Call to Action

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Call to Action ( CTA ) is an organization that takes up certain internal church issues within the Roman Catholic Church and discusses and disseminates certain positions within the church. The goals of the organization, founded in 1978, include the introduction of women's ordination , an end to celibacy in the clergy , a change in certain issues of sexual ethics, and an expansion of internal church democracy at the expense of the hierarchical decision-making structure of the status quo.

Call to Action has been criticized by the Vatican for its internal church views , as the leadership in Rome does not consider these views to be compatible with the Catholic faith.

history

In 1971 Pope Paul VI wrote. that the laity of the Catholic Church "should take up as their own proper task the renewal of the temporal order". In response to this, the American bishops called for a Call to Action Conference in Detroit in 1976 . At the end of the three-day conference, 1,340 delegates decided that the Catholic Church should re-determine the issues of celibacy among priests, ordination of women, homosexuality and family planning and the inclusion of lower church levels in the most important decisions. However, the resolution did not stipulate that these issues should be changed. It also called for an end to racism, sexism and militarism in the United States. Although many of the American bishops sympathized with the (ecclesiastical) political orientation of Call to Action , most of them avoided further discussing the outcome of the conference within the Roman Church in the following years. As a result of this inaction by the bishops, the Call to Action organization that emerged from the Detroit conference was given a lay leadership. In 1978 the organization was founded in Chicago , and in the 1980s the organization spread across the United States.

Controversy and evaluation

The organization is attributed within the American Catholicism of the Christian Left . Many conservative groups and individuals are therefore opponents of Call to Action . Some conservative Catholics have even the organization Call to Holiness of Mother Angelica connected, which was established as a countermovement to Call to Action.

Various theologians, bishops, and lay people have spoken at the meetings of lay organizations over the years. For example, in 1995 speakers at a meeting of Call to Action supporting the organization's goals were the Catholic Bishop of Partenia Jacques Gaillot , the Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit Thomas Gumbleton, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng . In recent years, Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton was one of the few episcopal members of the US hierarchy who supported the organization.

In 1996, the Catholic Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz from the Diocese of Lincoln , Nebraska , issued an automatic interdict , which after a month expanded into an automatic excommunication of members of certain organizations, including Call to Action . Call to Action, however, appealed to the Vatican. In 2006, however, the excommunications were confirmed by the Congregation for Bishops in the Vatican. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re wrote to Bishop Bruskewitz, it was his decision within its competence as bishop of the diocese and stated that the activities of Call to Action over the last year as opposed to the Catholic faith stood since, due to the positions taken which are unacceptable both from the point of view of teaching and from the point of view of church discipline.

When the organization hosted a speech by Thomas Gumbleton in Tucson in February 2007 , the Roman Catholic Bishop of Tucson, Gerald Kicanas , refused permission to hold the speech in Church-owned properties.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b CTA story ( Memento from February 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ George A. Kelly: The Battle for the American Church (Doubleday, 1979), and Joseph Bottum, When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano , First Things, October 2006, pp. 30-31.
  3. ↑ Call to Holiness
  4. ↑ Declaration by Buskewitz
  5. ^ Catholic Online: Vatican rejects Call to Action appeal; bishop urges return to church ( Memento from August 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Associated Press, "Vatican Upholds Neb. Excommunications" .
  7. ↑ Arizona Daily Star, Jan. 30, 2007 ( January 9, 2010 memento on the Internet Archive )