"How Catholics, bishops killed Senate Bill" is the lead article in the Sunday edition of the Connecticut Post for March 15, 2009. It is set forth below.
What struck me in this story is that both strategy and tactics used so cleverly and skillfully by the "Church" in defeating the bill are the same as those used against us who seek reform in the way our Church is governed. Just read the very first sentence.
The American Catholic Council should pay attention to this story. The power of hierarchs is awesome and must be acknowledged. Ours can be also, provided we do not adopt dirty tactics, thinking that is the way to level the playing field. We need to gather together, recruit talented players, hire great coaches, and practice, practice, practice. Dirty football teams do not win National Championships, because each game has referees. In our determination to reform the governance of the Church, there are no referees. It is not a game. What is at stake is The Church.
Personal note. One of our sons is a college football coach. For 45 years, we have been watching him grow, play, compete, and coach others how to play a game and pass on over into adulthood. Perhaps, in our efforts to reform an institution that masquerades as Church, we should look at sports and its games. We should drop our reliance on politics and the strategy and tactics that make politics impolitic.
In politics, victory goes to the majority vote, i.e. 50% + 1. Keep this in the front of our minds and hearts: We are not, cannot be merely 50% + 1. No majority is the People of God. All people are the People of God. All. From them, we gather a team. In sports, victory goes to the better team. The People of God, 6.2 billion of them, who are Church, can provide a team that is better than the 5,000 hierarchs, selected by a privileged few out of a privileged group of their own, and who together claim to be Church.
We aren't just fans. Some of us can make the team. The ACC is the beginning of recruiting and practice. The Council to come will begin on Opening Day.
I do not think, sorry, that we can defeat the hierarchy with politics, whether civil or ecclesial. It is a dirty way to play. The winner doesn't win. Just continues along the same miserable path of power. Revolutionaries who defeat incumbents usually take over as incumbents.
We Are Church. We, the People of God.
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Connecticut Post Online - How Catholics, bishops killed Senate Bill Sunday, March 15, 2009 By Ken Dixon Thousands of Roman Catholics made the trip to the State Capital The spark that ignited a firestorm over a proposed bill that would change the way Roman Catholic churches are governed started with a flurry of phone calls and e-mails. In the hours and days that followed, its intensity spread from parish to parish fanned by the state's Catholic bishops who used Web sites, videos, newspaper ads, church bulletins and messages from the pulpit. They warned their church was under siege and First Amendment rights in jeopardy. The faithful were told: today it is the Catholic church, who knows who is next. The anger was apparent in the usually serene Bridgeport Bishop William E. Lori, who called proposed Senate Bill 1098 "irrational, unlawful and bigoted" and "a thinly veiled attempt to silence the Catholic church." It was a harsh rebuke, but Lori, Hartford Archbishop Henry J. Mansell and Norwich Bishop Michael R. Cote knew it would take more than words to defeat the bill. Archbishop Henry J. Mansell speaks to the crowd of Roman Catholics The bishops and parish priests quickly mobilized the faithful, urging them to call or e-mail legislators and attend the Judiciary Committee's public hearing on the bill. More than 50 buses were chartered, religious and constitutional experts recruited. And in seven days of intense debate and heated words, the crusade to kill the bill was over. It died a simple death when the public hearing was cancelled. Yet, Catholics did not want legislators to forget their outrage. Last Wednesday -- the day the public hearing was originally scheduled -- 3,500 of the faithful descended on the state Capitol. The 40,000 who rallied at the Capitol against the income tax in 1991 formed a much larger crowd, but the 3,500 Catholics who made a vocal presence last week may have been the most passionate. How the bill and the protest began While the protest by thousands of state Catholics was quickly mobilized, Bill 1098 had a slower evolution, shepherded by a handful of people. A passionate group of thousands were stirred up and organized last weekend by parish priests over a perceived threat to the authority of church hierarchy. The number who demonstrated, and subsequent testimony before a mostly Republican panel, was universally opposed to a law that would allow local congregations to elect seven to 13 members of local parish boards. Currently two lay members are appointed to local boards by church leaders. Bishop Lori, who serves on 87 parish boards in the Bridgeport Diocese, focused the attention of last Wednesday's noontime rally on two lawmakers, Sen. Andrew J. McDonald, D-Stamford, and Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, the co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee. Bridgeport Bishop William E. Lori speaks Wednesday At issue was a proposal by Tom Gallagher, a parishioner at St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich, who along with scholars such as Paul Lakeland, chairman of the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, believe that lay members deserve a greater say on church boards. Backers of the bill believed the law would instill better control of church finances. The Rev. Michael Jude Fay, former pastor of St. John Church in Darien, was convicted in 2007 of stealing up to $1.4 million in parishioner donations and is currently serving a three-year prison term. In Greenwich, the Rev. Michael Moynihan resigned in January 2007 from Greenwich's St. Michael the Archangel Church after a preliminary audit uncovered $500,000 in spending the church couldn't account for in its records. The Bridgeport diocese said bookkeeping measures are already in place including finance councils and independent audits. Parishioners also have access to all financial reports and those who report improprieties are protected by a whistle-blower policy As the controversy died down, McDonald said Friday that the complicated issue is best left to extensive research. "Given the substantial and complex constitutional questions involved, the Legislature should do absolutely nothing until the attorney general has a chance to review the generations-old religious statutes on the books," McDonald said. While the controversy emerged last weekend, the idea goes back several years, when Gallagher approached his local House member, then-Rep. Claudia Powers, R-Greenwich, who briefly pursued part of his agenda in 2007 before it died in the legislative process. "He had written and asked me to put a bill in," Powers recalled last week. "What I ended up doing was doing a piece of it. It was one line written on a form filed upstairs" in the Legislative Commissioner's Office. "I never met Tom Gallagher, but he sent me a bunch of material. I wasn't interested in anything challenging the constitution." For students of Connecticut law, the issue has a back-to-the-future quality in a political landscape where the perceived rules separate religious communities from any state control, including taxes. In Connecticut's original 1866 state law on religious corporations, all church boards, including Roman Catholics, were elected by congregations. A 1902 revision of the law retained congregational elections, but a year later, Bishop of Connecticut Michael Tierney asked Connecticut lawmakers to allow church leaders to appoint the two lay members on each parish board. "After a long and varied experience both as pastor and bishop, I find that the clause in the charter bearing upon the election of trustees has proven ambiguous, capable of many interpretations and the source of numerous illegalities," Tierney wrote on March 24, 1903. It was published in the March 25, 1903 Hartford Courant, which printed the minutes and testimony of the General Assembly. At the time, the legislation had been approved by the General Assembly, but had been recalled for further debate, amid complaints from French-American congregations that it was "un-American" because it would have concentrated power in the top church officials. Fast forward to January 2007, when Gallagher published an op-ed piece in The Advocate of Stamford calling for an updating of the statute. McDonald last week recalled that by the time he was contacted in 2007, it was past the legislative deadline for submitting legislation, but he said it would be in the hopper for 2008. "In January of '08, I met with Sen. McDonald and Rep. Lawlor," Michael Culhane, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, the public affairs arm of the church, recalled last week. "It was very cordial and we discussed a number of issues and eventually Sen. McDonald raised the issue of revisiting corporate statutes regarding religious corporations." But in 2008, in the wake of the previous summer's triple murder of a mother and her three daughters in Cheshire, the Judiciary Committee was too focused on rewriting the state's persistent-offender laws. During last Wednesday s rally in Hartford, a woman holds a crucifix Key Dates of the bill's creation and defeat: By noon, when McDonald and Lawlor cancelled the next day's hearing at the 24-hour deadline, Republican lawmakers said they'd go ahead with an information forum anyway for Catholics who had already booked buses to the Capitol for the next day. "Fair's fair," Lawlor said of the Republican's seizure of the public-relations high ground. "It's all politics." McDonald and Lawlor said they should have rolled the bill out a different way. "The Catholics' reaction was my reaction," Lawlor said. "How can we do this? But then you see we've been doing it for 150 years." McDonald and Lawlor agreed that the bill was simply a matter of responding to constituents. "These guys are proposing boards of 7 to 13 members," Lawlor said. "I'm curious why five members is constitutional and 13 is not. I would just like to understand this a little better. My gut tells me we shouldn't have special laws for different religions. Apparently we're at the beginning of a very complicated discussion." Lawmakers now await Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's opinion on the constitutionality of current law on religious corporations. AFTERMATH In an commentary piece in Sunday's Connecticut Post, Lori writes: "The timing of this mean-spirited attack on the church comes at time when a severe recession is forcing Connecticut's state government to cut back on programs of all sorts. The church -- the largest private provider of social and educational services -- is taking up much of the slack. You'd think these legislators would see the importance of these services for the common good of society. "There are lessons to be learned here. First, as believers and citizens, we need to remain alert. Religious freedom may have dodged a bullet, but the struggle isn't over. Other salvos are coming." Area Catholics gathered to protest on the steps of the State Capitol +++++
Updated: 03/15/2009 12:16:36 AM
http://www.connpost.com/
All photgraphs are by Phil Noel,Staff Photographer
Changes in placement of photographs and type of bullets are mine.
STAFF WRITER
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