CALL TO ACTION... ONCE AGAIN

Leading dissenters from Catholic teaching will be gathered together for three days, November 1-3, in downtown Milwaukee. Many are well known to readers of The Wanderer who have observed carefully the heterodox activities of Amchurch activists:

• Charles E. Curran, who began the assault on Humanae Vitae;
• Garry Wills, author of various anti-papal books;
• Ray Bourgeois, who was expelled from the Maryknoll order for his promotion of women priests;
• Robert McClory, a favorite journalist for the heterodox National Catholic Reporter;
• Paul Lakeland, a former Jesuit priest and professor of Catholic studies at Fairfield University who has lamented the U.S. bishops being out of step with "same-sex marriage";
• and composer Dan Schutte, renowned for helping to destroy sacred music.

There is also the usual horde of radical feminists: Maureen Fiedler, Diana Hays, Sr. Miriam Therese Winter, Jeannine Gramick, Margaret Nutting Ralph, and many others declaring their concern and compassion as prophetic voices heralding a New Church.

There is also the outreach to Latinos with Latino Lisbeth Melendez-Rivera pressing for "LGBT inclusion in Catholic and Protestant Latino families and parishes/congregations." As the literature for the CTA conference relates:

"In 1976 United States bishops initiated a national gathering of Catholics from around the country to enter into dialogue and make recommendations on how to make the Catholic Church more just and inclusive. The name of this convention was Call to Action. As it did in 1976, Call to Action's national conference will bring together Catholics from every corner of the United States to form the largest gathering of progressive Catholics in the country."

Particularly noteworthy is the appeal to progressive Catholics from the age of three being encouraged to be brought to the conference "to participate in conference workshops while also enjoying specific programming designed just for them." It is, of course, astonishing that the term "progressive" can be used to justify those who dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is also a source of amazement that some Catholics willingly allow the description of "progressive" to be hijacked and emptied of its real meaning. I recall one astute observer of Call to Action's activities whose analysis of CTA's embodied modernism and liberalism, has yet to be improved upon.

I refer to my former esteemed pastor, Msgr. Nelson Logal (+1995), whose parish bulletin repeatedly exposed the anti-Catholic agenda which had made dupes in the Diocese of Buffalo as well as elsewhere. He was fearless in excoriating the leading modernist theologians and moralists who were spreading confusion among the People of God: Charles E. Curran, Andrew Greeley, Richard McCormick, SJ, Bernard Cooke, SJ, Notre Dame's Richard McBrien, Walter Burghardt, SJ, and other "spinners of words" who specialized in "opting sin out of the ballpark"!

Msgr. Logal had a special dislike for the gurus of the catechetical establishment who "refused to hand on the articles of faith as understood and articulated by the living hierarchical Magisterium." He did not hesitate to name names in denouncing those engaged in the not-always-so-subtle campaign to destroy the Catholic Faith. He did not fail to see the results of what would be called "The New Theology" lionized in much of the Catholic press: namely, the attraction to such groups as CTA intent on bringing the excesses of "The New Theology" and its "Democracy and Social Justice" agenda into parishes and dioceses nationwide.

Msgr. Logal declared the results of CTA and other like-minded groups desiring a modernist renewal of the Church to be "catastrophic" (a verdict borne out today by polls and statistics on the decline of Catholic commitment in North America). He saw clearly:

1. that polarization threatened to replace Catholicity;
2. that pluralism scrambled unity;
3. that dissent challenged apostolic authority;
4. and that contestation weakened any real effort by Catholic laity to counter the secularizing forces behind the "culture of death."

These were the four marks of the doctrinal and spiritual revisionism set into motion by leading dissenters and their CTA hangers-on.

— "Nothing fazes the revisionists," he noted.
— "The bigger the disaster, the more they scream for experiment and change…. They continually babble about the greatness of the 'New Day' of a Modern Church stripped of its magisterial excrescences. They would have had a picnic on Calvary."

He also noted the feverish activities of the contesters:

"Fevered revisionists remind me of wrecking crews whose members sing merrily as they watch the wrecking ball send debris in all directions. The foreman of one such crew remarked to me, as I saw a great cathedral smashed: 'Isn't it a beautiful sight to see it come apart? We have expertise and know-how, Monsignor! We get the job done!'"

CTA has certainly been in the forefront of crusades for the party line of revisionism based on a "new ecclesiology" sanctioning contraception, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, women priests, and a false ecumenism.

As Msgr. Logal wryly observed, CTA has had appreciable influence in targeting the formation of the rising generation of Catholics and in the molding of Catholic opinion — "whatever that may be." In a parish bulletin in 1979, he had already noticed that "in our day the ordinary Catholic needs to discover who speaks for the Church whereas before they had no problem because the U.S. bishops, theologians, educators, and people all sang the same song in unison."

CTA continues its mission for a "New Church," registering unconcern with "the rubble and ruin," they have wrought. They remain relentless in their myopic accommodation to secular morality and values.

It may be there are bishops who believe that CTA gray heads and troublemakers will shortly die out and disappear, but this might be unlikely since the virus of secularism has made deep inroads in the general Catholic population.

At any rate, there was one heroic Catholic bishop who did not hesitate to take action against the wolves threatening his flock. On March 18, 1996, in a letter to CTA leaders active in his diocese, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., excommunicated the members of CTA:

"Your organization is intrinsically incoherent and fundamentally divisive. It is inimical to the Catholic Faith, subversive of Catholic order, destructive of Catholic Church discipline, contradictory to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, and an impediment to evangelization. Of course, your slogan, which you claim to have from the mouth of Pope John XXIII, is not relevant to the issues at hand, since neither you nor your group possesses the competence, ability, or authority to determine authentically what is essential or non-essential in Catholic doctrine, Catholic moral teaching, or Catholic Church law."

The National CTA will be meeting in Milwaukee, an archdiocese notorious for the reign of Archbishop Rembert Weakland. It will be interesting to see the reaction of faithful Catholics to the CTA wrecking crew coming in November.

 

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