What's So
Bad About Call to Action?
On March 22, 1996, Bishop Fabian
Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, speaking for the one, universal Church,
warned Catholics that membership in Call to Action (along with Planned
Parenthood, Masonic organizations, and Catholics for a Free Choice, among
others) would result in excommunication. Why?
Call to Action literature
explains:
Bruskewitz opposes CTA for the
very reasons mainstream Catholics are embracing it: open dialogue on
ordaining women, accepting married priests, birth control for married
couples, a popular voice for selecting bishops.["CTA Stronger after
Nebraska bishop's censure" http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/cta/watch.html]
Call to Action maintains an
openly rebellious and dissident position against Catholic Church teaching
on morals and discipline. In addition to the CTA positions expressed in
the above text, CTA has called for the "restructuring of parishes".
We must begin again as church,
reinvent the church, refound the church - with a different structure and
leadership. [quote from Fr. Art Baranowski, urging the creation of small
faith communities, Call to Action News, December 1995-January 1996.]
Call to Action was established in
1976 with the organizational assistance of Alinsky disciple and IAF-trained
Monsignor Jack Egan. Twenty years later, CTA has 14,000 members, many of
them priests or ex-priests, religious or ex-religious, and diocesan
personnel.
Call to Action Conferences have
featured guest speaker Rosemary Ruether, speaking on "Ecofeminist
Theology". Ruether, besides preaching for population control, is an
enthusiastic advocate for supplanting Christianity "patriarchalism" with
pagan Gaia spirituality. The 1996 CTA Conference will feature the
heretical "Catholic" theologians Hans Kung and Charles Curran, and the
deposed Bishop Jacques Gaillot of France, removed from his post for
permitting married priests to celebrate Mass, for blessing homosexual
unions, for encouraging distribution of condoms in public schools, and for
working to change Church teachings about divorce and contraception.
CTA-led coalition organizations
include pro-abortion Catholics for a Free Choice, Conference for Catholic
Lesbians, Matthew Fox's Friends of Creation Spirituality, CORPUS
organizations in the United States and Canada, etc. These groups stand in
defiant contradiction to the moral strictures of scripture which have been
affirmed by 2000 years of Church teaching and Church discipline.
The Call to Action has launched
the "We Are Church: A Catholic Referendum", a subversive petition which
has been circulated even among the young people in Catholic high schools.
The petition contains a distillation of major CTA positions, demanding
- * popular, "democratic"
selection of bishops and priests.
- * female ordination.
- * a lifting of the discipline
of clerical celibacy.
- * a change in the Church's
moral stand concerning birth control, homosexuality, and other sexual
issues.
- * a greater Church emphasis on
social justice and environmental issues.
- * "freedom of speech" for
Church theologians.
WHAT DOES THE
CHURCH TEACH?
In contrast to this mutinous and
divisive spirit, the Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc. is launching a Call to
Holiness. We stand firmly behind the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, and
behind 2000 years of Church teaching. We support the hierarchical
structure of the Church which, we believe, was established by God as a
means to personal salvation and for the salvation of all.
On the Ordination of Women: The
Catholic Church "holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the
priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the
example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles
only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has
imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority
which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the
priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church." [John Paul
II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, quoting Paul VI]
On priestly celibacy: "All the
ordained ministers of the Latin Church...are normally chosen from among
men of faith who live a celibate life and who intend to remain celibate
'for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.'" [Catechism of the Catholic
Church, #1579; Mt 19:12; see also 1994 Directory on the Ministry for the
Clergy.]
On "democratic" selection of
bishops and priests: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, # 874 - 913,
details the hierarchical structure of the Church and the virtue of this
structure. The moral and teaching authority of the Church flow from Jesus
Christ, its head, through the Pope and then to the Bishops who operate in
concert with the Pope [Lumen Gentium #25] and through them, to the
faithful. "Popular selection" of priests or bishops reverses the flow of
hierarchical authority.
On active, homosexual behavior:
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a
sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic
moral evil; thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective
disorder....when they [people] engage in homosexual activity they confirm
within themselves a disordered sexual inclination....Christians who are
homosexual are called, as all of us are, to a chaste life." [Letter to the
Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]
On birth control: "'[E]very
action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act. or in its
accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences,
proposes, whether as an end or a means, to render procreation impossible'
is intrinsically evil." [Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2370,
reaffirming Humanae Vitae, # 14.]
On abortion: "Among all the
crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has
characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second
Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an
'unspeakable crime.'" [Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II, # 58,
referring to Gaudium et Spes, # 51.]
On social justice and Catholic
Action: "The Church well knows that no temporal achievement is to be
identified with the Kingdom of God, but that all such achievements simply
reflect and in a sense anticipate the glory of the Kingdom, the Kingdom
that we await at the end of history, when the Lord will come again." [Solicitudo
Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II, # 48.]
On "freedom of speech" for
Catholic educators and theologians: "[I]t is apparent, however, that some
today...desirous of novelty, and fearing to be considered ignorant of
recent scientific findings, try to withdraw themselves from the Sacred
Teaching Authority and are accordingly in danger of gradually departing
from revealed truth and drawing others along with them into error."
[Concerning Some False Opinions which Threaten to Undermine the
Foundations of Catholic Doctrine, Pope Pius XII, # 10.]
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