CTA Lincoln: Two personal profiles
Jerry Johnson and his wife Joan were among the Lincoln diocese members of the newly organized CTA Nebraska who were hit with Lincoln Bishop Bruskewitz's 1996 excommunication for belonging to CTA. Now a retired university math professor, Jerry told ChurchWatch how he copes with the punitive Bruskewitz ruling. He said it worried him at first, but several years ago he said to himself, "Can this guy really determine whether I go to heaven or hell? I don't believe it. He has power to make us uncomfortable — especially our members who still feel intimidated by ecclesiastical power. But he can't determine my relationship with God."
Joan and Jerry have four grown children. The four are at different places in their respective faith journeys and relationships with the Catholic Church, but all support fully their parents' decision to remain Catholic and to resist, not to accept, the excommunication.
About 50 of CTA Nebraska's members live in the Lincoln diocese and are affected by the excommunication. Johnson says few if any have left CTA over the recent Vatican letter to Bruskewitz allegedly endorsing the 1996 penalty. Members participate on roughly three levels: some are leaders like Joan, a board member of CTA/NE. Some, like Jerry, are steady followers who show up and take part in everything the board initiates. And a third group stays connected but only attends events and meetings part of the time.
Jerry says the consistent support of national CTA has been invaluable. Right now CTA/NE and CTA-USA leaders together are getting advice from more than one eminent canon lawyer about how to file further appeals of the excommunication. "In some ways,” he says, “I think what we are doing may be even more important to CTA at large than they are to us. We are weathering the severest treatment the hierarchy can hand out, and we are not going away. Catholics all over the world tell us they are grateful to us for hanging in. They say it gives them courage.”
Megan keck is a wife and mother of three boys, ages 13, 11 and 7. Born and raised in Florida in the 1970s, she attended Catholic schools from first grade through college, and came away with an open-hearted, tolerant brand of Catholicism: “I learned that the heart of the faith is that God is love. That is more important than a lot of rules. And 'catholic' means 'universal', so there should be room for everyone.”
Megan and her family lived in Lincoln during the 1990s, and were there when Bruskewitz banned CTA in 1996, but weren't aware of CTA and thus didn't feel affected. They moved back to Florida from 2002 until 2005, then returned to Lincoln. Now Megan had some concerns about the Catholic Church. Bruskewitz's refusal to take part in the U.S. bishops' audit of compliance with the Dallas Charter against clergy sex abuse of children worried her. So did the hierarchy's marginalization of gay and lesbian Catholics. She didn't know if the Call To Action group banned in 1996 had even survived, but she felt moved to find out. A mutual friend introduced her to Rachel Pokora, current president of CTA Nebraska. She got invited to a meeting. "I kept waiting for something 'anti-Catholic' to come up (to give me a reason not to come back). It didn't happen. If anything I have felt reassured about being Catholic."
Megan found CTA a warm, intimate group of friends meeting each week during Lent 2006 sharing their faith. Several were retired university professors. “I learned about their treatment by the bishop, but even more I experienced what a wonderful, loving community they are.” CTA Nebraska grounded Megan in her own sense of the basic goodness of people and of the Church as people of God. Lincoln CTAers are centered in love, not contention. “It was almost surreal. I asked myself: these are the Call To Action people? Why are such nice people being vilified?” The experience equipped her to look at her own parish, its liturgy, the CCD classes her boys attend, with new eyes, and better to appreciate goodness and holiness in ordinary parish life.