Under the theme of “Our Earth, Our Church, Ourselves,” Catholics from across the nation began arriving in Milwaukee Friday for the annual Call To Action conference, which runs through Sunday. Early arrivals participated in morning and afternoon seminars that focused on new ways to look at earth and community.
Seminars also gathered participants to discuss gay and lesbian person ministry programs and strategies for living and ministering within a “post-clerical” church.”
Loretto Sister Jeannine Gramick in one Friday seminar recounted the slow and painful progress gay and lesbian persons are making within the Catholic church.
She recounted the various documents issued by the church hierarchy during the past thirty years, saying that supportive documents have helped form a more compassionate church and negative documents have often lead to reactions that raised issues and eventually set a context for further gains.
“Good things can emerge when bad things happen,” the typically patient Gramick stated.
Gramick said she recognized there had been setbacks in recent years, especially in statements coming out of the hierarchy.
At the same time, she said, Catholics in the pews are becoming more accepting and more open to gay and lesbian persons.
“Our hierarchy is getting regressive. But on a grass roots level it is the opposite that his happening,” she said. “Catholics in general are getting more expansive, more embracive, more accepting.”
She said she expects the day will come when official church teachings allow for gay and lesbian couples to live intimately, morally sanctioned lives.
Official church teachings now hold that sexual intimacies between persons of the same sex are immoral. This teaching, she said, comes from old natural law theology, which, she said, has not kept up with contemporary insights into the fullness of the natural law, as understood, for example, by modern experience and modern science.
She pointed out, as an example, that in all mammal species a segment of the population is attracted to the same sex.
“It is common through all nature,” she said.
Gramick has been engaged in pastoral work with lesbian and gay persons since 1971 and received Call To Action’s leadership award in 2001.
In a seminar lead by Mary E. Hunt entitled “Living in a Post-Clerical Church,” she invited participants to think about a church in which ministries are based “one the needs of the world” and not by “needs of the church.”
“We have to prepare ourselves for very different ministries,” she said, noting that there are now approximately 27,000 priests and some 31,000 lay ecclesial ministers, most of whom are women. She said the average age of a U.S. priest today is 70 years old.
She said that Catholics need to look at other denominations for examples as they go forward in preparing the church of a new in ministries. “We have to prepare ourselves for very different ministries,” she said to a gathering of several hundred participants. “We are at the end of an era.”
She pointed to four challenges facing the ministers of the future.
The first, she said, is gaining education and training at a time when the church blocks women from many education avenues.
The second, she said, is finding adequate compensation. She said in the future people need to be paid for work done and not simply for the clerical titles they hold.
Third, she said, is accountability - being accountable to the community the minister serves and not the hierarchy that has put the person in place.
The fourth, she said, is liability. In ministry work, one’s liability needs to be covered. She said mechanisms that will allow for this need to be developed.
She said the common thread in ministry is working for justice. Hunt’s overall theme is the that “post-clerical” church is already upon us, even though much of the hierarchy is living in denial regrarding this fact. It is living in denial because to affirm it would be to affirm the role that women have played and are increasingly playing in the Catholic church today.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was set to deliver the key note address Friday evening, “Failing America’s Faithful – How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way.”
The gathering also plans to salute Dan and Sheila Daley who recently stepped down and co-directors of the Call To Action program.
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(Source: NCR)