When U.S. Catholic bishops convened last week for their spring conference in Dallas, the 25-year-old Chicago-based reformist group Call to Action was on hand, armed with proposals it wants the church to adopt.
Among them: that dioceses should establish independent boards to review sex abuse cases; take steps to end cover-ups; establish national hotlines; and name active priests with a history of abusing minors.
“There are some bishops who are genuinely trying to do something to change the way the church handles these cases,” Call to Action spokeswoman Linda Pieczynski said in a phone interview from the conference. “But my fear is that it will ultimately be window dressing, because the Vatican will not approve what they come up with. I know that’s the fear of the survivors I’ve spoken with. And as I’m watching the debate, I still see many bishops who don’t understand the scope of the problem — and that’s scary since these are the people who will implement the policies, if the Vatican approves them.”
In any other year, the Dallas pilgrimage might not be news. Call to Action, after all, has been around 25 years — its philosophies flying in the face of those advanced by Pope John Paul II, who has occupied the Holy See for 23. But with unraveling sex scandals in the clergy, Call to Action and its liberal Catholic agenda have garnered unexpected time in the limelight.
“It’s brought us to the consciousness of normal Catholics in the pew,” Pieczynski said. “As much as we get interviews, there are thousands of people who don’t know we exist, and we don’t have millions of dollars to run ads, like the Gap.”
As a former assistant state’s attorney in DuPage County, Pieczynski knows a clerical sex abuse case when she sees one. “I told the Hinsdale Police Department in 1985 that Father Fred [Lenczycki] had been accused of molesting altar boys,” said Pieczynski, a Hinsdale resident who is also a past president of Call to Action. The matter had a personal resonance too: the priest had baptized her middle daughter, Jenna.”This has eaten away at me for 17 years,” Pieczynski said. “But when things started to break in Boston, I said, `[The Joliet archdiocese] is going to blow up.'”
Her reaction? “I was thrilled,” she said. ” I don’t see how an institution is going to fix itself until everything is aired out.”
In the last three months alone, the group’s ranks have swelled by about 1,000 to more than 25,000, according to Pieczynski. How those numbers will add muscle is impossible to say, but the optimism is palpable among Call to Action’s ranks.
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“Things are happening,” she said. “Who knows where they’re going, but I have a lot of faith that the spirit is guiding this process. We’re in a transformative period, like the Protestant Reformation. But this time, the dissenters are in the laity.”
Plenty of opposition
Yet despite the groundswell, conservative opponents remain plentiful. They blast Call to Action’s open support of ordained women, wedded priests and birth control for married couples. One critic has even derided the group as “Call to Insanity.”
In 1996, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., excommunicated members of his flock who joined the organization, and threatened to do it again in April. And a spokesman for Call to Holiness, formed in 1996 as a reaction to Call to Action, sounded like a hellhound when talking to the National Catholic Reporter. He vowed “to follow Call to Action wherever they go into eternity.”
“You go to a Call to Action meeting and you see a lot of graybeards,” said Leon Suprenant, president of Catholics United for the Faith in Steubenville, Ohio. “I think it’s spiritually sterile in that regard. I certainly don’t see it as a healthy movement in the church, and I see it as a dying movement.”
Suprenant goes a step further, arguing that Call to Action’s incessant appeals for reform may have contributed, at least indirectly, to the church’s woes. “The dissent, the lax morality, the push led by Call to Action for greater acceptance of homosexual lifestyles–all these things are coming home to roost in the current scandal,” he said. “I just see them as using the scandal as a springboard for their very extreme views.”
Try telling that to Pieczynski, who in many aspects is your textbook Catholic. Set to celebrate her 30th wedding anniversary in July, she has three daughters with Catholic school backgrounds. She earned undergraduate and law degrees from DePaul University. She’s at church just about every Sunday and would probably work the bake sale if asked.
“Within this crisis, I’m hoping Call to Action takes its place among the mainstream Catholic laity,” she said. “We’re just ordinary people who have felt called to be advocates.”
Back to Vatican II
Call to Action traces its roots to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which Pope John XXIII dedicated to constructive renewal of the church. American bishops then launched the first “Call to Action Conference” in Detroit in 1976, after two years of consulting with some 800,000 Catholics. Three days of debate went further than many delegates had expected, hitting hot-button issues such as celibacy and homosexuality.
Call to Action then went local, moving to Chicago and challenging the policies and practices of Cardinal John Cody. With Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Call to Action found a sometime ally — one who backed some of the group’s ideas, but not enough to support them back in 1976 when, as president of the Detroit conference, he buried them in a bureaucratic maze.
In 1990, Call to Action issued a “Call for Reform” — a full-page ad in The New York Times with 4,500 signatures. Soon, 25,000 people had signed the document, launching the group as a national entity.
“Within this deep embarrassment and this awful moment for the church are the seeds for growth and reform,” said Tom Roberts, editor of the National Catholic Reporter. “And I think whether bishops are wont to admit it or not, those reforms are along the lines of what the people in Call to Action have been discussing for a long time.”
The question, though, may boil down to who is listening. Some people regard Call to Action as too idealist, too stuck in the past — even too Midwestern.
“In all the efforts for groups to get their names out in the wake of the scandal, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of them,” said Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, editor of the Catholic magazine Commonweal. “I suspect they’re a very Chicago kind of group, which is good; they’re probably more responsible than many others. I’m sure they have members in Boston or New York, but they don’t have a great presence here on the East Coast, which is quite conservative.”
Still, Cardinal Bernard Law’s problems in Boston could change that, “if they play their cards right,” said Rev. James Halstead, director of Catholic studies at DePaul. “Anyone who glories in a scandal, no one wins by these things. I hope they don’t gloat or say `I told you so.'”
Time to step up
Halstead believes this is the time for the group to bring its issues to the table. “Gender in ordination needs to be talked about,” he said. “Celibacy needs to be talked about. God knows what the [church] position is going to be in the end, but to say that the position needs talking about is right.”
For all who have ears to hear, Pieczynski insists her group takes its cues as best it can from another outsider: Jesus.
“If you look at where he was his whole life, he hung with the outsiders the underdogs,” she said. “He would be with the people in the pew, calling the leaders to account. That’s what he did his whole life — calling account to arrogant use of power. He saved his biggest rants for the leadership of the time.”
“Call to Action knows all about the underdog,” Halstead agreed. Still, he sounded a cautionary note of mercy. “The underdog now happens to be priests who are abusers. They’re sick guys on three levels: moral, legal and spiritual.”