American Catholic Council -- ACC

American Catholic Council ACC
"We are the Church!"

http://www.americancatholiccouncil.org

Councils 50 Years Apart

On January 25, 1959, Pope John XXIII stunned every single cardinal and archbishop and bishop in the world with his call for an Ecumenical Council, to be named Vatican II. The first one since Pope Pius IX called for Vatican I in 1868, 100 years before.

On January 25, 2009, the sponsoring groups came together for their call for an American Catholic Council -- ACC. 50 years to the day after Pope John XXIII's call.

Many of us back in 1959 -- I was 30 years old -- weren't too aware of the prestige of an Ecumenical Council. Whispers in pews when the announcement was read in Church were:

• What's Ecumenical?
  
• That like an Encyclical.
  
• Got anything to do with Excommunication?
  

We weren't even aware that our hierarchs were so startled they almost stampeded like buffalo heading for a cliff. To get in synch with Councils, what they do, how they are put together, we need to read John O'Malley, What Happened at Vatican II? Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. 2008. It was just published and is a must read, should we hope to share with those framing the ACC.

It is a fascinating book to read as well, as all of Fr. O'Malley's are. He sees more than most historians can absorb and writes better than any one of them. He had edited another book on Vatican II in 2007, just the year before, and called that one Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? He has a knack of demonstrating that all politics is local, and Church politics is tighter and tinier than local, out of that little City-State across the Tiber River from the center of Rome. And yet, and yet, its outreach touches the skin of the globe all over this planet Earth.

Our ACC sponsors and organizers probably feel like the 1959 hierarchs. Where do they start? How do they start? They are staring up at an enormity, a worldwide mass with encrustations of 2,000 years clinging to a simple breakaway, as in a reform, from the Jewish Church of Pharisees and Sadducees and their traditionalists, lugging a mammoth scripture called The Old Testament. Their leader was a carpenter's son, the incarnate God, we know as Lord, Lord and call by his name, Jesus.

That first group of church developers and builders numbered but Twelve. They had disciple friends. All were common, ordinary folk who worked at fishing and carpentry and tax collecting. Not a scholar in the bunch, but a few could write and speak well, while each could teach by example. They started the Church in Palestine. Some took it around the Mediterranean Basin to the west, with others going east towards India.

With Peter and Paul in the lead, they set up Churches in bustling cities and towns and followed up with letters of care and guidance to their parishioners to help them smooth out the kinks of the new. They were addressed to Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Romans. Those early Catholics, the name first given them by St. Ignatius early in the second century, created Creed, Clergy and Canon. They adopted a more modern scripture, some gospels and those early letters, as The New Testament. And their Apostolic succession has lasted for the past 2,000 years as the Roman Catholic Church.

Size of the Church -- America and the World

In our time here in America, the USCCB reports that the Catholic Church in America is very large. According to the Official Catholic Directory, cited at Wikipedia, and the USCCB, there are in the beginning of the third millennium:

• 69,136,254 Catholics
  
• 19,000 Parishes
  
• 195 Archdioceses and Dioceses
  
• 17 Cardinals
  
• 269 Active Bishops
  
• 164 Retired Bishops
  
• 41,406 Priests
  

Question? Is the ACC a reform in continuation of the Roman Catholic Church, now almost a monolith in the world? How big is the whole Church? On March 30, 2008, Reuters reported:

" Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent."

. . . . .

"The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion."

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKL3068682420080330

Second Question? Will the ACC be a reform of breakaway from the old, like the one led by the Twelve Apostles around the Mediterranean, west and east of Palestine?

We need answers, for they have been bedeviling us for the last seven years, as we watch Bishops huddling a stalemate of silence while we pound on chancery doors, parishes being closed, priests dwindling in numbers, friends of ours walking on out to find Church elsewhere. We just cannot sit still and watch our Church die. And so, we gather in our first ACC led by us, for we are Church and it is ours. In a blunt way of saying it: we have to do this.

Please keep in mind that this is an American Catholic Council, not an Ecumenical one. the 69 million of us do not live in, nor go to Church in Italy. We are here, and our 19,000 parish churches is the total number of churches in America's 197 dioceses. We refer to it as the American Catholic Church, because, like politics, all religion is local.

Setting Up An ACC

For an authoritative statement of what this ACC intends, please go to its website at: http://www.americancatholiccouncil.org/. Be patient. The website is not yet one month old, but there is enough there to inspire us to keep coming back to it. This blog for January 27, 2 days after its announcement noted the involvement of Leonard Swidler, President of ARCC, one of the founding groups:

U.S. Catholic reform organizations have joined together in an unprecedented move to form the American Catholic Council (ACC), calling for a historic national assembly of the American Catholic Church—lay, religious, priestly, and episcopal.

The organizations involved include the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC), Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), Call to Action (CTA), Corpus, FutureChurch, among others.

ARCC president, Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue Dr. Leonard Swidler, stated: "The Reform Movement of the Catholic Church in America—in the spirit of Vatican II—is on the cusp of a great leap forward."

Swidler went on to say that "ARCC and other organizations have for several years been promoting the idea of all major Catholic Reform groups in the U.S. joining together in an American Catholic Council to move our common agenda forward. The great leap forward is now being launched!"

http://epkblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/american-catholic-council.html

We Must Change Our Focus

There is much to think about. Many of us have been doing that ferociously since 2002, when we first learned of the sexual abuse scandal. Our fervor was renewed often during these last seven years by reports of other abuses by the men in power and their chilling denial of accountability to the people of God. Anger, even rage, though understandable, destroys professional attention for remedial care. Our intent has to be to save, to cure, to rebuild, to repair, to build Church. We do not come together in ACC to punish and destroy. Should any of the clergy or the hierarchy join us the people in this work, we will consider it blessed.

That kind of attention has to be redirected now from the abuses of power to the need to save the Catholic Church in America. It is our assembly, not the institution of the clergy alone. We face a task almost as huge as the one facing the bishops of the world in 1959, perhaps even more awesome, because we don't yet know where the Holy Spirit is leading us.

Our focusing on our own parishes and dioceses and country is not being hostile to the Vatican or anti-Roman. The Federation of Asian Bishops -- FABC -- has been doing just that for years now, being Catholic in the places where they live. We should take them and their people as role models, extra special ones in that they have not been born into, molded by a Eurocentric culture, and are, thus, much more deeply in touch with the ground where they are: Indonesia, Japan, China, the Koreas, Southeast Asia, the Islands, India, where St. Thomas, Didymus, the Twin, the greatest doubter in the first group of church builders did his work. He's my favorite!

Tom Fox wrote a remarkably simple line about the Asian bishops in Pentecost in Asia, at p. 14: " . . . the Asian leadership saw itself as more interested in engaging the future than rejecting the past."

First Steps

Our attention must now gently switch over and carefully forward to the first steps for an ACC:

• Select topics to discuss,
  
• Prepare proposals as in a prospectus
  
• Pass them around to each of the sponsoring groups
  
• Schedule regular meetings
  
• Participate in searching discussions
  
• Cast votes for committees needed
  
• Apportion the work load among them
  
• Produce the Agenda for the ACC
  
• Settle in for the real work
  

The usual buzz for topics for reform are:

• Love and Care for the sexually abused children
  
• Provide professional medical care for them and their families
  
• Recognizing women of the Church and honoring their dignity
  
• Ordination of women to the priesthood
  
• Abolition of mandatory celibacy
  
• Leaving priests free to marry or not, as people do
  
• Treating gays with the dignity due all human beings
  
• Election by the people of leaders as servants of the servants of God
  

Are there others we should be discussing?

• Establish authentic collegiality
  
• Papal Primacy
  
• Accountability of leaders
  
• Abolition of the CDF
  
• Disband the Curia
  
• Repeal Canon Law
  
• Review Dogmas and Doctrines
  
• Collate and publish the Official Teachings of the Church, Annotated
  
• Publish the Sensus Fidelium -- Sense of the Faithful -- as the critical part of The Magisterium
  
• Academic freedom in the search for knowledge and truth?
  
• Respect autochthonous cultures
  
• Liturgical worship
  
• Translations of scriptural and liturgical documents by those who live and speak American English
  
• The Beatitudes
  
• The Gospels as required reading for Bishops
  

How Do We Assist The Framers of the ACC?

The questions without answers, the ideas that tantalize, the oppressions that weigh so heavily, all are endless, beyond the capacity of one person's mind to handle, much too much for one soul to pray over, alone.

We who are beginning to gather round ACC's sponsors and getting ready to volunteer our help think of that moving line in one of Daniel Berrigan's poems:

"Lord, send us mystics with hands."

And we wonder:

• Should we follow for a role model of governance the American way of proceeding?
  
• Or that of Great Britain, France, Japan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe?
  
• Should we sell all we possess and give the proceeds to the poor?
  
• Any other Beatitudes we wish to adopt as actual practices?
  
• Keep all Seven Sacraments?
  
• Increase them?
  
• Is Church itself a Sacrament as some leading ecclesiologists teach?
  

Underlying all this is an old Latin phrase: Quo warranto -- By what authority. If indeed, we are the Church as Vatican II proclaimed, do we need further encouragement? Or do we slip back into the easy posture of the kind of crowd control we became accustomed to and our hierarchs grew so fond of wielding, down through the ages?

• "I am the Pope" -- attributed to Pope Pius IX of Vatican I.
  
• Roma locuta, causa finita -- Rome had spoken, the cause is finished.
  
• Ipse dixit -- He said so.
  

Treat The Media With Respect And Caution

The media gives us great examples for topics of discussion. Recall the recent splurges of media frenzy on Excommunications and Unexcommunications and the prurient fascination with the activities of the founder of the Legion of Christ. A story with sex in it grabs reporters' interests and dumps them into headlines, which then grab ours. European media is throttled with Pope Benedict XVI and SSPX, but American centers on the private sex-life of the Legionaries' founder.

Even Slate gets into the act. Roman Catholic Church procedures and processes twit the curious. On February 13, 2009, it was "Purgatory Parole: How Catholic 'Indulgences' work," by Nina Shen Rastogi. It is not a cheap shot. She is a writer from Brooklyn and consulted with scholars from Notre Dame and Fordham. The article is at: http://www.slate.com/id/2211167/ It raised as a topic for public notoriety and interest an old practice long forgotten, presumed dead: Indulgences. Remember them? They used to be sold like lottery tickets.

I am not recommending the article, but want to note it as the kind of the stuff out there in the media and the internet that catches our interest, as the scandal of sex abuse did in January, 2002. Such media pursuits could lead us off and away in tangents. We are helping ACC, not gawking at porn, be it clerical or lay.

We Need Discipline

We need discipline, not only in how we discuss, but also in what we choose for topics. We haven't had a Council in America for 125 years. There were three Baltimore Plenary Councils, the last one in 1884. They were called by Bishops. Ours differs and, thus, poses many problems for us in thinking ACC:

• Who chooses?
  
• Are these acronyms the hallmarks of churchism: Karen Armstrong's three Cs: Creed, Clergy, Canon; followed by my pet peeves: three Ds -- Doctrine, Dogma, Discipline?
  
• Is there a print edition of The Official Teachings of the Church" -- not just a catechism -- for editing and, perhaps, rewriting?
  
• Would it contain the Sensus Fidelium -- Sense of the Faithful -- i.e. Us?
  
• If not, how do we change, reform that which doesn't exist save in the facile mind of an Ordinary, trotted out extemporaneously when called upon to promulgate?
  
• Is there a list of Dogmas or Doctrines, just a list without exegesis?
  
• Which ones are infallible?
  
• What's a theologian? Different from a philosopher because of God-talk?
  
• Should they be licensed like lawyers and doctors, or plumbers and barbers?
  
• Are those licenses fragile?
  
• Along with Christology and Ecclesiology and Theology, is it time for a modern grownup Sexology?
  
• Whose?
  
• Is it OK to be human and Catholic at the same time?
  
• Do we risk going to hell because we are human, or because we aren't Catholic?
  

Can we do this? Yes, Together We Can!

Is it at all humanly possible for us, the fishermen and carpenters and tax collectors of our times, to assemble, digest, weed out and pare down 2,000 years of accumulated Ecumenical Councils, Papal Bulls, Decretals, Encyclicals, Theological Summae, Catechisms, Encyclopedias in such a way that we do reform an ancient Church with all its traditions and glory and bring slowly, carefully into its third millennium, alive and well and functioning as the assembly for the People of God?

Is the Roman Catholic Church united with, or rather descended from the one that began in Jerusalem when Jesus ascended and left us on our own with a Paraclete?

Will the American Catholic Church be united with, or rather descended from the Roman one?

OK, where do we begin? How?

Here . . . . . and with God's Blessing on us all.

American Catholic Council ACC
"We are the Church!"

http://www.americancatholiccouncil.org