Perspective Call to actions that speak
louder
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Call to Action took over downtown
Milwaukee on Halloween weekend. In case youre from very far away -- such
as Outer Mongolia or the diocese of Lincoln, Neb. -- CTA describes itself as
a national church renewal and social justice organization of over 19,000
laity, religious, priests and bishops who believe that we, all of us, are the
church.
But the Catholic church, whose wings stretch from Jesus to John
Paul II to ourselves, has never been neat. Compared with 400 years of
buttoned-down belief after Trent, this group has panache, always a papal
nightmare. Every expert in America should be watching CTA closely because
its a rare fragment of the human condition poised either for oblivion or
some miraculous breakthrough.
I arrived late for a talk by the eloquent Anthony Padovano,
president of CORPUS, the national association for a married priesthood, and sat
at the back. What struck me was all the white hair and all the bald heads. Hard
to believe this group is threatening holy mother church.
Yet at their annual conference one could see these 3,500 CTA souls
did not mean business as usual. The theme was Created in
Gods Image: Women and Men Seeking Equality. A purple leaflet
claims, for example, that 82 percent of all parish ministers are women but only
25 percent of top diocesan positions are held by women; that 57,000 parishes
worldwide are without a resident priest; that in the United States
approximately 81 percent of administrators of priestless parishes are women.
And more of the same, more than enough to rock the boat.
The CTA speakers roster glittered with luminaries. Elisabeth
Schüssler Fiorenza gave a keynote address on equality (see story, Call to
Action celebrates equality sought and earned). Everyone said she was great.
Another keynoter was Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade: Our
History, Our Future. She gave a challenging talk. The dominator model that
got us where we are, ranking one half of humanity over the other, with
disastrous results, must be replaced by a partnership way of living,
Eisler said.
This is not a search for matriarchy, she pointed out. Sturdy women
such as Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick, she who blamed the four El
Salvador women martyrs for their own deaths, flashed through at least one
mind.
Women need the involvement of men, Eisler went on. It
was a timely reminder. Women are overwhelmingly the religious half of humanity.
In most countries and cultures, it is women who practice
Catholicism -- go to church and support it. They just dont get to make
the big decisions.
However, the supply of willing men is drying up, even for
leadership roles. What kind of church, then, can the women hope to find when
they emerge in the light at the end of their tunnel? Will theirs, when they get
it, be a priesthood worth fighting for? Its ironic that women want
priesthood so badly at a time when men have largely lost interest in it.
The magisterium and everyone have been telling us, especially
since Vatican II, that the Eucharist is the heart of our particular religion.
The Eucharist in turn is dependent on priesthood. However, the same leadership
that preaches that Eucharist is primary fails to find enough priests to provide
it.
Women, thwarted in their effort to fill this need, began some
years ago to celebrate eucharistic liturgies. Thousands of them meet in groups
nationwide, as NCR has frequently reported, not to pretend Mass but to find a
fulfilling substitute while they wait for a new pope or a new wind to be blown
by the Spirit.
Now, however, many women no longer find this enough. A substitute
is by definition temporary, and time is running out. They have gone through the
non-Mass eucharistic liturgy phase and are looking for something else on the
other side, according to this view.
What is vital to remember -- lest anyone at the Vatican ever read
this, or lest it come ashore in a bottle in a thousand years -- is that these
are, in ordinary English, good people. They are not troublemakers. Nor flakes.
For two days in Milwaukee we all had a blast. NCR set eyes on very few
of the luminaries, but that left approximately 3,450 men and women who are salt
of the earth. They are not radicals. Radicals would long since have gone
elsewhere.
The conversations went around in circles. As its name implies,
however, Call to Action wont be satisfied to go on talking forever. It
says up front that we are the church. But does that leave the pope
out if he fails to come along? The circles we went around in were not new ones,
but they rippled wider. Eisler said her search for the partnership way took off
when she left linear logic behind and embraced chaos theory, which suggests
that a small change in a small system can result in massive and unpredictable
changes elsewhere. That could take Catholics on a wild ride.
The circle invariably returned to one fundamental question: What,
then, is a Catholic?
Even if weve been at it forever, this is a great project for
the millennium: After 2,000 years to strip away the debris of all the old
arguments and find a new definition or description or, if its all we can
do, a new metaphor for what is a Catholic. All sides should be in on the
debate, including Human Life International, whose book Call to Action or
Call to Apostasy? was making the rounds in Milwaukee. (Sometimes one
wonders why this pope is not dismayed by the sheer lack of kindness, the sheer
contentiousness so often found on the right.)
We might, indeed, burn each other at the stake in our frantic
search for truth, as we have done before. Or we might, if we gave goodwill a
chance, make breakthroughs, learn things, become good Catholics even as we find
out what good Catholic means.
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, November 13,
1998
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