Excerpt
OVERVIEW: FROM THE BOOK'S INTRODUCTION
Many dedicated, creative reform and renewal groups have grown out of U. S. Catholicism. Some have been working to achieve their goals for over forty years. These reform movements have held conferences, published newsletters, worked with the press, reached out to Church leaders, and engaged in a myriad of other reform activities. It seems safe to say, however, that none can claim to have achieved their main goals. Church reformers appear to be up against a brick wall.
It is not yet in the interest of leaders in the Catholic Church to take us seriously, much less to act on our proposals. For the most part, Church leaders rebuff or ignore us. Some groups have been denounced, banned from meeting on Church property, or even excommunicated (as was a Nebraska Call to Action group in 2006). Even if we don’t face such drastic measures, we often feel treated like children who are to be seen and not heard, rather than thoughtful adults, with talents, intelligence, and experience that the Church desperately needs.
Tom Roberts, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, once characterized the contemporary situation as one in which the bishops are sinking in a mire of quicksand and the laity are standing on firm ground around the edge with ropes, offering to help. The bishops remonstrate, saying, “No, no, we can handle this ourselves.”
Such treatment is hard on those working for reform. Discouragement sets in. Interest flags when it’s hard to see meaningful change. When there’s such a sense of impasse, group leaders burn out, and members begin to drop out.
This sense of stalemate has led some of us in the reform movement to speculate about whether nonviolent direct action, in the spirit of great pioneers like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Daniel Berrigan might help penetrate the brick wall.
We see that nonviolent direct action has been a powerful force for social change, not only in well-known cases like India’s liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, but in many other places and times. Some of us have experienced the power of nonviolence directly by participating in direct-action campaigns. Could this power be harnessed to get past the wall of resistance we face from church leaders today?