Call to Action every year. I come because here is the Church. CTA is for all of us a reminder that the bishops alone are not the Church, that we are the body of Christ, God's people.

BISHOP RAY LUCKER

Chicago Call To Action

The autocratic style of Cardinal John Cody in Chicago was far from open and collaborative. He made no move to implement the Call To Action ideas. But nine existing organizations of priests, nuns, laity, school principals and teachers formed a coalition, distilled the Detroit resolutions, did a mail survey of 2,400 Catholic leaders to choose priorities, and convened the first Chicago Call To Action Conference in October 1978. Co-coordinators were Karen Minnice and Dan Daley. Over 400 people came. The ingredients of the day would become hallmarks of every CTA conference: a rousing keynote address, an inclusive and joyous Eucharistic liturgy, and smaller gatherings that focused on both societal and church topics, just like Detroit. Working committees emerged on racism, financial accountability, church decision-making, and women in the Church.

Church reform under Cody

Cardinal Cody's annual financial reports left millions of dollars unaccounted for. CTA became the watchdog, analyzing each year's report and grabbing media coverage by printing its own counter-report in the pages of Call To Action News, the bi-monthly founded by Bob and Margaret McClory. On church decision-making, CTA organized among the 500 delegates to the 1981 Archdiocesan Conference of the Laity, and helped get many Detroit 1976 ideas into the agenda and approved. Even the call for consideration of women's ordination lost by only two votes. Momentum was building for a permanent Archdiocesan Pastoral Council.

Hans Küng draws 1,800

Hans Küng, the Swiss priest-theologian renowned for his work at Vatican II, was censured in 1979 by the Vatican and declared no longer a Catholic theologian. The flashpoint was Küng's critique of papal infallibility. In 1981 CTA scheduled Küng as its speaker. Instead of the usual 300-400 in a school auditorium, CTA drew 1,800 cheering Catholics to McCormick Place, the giant lakeside convention center, to hear Küng contrast "The Church From Above and The Church From Below."

After Küng, CTA over the years has made it a point to provide a platform for theologians and pastoral leaders persecuted by the Vatican and the hierarchy. The list includes Charles Curran, Bill Callahan, Theresa Kane, Matthew Fox, Edwina Gateley, Carmel McEnroy, Barbara Fiand, Paul Collins, Michael Morwood, Lavinia Byrne, Jeannine Gramick, Robert Nugent and Bishop Jacques Gaillot. Publicity for Sri Lankan Fr. Tissa Balasuriya's appearance at CTA in 1997, combined with massive international outcry organized via the Internet, was unusually effective: the Vatican rescinded Balasuriya's yearlong excommunication two months later.

Peace/disarmament efforts

Cody died in 1982 and was replaced by Bernardin. After five years of preoccupation with church reform, CTA turned its energies more toward global peace and justice. A new priority was nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Freeze Campaign was in full swing across the U.S. and in Europe. CTAers, led by Carmelite Fr. Tracy O'Sullivan, an inner city pastor, helped build citywide peace coalitions that held huge disarmament marches. When the NCCB drafted its Peace Pastoral opposing nuclear weapons, Bernardin led the effort. Before the final vote in Chicago in May 1983, CTA marched again, supporting passage. CTA then created Catholics for Peace to promote the pastoral in parishes, and mass-produced a Peace Pledge brochure for parishioners to sign. With the nuclear freeze on the 1984 election ballot, CTA materials were used in 200 parishes, reaching 150,000 voters. Peace efforts also prepared CTA for many future collaborations with Pax Christi USA, such as opposing the Gulf War in 1991. CTA gave Pax Christi its award in 1997.

At the core of Call To Action is justice. CTA for me and for many Catholics has been a core development of our spirituality: we are called to act with justice.

SR.THERESA KANE

Spirituality for Justice

Early on, CTAers hungered for spiritual nourishment to sustain their efforts for peace and justice. Dan and Sheila Daley, now co-directors of CTA, with Tracy O'Sullivan and others, formed the Spirituality and Justice Center in 1980. Weekend retreats and monthly seminars sought to connect prayer, justice, lifestyle and community. The Center began monthly mailings of "S/J Reprints" - photocopies of reflective articles from other magazines that nourish the spirit. Essays by Henri Nouwen were favorites. Then ecology and the creation spirituality popularized by Fr. Matthew Fox came to the fore. In 1990, CTA's first weekend-long conference was on creation spirituality. Fox made his first public speech after a yearlong silence imposed by the Vatican, and drew 1,700 participants from all over the Midwest. Since 1991, every annual conference has offered a variety of spirituality, ritual and prayer sessions, from Taizé to body prayer, from Celtic poetry and African drums to Buddhist meditation. The whole theme of the 1997 event was "Spirituality for the 21st Century."

Latin America and the Third World

CTA's window on the Third World was first flung open in 1980 when Archbishop Romero and then four U.S. churchwomen were killed by the military in El Salvador. CTAers picketed newly elected President Reagan at Notre Dame in 1981 because of U.S. military aid to El Salvador. By the mid-1980s, U.S. arms were also flowing to the right wing contras in Nicaragua. CTA lobbied against contra aid, and joined Quest for Peace, a program of the Quixote Center shipping clothes and medical supplies to the Nicaraguan people, bypassing the U.S. embargo against the Sandinista government. It was a people-to-people foreign policy alternative to the one pursued in the Reagan and Bush administrations. CTA members and churches across northern Illinois collected goods. CTA became Midwest coodinator for the Quest, shipping one 15-ton cargo container per month in 1988-89. Board and staff members traveled to Nicaragua to see how aid materials were reaching the people in the countryside. To staff the effort, CTA hired a succession of one-year, post-college Sinsinawa Dominican lay volunteers - bringing "Next Generation" men and women into CTA leadership for the first time. In the 1990s, concern for the poor of Latin America brought CTA into the struggle to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, where Latin American military officers are trained. SOA Watch received CTA's award in 2000, and its founder, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, regularly addresses CTA conferences. Through Tissa Balasuriya, CTA has also connected with pastoral leaders in Asia and Africa, bringing annual speakers from both continents and from the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

Performing arts: CTA gains a national following

In 1986, the NCCB prepared to release its pastoral, Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy. Two 20-something couples in CTA, professional actor/singers, created a musical theatre piece dramatizing the pastoral's message for parish audiences. Paul and Tom Amandes and their wives, Beth Ann and Jamie O'Reilly - brothers married to sisters - performed Between The Times at the annual conference, where the speaker was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, principal author of the pastoral. In Washington, they presented it at an NCCB conference of diocesan leaders. Suddenly the show was booked all over the U.S., and touring theatre became a major program of CTA. Bernardin honored CTA with a Vatican World Communications Day award. The CTA playwrights created a sequel, PeaceWorks, on the 1983 peace pastoral, which premiered at the 1988 Pax Christi USA Assembly in New Orleans. Both shows went on the road. More actors were hired. In the next five years, CTA players added shows on women in the Church, Dorothy Day, ecology and creation. The musical dramas reached over 600 audiences in 40 states. Chicago-based Call To Action was gaining name recognition, and signing up members, in every part of the country.

The 1990 Call for Reform: CTA a national movement

After 10 years with Pope John Paul II, progressive reform of the Church seemed stuck in reverse. The pope appointed as bishops only men who shared his views against contraception and the ordination of women. A new rallying cry was needed. In 1989 the CTA board, led by Mary Ann Savard with help from her husband Bob, drafted A Call for Reform in the Catholic Church, a pastoral letter restating major reform goals from the original Call To Action. But how to disseminate it? Driving to Washington for a church conference, Dan and Sheila Daley decided to ask Hans Küng, a speaker at the event, to read the document and give them advice. Arriving at midnight, they slipped it under Küng's hotel room door. The next morning as the climax of his keynote address, Küng read the text verbatim, endorsed it fully, and sent 1,300 conferees scrambling for copies. CTA was deluged with calls. On Ash Wednesday, 1990, the Call for Reform was printed as a full page ad in the New York Times with the names of 4,500 signers from 49 states. CTA then christened a new quarterly, ChurchWatch, to report the progress of the church reform agenda.

CTA members across the country reached out to me in the summer of 1999 when the Vatican prohibited me from pastoral ministry with lesbian or gay persons. I felt their arms around me, listening to my story, and enabling me to grow into a freedom whereby I could make a conscience decision and say, "I choose not to collaborate in my own oppression."

SR. JEANNINE GRAMICK

Spreading a big tent

Within months, 20,000 had signed the Call for Reform, and CTA had become a national movement. In 1991, CTA held its first explicitly national We Are the Church conference, a full weekend that drew 1,000 people from 37 states. Crowds swelled to a record 5,000 by 1996. Membership mounted. By spontaneous combustion, CTA members began forming local CTA units. CTA members in Baltimore got 200 to attend a 1993 first conference of "CTA Baltimore," borrowing the CTA name and logo. They told the Chicago office, "We are your regional affiliate." "But we don't have regional affiliates," said Chicago. "You do now," said Baltimore. CTA New England followed suit with a first annual six-state regional event. Regional CTA leaders began meeting regularly with national staff. Today there are 44 CTA branches in 33 states, and one in the Philippines.

Soon the national CTA conference was more than a gathering of individual Catholics. It had evolved into a congress of organizations and communities. In 1991, a dozen organizations - Women's Ordination Conference, Catholics Speak Out, CORPUS, Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, and others - formed a caucus with CTA that evolved into COR - Catholic Organizations for Renewal. Meeting three times a year with CTA staff support, the COR forum has enabled some 30 groups to coordinate their activities, and often to take joint initiatives, such as the 1992 Gallup Survey of U.S. Catholics.

Small faith communities (SFCs) were multiplying rapidly. and began coming to CTA conferences. Special SFC sessions were added. In 1994 CTA published its first Church Renewal Directory, with 125 SFCs and church renewal organizations listed. The resource was expanded and re-issued four times in the 1990s.

A defining issue: opening priesthood to women

Admitting women to all ministries including priesthood was deliberately listed first in the Call for Reform. It is what Sr. Theresa Kane publicly asked of the pope during his first U.S. visit in 1979. How the Church treats women had emerged as the touchstone of all church reform. At the 1989 CTA event Fr. Bill Callahan spontaneously invited Kane to co-lead with him the Eucharistic prayer. Ever since, CTA conferees have insisted on seeing women at the altar for conference Eucharist. When CTA went national in 1991, its first annual award went to the Women's Ordination Conference. John Paul II in 1994 issued a letter that came close to calling the ban on women priests an infallible teaching. Membership in CTA soared in response. Mike Wallace and "60 Minutes" covered the 1994 CTA conference, televising to 30 million homes the image of Joan Chittister, who said: "Faced with a choice between maleness and sacraments, the Church has chosen for maleness."

The next year a Vatican edict from Cardinal Ratzinger insisted that the male-only priesthood was infallible teaching, so bishops should be using their authority to suppress even discussion of women's ordination. Theologians dissented widely, but now the stakes were higher for anyone - like CTA -on record in support of women priests.

The Nebraska excommunication

In 1996 Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., reacted to the launch of CTA Nebraska by excommunicating CTA members in his diocese. National news media devoured the story, and nationally CTAers rallied to support their Nebraska colleagues. National CTA membership rose dramatically. No other bishop joined in the censure by Bruskewitz, though several denounced CTA or banned CTA regional gatherings on church property. The Church climate became chillier, more polarized. Yet the CTA movement emerged stronger, and a record 5,000 came to Detroit for the 20th anniversary conference. Right wing Catholics tried to characterize CTA as too far left to be Catholic. But the registration questionnaires at each CTA conference showed participants to be thoroughly mainstream: 90 percent regular churchgoers, 70 percent active as church volunteers, and 25-30 percent employed by the church. They are 75 percent lay, 20 percent religious, and five percent priests -plus several bishops.

Priest shortage hits home

When faced with loss of Eucharist because of fewer priests, Catholics in the pews awaken and say, "Then open the priesthood to married men and to women." In Cleveland in the early 1990s, one parish made such a declaration, two dozen parishes followed, and a coalition named FutureChurch arose to press the point in dialogue with the bishops. In 1996 CTA and FutureChurch joined in a National Dialogue on the Future of Priestly Ministry, a project to publicize priest shortage data in every diocese. By 2000, after over 100 major media articles, and with 3,500 Catholics using the data for honest talk in parishes and dioceses, the U.S. bishops' meeting discussed the shortage for the first time. Their own new study had revealed that 27 percent of U.S. parishes are now without a resident priest.

The wider issue: Women in the Church

At CTA, the call for women's ordination has always been seen as part of a wider concern: assuring equal status for women in every aspect of church life. At Chicago CTA, the Women's Issues Committee worked to heighten women's consciousness through retreats with feminists like Madonna Kolbenschlag and Edwina Gateley. Rosemary Radford Ruether, a founding member of CTA, gave strong leadership and a stream of scholarly books like Women-Church and Sexism and Godtalk. She was CTA's keynote speaker and awardee in 1985 and a frequent speaker ever since. CTA gave input to the NCCB on every draft of its proposed pastoral on women. Each version moved farther to the right under Vatican pressure, until finally CTA and others lobbied successfully to get the NCCB in 1992 to discard rather than release the badly flawed document. Plenary audiences at every CTA conference have heard feminist voices such as Ruether and Chittister, Sandra Schneiders and Miriam Therese Winter, Elizabeth Johnson and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.

While stonewalling the ordination of women, both John Paul II and the NCCB have said they favor maximizing leadership roles for women. In 1996 the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing 94 percent of nuns in the U.S., took this claim seriously and published its "Benchmarks for Church Leadership Roles for Women." Two years later CTA joined with FutureChurch in a Women in Church Leadership (WICL) project that builds on Benchmarks and looks at achievable ways to move toward equality for the paid and volunteer women who make up 82 percent of the Church's ministers. How can they be better recognized, rewarded, invited to preach, ushered into wider decision-making? After three years, 50 WICL anchors nationwide are guiding efforts to establish a women's equality witness in dioceses and parishes.

One visible expression is the WICL-redesigned July 22 celebration of St. Mary of Magdala as Apostle to the Apostles. Over 300 services were held in 2000, with more planned in 2001, many by local CTAs. This spring a sequel was published: Celebrating Women Witnesses. The packet gives profiles and prayer services honoring 12 historic women of faith from Clare of Assisi to Thea Bowman and Dorothy Day who resisted patriarchy in their day.

CTA with the bishops on Jubilee justice

Though unpopular with many bishops on church reform, CTA finds itself partnered with the NCCB on many social justice fronts. Dan Daley and other CTA staff have been part of the NCCB's annual Social Ministry Gatherings on Capitol Hill for over 15 years. Many NCCB public policy priorities translate into action for CTAers. CTA has been part of the Catholic Campaign Against Landmines, the movement to abolish the death penalty, and Jubilee 2000, to relieve the debt burden of impoverished nations. In 2000, CTA took aim at the injustice of sweatshop labor. CTA's Focus on Sweatshops brought new collaboration with both student groups and organized labor, and opened a window on the complicated economics of globalization.

Younger adults and the Web

Begun in 1995, the CTA website began attracting younger Catholics. After a caucus at the 1997 conference, CTAers in their 20s and 30s started annual summer retreats, distinctive conference sessions, and CTA News features. Next Generation leaders sit on the CTA national board and are active in many local CTAs. Over 500 adults age 18 to 42 came to Conference 2000, twice the number in 1999. Year-round connections for the Next Gen crowd are through CTA-HOPE, an e-mail chat list. Participants sign up through CTA's website. Staffing for the Next Generation program and for upgrading electronic communication got a major boost from the Crowley Legacy Fund, which raised $567,000 in 1999-2000. Honoring the work of Pat and Patty Crowley, the fund has also supported wider outreach to people of color, advanced social justice projects like the Focus on Sweatshops, and expanded international networking.

The international Church

As the largest church reform group in the U.S., CTA has links to coalitions abroad: the 12-nation European "Church on the Move" network, and the broader International We Are Church Movement, an outgrowth of the 1995 We Are Church referendum in Austria and Germany which garnered 2.3 million signers for a collegial church and an open priesthood. Overseas, especially in the developing nations, CTA finds a convergence of church reform efforts and the struggle for social justice. From Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka and Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Mexico to Nasimiyu Wasike of Kenya and Ivone Gebara of Brazil , the most prophetic CTA conference speakers are passionate about justice in the Church and in the world.