Call to Faction
By Alvaro Delgado

After attending both the regional Call to Action gathering and the National Catholic Family Conference, Alvaro Delgado writes that orthodoxy is healthy and vibrant while dissent is starting to look a little, well, old.

The wooden crucifix looms large behind the altar of the chapel at Notre Dame College in Belmont, California. Outside, a concrete sculpture bespeaks the Incarnation in a most sublime way. Mary tilts her head down in contemplative prayer, the child Jesus in her arms. A cross rises from the obelisk-like structure, with metal rays radiating its power to the world. Water flows at the base of the sculpture, signifying life. Obedience by Mary has given birth to the cross of redemption. Contemplative adoration has shown us the way of salvation. The beauty of the chapel of Notre Dame stands as a witness to the solidity of the Catholic Faith.

Well, for some.

In late July, 300 members of the dissident group, Call To Action, descended on the chapel to celebrate a liturgy and close a three-day regional conference. Self-proclaimed as an engine of reform and vibrancy in today's Catholic Church, Call To Action shamelessly promoted same sex unions, women's ordination and a free-for-all Sunday liturgy.

The rebellious group consisted mostly of gray-haired senior citizens with a virulent bias against the institutional Church and its hierarchical structure. Their aim, it would seem, is to recreate the Church in their own image and usher in a new era with a royal priesthood of believers who have the power to concelebrate the liturgy and render the traditional male priesthood obsolete.

The dissident conference stood in stark contrast to the orthodox National Catholic Family Conference held the preceding week in Long Beach, California. While Call To Action highlighted structural sin, feminism and lay empowerment, the Catholic Family Conference emphasized God's holiness, our sinfulness and the need for conversion. Speaker after speaker at the latter assembly focused on the importance of obedience and prayerful communion with God, concepts seemingly alien to the Call To Action agenda.

I was struck by the unity and coherence of mission demonstrated at the Catholic Family Conference. You knew you were among Catholics professing loyalty and allegiance to the Magisterium and to Pope John Paul II — the living sign of our faith and communion. The conferees shared a sense of wholeness and strength in the battles against the evils of the age. People were proud to be Catholic and expressed that pride with T-shirts professing love for Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the saints and other treasures of our sacred tradition. There was an evangelistic fervor in the air, a yearning to share this precious treasure with the world.

By contrast, Call To Action resembled more an ideologically driven movement than souls desiring to spread a message of hope and salvation. Why would anyone want to associate themselves with a group that sows division — a house divided against itself? Most everything they espouse threatens to tear asunder the heirloom of faith. The group's members see the Magisterium as an albatross around their necks, an obstacle to reform and democratic decision-making in the Church. But when a group seeks to trade cultural opinion for time-tested Divine truths, the edifice of faith crumbles.

In Called To Communion, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger aptly describes the attitude of these self-appointed reformers: "The Church must no longer be fitted over us from above like a ready-made garment; no we 'make' the Church ourselves, and do so in constantly new ways. It thus finally becomes 'our' Church, for which we are actively responsible. The passive yields to the active. The Church arises out of discussion, compromise and resolution."

The problem is that a Church built upon human opinion is without foundation. Ratzinger further writes: "Everything that men make can also be undone again by others. Everything that has its origin in human likes can be disliked by others. Everything that one majority decides upon can be revoked by another majority. A church based on human resolutions becomes merely a human church. It is reduced to the level of the makeable, of the obvious, of opinion. Opinion replaces faith. And in fact, in the self-made formulas of faith with which I am acquainted, the meaning of the words 'I believe' never signifies anything beyond 'we opine.'"

The concluding liturgy was ample evidence that Call To Action, embracing "We are the Church" as a slogan, has fallen prey to what Ratzinger describes. Ribbon stoles hung from the necks of many participants, symbolizing their vision of the priesthood of believers.

Female liturgical dancers in white dresses pranced up and down the aisles at the beginning of the liturgy, exchanging black balloons for colorful ones as joyful scenes replaced sad ones in slides shown on a giant screen. The homilist portrayed Jesus at table with gays and lesbians, an invitation rejected by today's religious leaders. Jesus visited the marginalized on Death Row, met with a Mafia godfather and aroused the ire of the papal nuncio and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Conference participants crowded in spaces alongside and behind the altar for the purported Eucharistic celebration. Two women pronounced words of consecration over the bread and wine as conferees extended their hands toward the altar. The recitation of the litany of saints included "good Pope John XXIII," Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa and Bishop Juan Condera of Guatemala City.

The distribution of bread and wine resembled more a picnic than the transcendent dignity of the distribution of the Holy Eucharist at Mass. People returned to their seats after the para-Eucharistic prayers and designated "ministers" brought wicker baskets filled with bread and cups of wine to conferees in the pews. At the kiss of peace, people walked from one corner of the church to another, hugging, shaking hands, visiting and exchanging pleasantries and stories for over 10 minutes. At the end of the "Liturgy," participants were urged to turn around to someone and say: "You are the body of Christ."

One thing was made clear from all this posturing: Whatever "We Are Church" may be, it's definitely not the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger warns of tailor-made liturgies like Call To Action's: "[For the reformer,] the liturgy must no longer be fixed in advance but must be something that we make in order to express what is unique about ourselves. This project finds something of an obstacle in the word of Scripture. . . there are not a great many texts that can be utilized so as to fit smoothly into the self-realization that is now the apparent aim of the liturgy."

During a feminist-oriented evening prayer earlier in the conference, Call To Action participants anointed themselves the "Bread of Life," subtly diminishing the centrality of Jesus as the source of life. They sung: "I myself am the bread of life. You and I are the bread of life, taken and blessed, broken and shared by Christ, that the world might live." Jesus was described as a powerful source of energy and likened to a microphone we must stay close to. The logical conclusion, then, is that God is merely an instrument to amplify our own voices.

How different it was at the Catholic Family Conference, where humility, docility and submission to God's will were trumpeted as core spiritual values. People prayed reverently in a chapel reserved for the Blessed Sacrament. A young woman, striking a pose of submission, leaned back on her knees with hands turned outward in humble supplication. At the Eucharistic liturgy, celebrated in a sterile convention hall, many of the faithful bowed or genuflected before receiving the Lord Jesus. Signs of a faith alive with hope and promise abounded. A couple of teens, Bibles in hand, walked briskly with a sense of mission in their eyes. There were long confessional lines. Everywhere were babies in strollers. A procession of children displayed proudly the works of art they had created in their own program. Nuns in brown and blue habits offered evangelical witness. Young couples and gray-haired folk alike were plentiful in number.

During the conference program, the passion, drama and terrible suffering of Our Lord was vividly presented by the musical group Radix. It was a no-holds-barred depiction of the price of redemption paid by Jesus with His blood. "You think sin is pretty?" an actor shouted at one point, launching into a graphic description of how contraception, abortion, war, greed and child abuse all disfigure the Body of Christ in the same way Jesus' own body was disfigured. This was a forceful presentation of the Church's teaching. No kow-towing to the politically correct crowd here.

The speakers at the Call To Action conference made few references to personal sin. In one of the rare exceptions, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit made an eloquent plea on behalf of the world's poor, exhorting conferees to shun the sin of self-absorption and renounce lifestyles of consumerism that enslave most of the world's people in abject poverty. The mention of original sin by Florence Gillman, a Bible scholar leading a workshop on Paul's teachings, caused one woman to complain that Bishop Gumbleton and Gillman were shoving the concept of sin down people's throats. Catechesis during the last 10 years had wisely avoided references to the negative concept of sin, the woman claimed. A man in the same workshop added sin was irrelevant for the person fundamentally oriented toward Christ.

Indeed, most of the attendees of the Call To Action gathering urged accommodation with the spirit of the age. While Pope John Paul II has spoken definitively against women's ordination, Bishop Gumbleton said priestesses will inevitably come. Already, female parochial administrators are proving their competency and laying the groundwork for the ordination of women. One woman muttered that "one little mind" — the pope's — stands in the way of making women deaconesses, a first step toward priesthood.

In the end, the energy wasted on non-issues such as women's ordination weakens the Church's essential mission of proclaiming the Gospel, as Ratzinger points out in Salt of the Earth: "In the midst of all this, there is too little attention to the fact that 80 percent of the people of this world are non-Christians who are waiting for the gospel, or for whom, at any rate, the gospel is also intended, and that we shouldn't be constantly agonizing over our own questions but should be pondering how we as Christians can express today in this world what we believe and thereby say something to those people."

Preoccupation with power in the Church destroys the Church's very character, Ratzinger continues: "If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is ipso facto oppressed. And then the question of, for example, women's ordination, becomes imperative, for everyone has to be able to have power. I think that this ideology, which suspects that everywhere and always what's at stake is basically power, destroys the feeling of solidarity not only in the Church but also in human life as such. It also produces a totally false point of view, as if power in the Church were an ultimate goal. . . If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life."

Given Call To Action's extremism, one might be tempted to dismiss the group as a legitimate threat to the mainstream Church. Unfortunately though, many of their ideas have filtered into our parishes and a good number of its adherents work for change from their seats of power in the Church's middle management. Its theological leaders carry tremendous influence in academia and seminary classrooms. Liturgical abuses are rampant and the fixation with the human community at the expense of worship of God has subtly and profoundly changed the attitude of believers.

The seductive attraction of Call To Action lies in the seeds of truth found in its heterodoxy. The scandal of worldwide poverty is something that concerns all Christians and Bishop Gumbleton rightly said so. The homilist at the concluding liturgy, surprisingly, talked of the sacredness of life from the womb to the tomb. Keynote speaker Diana Hayes stressed the need to listen to the Holy Spirit on our walk of faith. And most certainly, the Church is always in need of reform. The problem comes when these seeds of truth get choked out with the weeds of dissent and rebellion.

These are times of great turmoil in our Church. We would do well to discern prudently and wisely choose our allies in our pursuit of truly prophetic Catholic teaching. My experience with Call To Action served to reinforce my belief that the orthodox branch of the Church, as typified by the Catholic Family Conference, is the tried and true road to faith. To choose the Call To Action path is to risk a plunge into a spiritual black hole of further chaos and confusion. Error will never beget anything but error.