It’s a long way from the Vatican
to Roscoe Village, but a group based in that North Side neighborhood is
leading a high-profile protest among American priests that challenges
the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on ordination of women.
The group, Call to Action, an organization for reform-minded Catholics,
has collected signatures of more than 150 priests — including 8 in
Chicago — on a petition defending a liberal priest, the Rev. Roy
Bourgeois, who is being threatened with dismissal for his public support
for ordaining women. In an increasingly conservative church, the
rebellion has been hailed as a remarkable moment for liberals in the
church.
“We just got on the phones and started telling priests, ‘We’ve got to
support Father Roy,’ ” said Nicole Sotelo, 33, a leader of Call to
Action, which bills itself as the nation’s largest organization for
reform-minded Catholics.
The Rev. Bill Kenneally, who lives in the Beverly neighborhood on the
South Side, is among the protesters. Father Kenneally, the 75-year-old
retired pastor of St. Gertrude’s Church and volunteer at St. Barnabas
Church, said he “and a majority of priests, truthfully” do not agree
with the church’s “vapid reasoning” for excluding women.
Father Kenneally said he is unfazed by possible reprisals. “Since I’m
retired,” he said, “it’s not like they can take a church away from me.”
The protest orchestrated by Call to Action underscores the role that
Catholic culture — orthodoxy and dissidence — has played for generations
in shaping the intellectual life and politics of Chicago. Only once
have voters elected a non-Catholic mayor — Harold Washington — in the
more than 75 years before Rahm Emanuel, who is Jewish, won a landslide
victory this year.
Nuns have also held powerful positions in Chicago public life. Sister
Sheila Lyne served as commissioner of public health under Mayor Richard
M. Daley, while Sister Catherine Ryan headed the juvenile division at
the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office under Richard Devine.
Writers,
including the Rev. Andrew Greeley and Eugene Kennedy, a former priest,
as well as John Powers, have given rich voice to Chicago cultural and
Catholic issues (and in Father Greeley’s case, contributed to some
steamy romance novels).
Catholic activists marched in the city’s streets to protest the Vietnam
War and racism. Social activism within the church during the 1960s
prompted many priests and nuns to walk alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., even as insults — and at least one brick — rained down
from angry onlookers.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the head of the
Archdiocese of Chicago, was a leading national voice in opposition to
the death penalty.
These days, the Rev. Michael Pfleger invokes the Catholic mission and
obligation in pushing for social causes that serve the poor and reach
out to blacks, even as his style sometimes draws the wrath of his boss,
Cardinal Francis George.
While the city also has many conservative Catholics, perhaps no
organization in Chicago with a Catholic identity has been more direct,
or far-reaching, than Call to Action in making the case for wholesale
reform within the church itself.
Besides the ordination of women, the
group calls for equal rights for gay men and lesbians, giving priests
the option to marry and accepting back into the fold divorced Catholics
who have remarried.
Call to Action has also focused on protecting church workers, citing
cases of Catholic employees’ being dismissed for holding views contrary
to Vatican orthodoxy or belonging to organizations like Planned
Parenthood deemed unacceptable by the hierarchy.
Although many Chicago priests and nuns belong to the group, Cardinal
George has kept his distance.
“The archdiocese has no relationship with
Call to Action,” said Susan Burritt, the spokeswoman for the Chicago
Archdiocese, “and therefore has no comment on Call to Action’s policies
or statements.”
That position contrasts sharply to the attitude of Cardinal Bernardin,
according to Msgr. Ken Velo, who was his personal assistant.
“It is a very different church than it had been when Cardinal Bernardin
died 15 years ago,” said Monsignor Velo, now an administrator at DePaul
University.
“Cardinal Bernardin’s style was collaborative. He was a true
believer in church teachings, but at the same time he understood that
people had varying viewpoints. And he was respectful of their views. He
wanted to learn from them.”
Call to Action was founded in 1976 by Dan and Sheila Daley, a priest and
nun who had met at St. James Church and school (he was associate
pastor, she was a teacher) and then fell in love and married. The Daleys
retired from the organization in 2008.
The organization has 57 chapters and 25,000 members nationwide. Nuns and
priests account for about 30 percent of the members who attend the
group’s annual conference.
Call to Action’s headquarters are in a modest office building at the
corner of Roscoe and Hamilton Streets.
On the wall of a conference room
hangs a painting of the Last Supper — with women and children joining
Jesus and the apostles at the table.
On another wall, a map of dioceses
around the country is stuck with pins in a battle plan to address
current issues: gay rights, the role of altar girls, changes in the
liturgy.
In the case of Father Bourgeois, the priest who is calling for the
ordination of women, Call to Action has sponsored his 34-city speaking
tour, called “Shattering The Stained Glass Ceiling,” which will conclude
in September in downstate Belleville.
The Vatican maintains that even discussion of ordaining women is a
violation of Catholic teaching.
The authorities of the Maryknoll Order,
based in New York, sent a letter to Father Bourgeois in March demanding
that he recant his public statements or be dismissed from its ranks.
The petition drive sponsored by Call to Action defends the priest’s
“right to speak his conscience.”
The list was restricted to “priests in
good standing,” said Bob Heineman, one of the group’s leaders, so that
church authorities could not dismiss the protesters as “renegades.”
The Chicago group contends that surveys show that more rank-and-file
Catholics side with Father Bourgeois on church policies than with the
Vatican.
“What it all boils down to is who is the church?” Mr. Heineman
said. “The hierarchy? Or the people?”
Among Chicago’s conservative Catholics is the ultra-orthodox group Opus
Dei, which has long counted the city as one of its stronger bases of
operation. Many of these Catholics believe that the church went too far
with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
The Rev. Anthony Brankin, the longtime pastor at St. Thomas More Church
who now serves at St. Odilo Church in Berwyn, is an outspoken
conservative and critic of Call to Action.
Father Brankin describes
members of the liberal Catholic movement as lost souls, disenfranchised
by both their own church and a larger society that views Catholicism as
largely irrelevant.
Pope Benedict XVI has spoken of a more faithful church, even if that means it becomes smaller.
Father Brankin said: “Really, when you think about what has happened in
modern society, who but aging feminist nuns and their hangers-on clerics
even cares whether women should be priests or not?”
But the activists at Call to Action note that while church leaders might
not be open to dissent, they seem to be paying attention.