c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The reform group Voice of the Faithful was created by lay Catholics in response to the clergy sex abuse scandal amid revelations that some bishops protected priests from prosecution.

The group, whose mission is to increase roles for laity in church governance, quickly drew thousands of people, its membership reaching 30,000 by June 2003 after less than 18 months of existence.

Yet even as it has mushroomed to 200 chapters nationwide, the growth of the group has slowed dramatically over the last 18 months as public attention to the crisis has decreased.

Voice of the Faithful members say the group remains relevant, raising awareness of what the group claims are continued problems with bishops’ response to the scandal, and recently drawing more than 1,000 people to a conference. But the new membership trend concerns group leaders and supporters and could threaten their mission to shape structural change in the church.

“It’s an important question. It’s one that we’ve asked ourselves about: Why can’t we seem to get more Catholics up and out of their chairs to do something?” said Jim Post, the group’s president.

Lay people founded Voice of the Faithful in 2002 in Massachusetts, where Catholics were most devastated by revelations that church leaders protected sexually abusive priests from law enforcement and shifted them among parishes without notifying their new communities.

Voice of the Faithful’s goals include supporting abuse victims, giving laity a greater hand in church decision-making and persuading bishops to make diocese finances public.

Leaders hoped the initial pace of membership would continue, or even increase, but since mid-2003 it has reached a plateau, growing by less than 4,000 members to around 34,000, said Suzanne Morse, a spokeswoman.

The slower growth rate, and whether it means more of the nation’s Catholics are unwilling to demand more accountability from bishops after the worst crisis in American Catholicism, concerns the group’s leaders and supporters.

In interviews, they cite several factors for the lack of interest: too many Catholics are too busy with their own lives to join; many Catholics instinctively shy away from groups critical of bishops; and many believe bishops, through high-profile reforms, have resolved the problems.

Plus, they say, it does not help that some Catholic leaders such as Newark, N.J., Archbishop John J. Myers call the group subversive and won’t allow it to meet on diocesan property, let alone discuss issues with church officials.

“In the beginning,” said Maria Cleary, a Voice of the Faithful organizer in northern New Jersey, “I perceived a lot of hope on the part of our membership that they thought we would be able to work within the church organization to effect change, and there was a lot of effort made to dialogue with those in the institutional church about the issues that we felt were problematic.

“Well, a lot of that dialogue just hasn’t happened, or happened on a very superficial level. It’s even been refused. And so I think that’s dashed hopes of an awful lot of people who thought perhaps an organization like this could effect change,” Cleary said.

Conservative Catholics such as Myers suspect the group’s motives extend beyond preventing abuse and making bishops accountable to include liberal church agendas like the ordination of women.

These critics point to one of the group’s stated goals _ “shape structural change in the church” _ and cite its meetings where liberal Catholics such as the Rev. Richard McBrien, a prominent critic of Pope John Paul II, are featured speakers.

Harriette Peters recently attended a Voice of the Faithful meeting in Morristown, N.J., the second she has attended. Asked why she thought more people do not join, she said: “The problem is everybody, regardless of whether they’re liberal or conservative, can agree priests should not abuse kids. But how do they come up with other issues that people can coalesce around? Once you get off that issue, it’s a matter of liberal or conservative.”

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Linda Pieczynski, spokeswoman for Call to Action, a 26-year-old Catholic reform group focusing on both church institutions and traditional social justice issues, said memberships in such groups “typically surge when there’s a lot of outrage,” and even then represent only a small fraction of people who care.

“Everybody’s against heart disease, for example, but how many people will volunteer to collect money? It’s a small percentage, and a lot of times it’s people who are affected by the problem.”

Voice of the Faithful has been most active in the Boston Archdiocese, which has drawn the most criticism for protecting abusive priests. About 35 percent to 40 percent of its membership hails from that archdiocese, Post said.

Interest there in the group increased recently with announced closures or consolidations of 80 of the archdiocese’s 357 parishes. Recently, in a victory for Voice of the Faithful, the Boston archbishop named a group leader to a committee managing property sales from parish closures and determining how the money is spent.

Even if most Voice of the Faithful chapters do not evolve beyond gathering Catholics together for meetings and raising awareness about issues on their agenda, they can still play an effective long-term role, supporters said.

The Rev. Kenneth Lasch, a retired Mendham, N.J., priest and advocate for abuse victims, said Voice of the Faithful can be effective even if bishops do not heed its calls to reform in the foreseeable future, that over time the group’s ideas can gain traction and slowly cause change.

“If you’re looking for some change in the (church) structure because of their meetings, that’s not going to happen, certainly not in our lifetime. But true reform doesn’t start at the top,” he said. “It takes place at the bottom.”

MO/PH END RNS

(Jeff Diamant writes about religion for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)