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  Catholic Group Asks Openness of Church

By Michael Paulson mpaulson@globe.com
Boston Globe [Indianapolis IN]
July 10, 2005

INDIANAPOLIS -- Leaders of Voice of the Faithful, the national lay Catholic reform organization founded in a Wellesley church basement three years ago, gathered for the first time outside the Northeast yesterday and vowed to intensify their push for greater financial disclosure by the church and increased lay involvement in the administration of the nation's largest religious denomination.

The organization has claimed victories in a series of steps by bishops nationally and locally to consult with laypeople about management of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. And many of the members interviewed here, as well as scholars who have studied the group, say the organization has played an important role in keeping in the Catholic Church adherents who might otherwise have left in frustration.

Many of the nearly 600 Voice of the Faithful affiliate leaders who traveled to Indiana from 33 states to attend this weekend's gathering said that creating a support structure for concerned Catholics has been the organization's greatest accomplishment.

"After the crisis broke, . . . I was seriously considering going elsewhere," said Evelyn Mercantini, 56, a corporate meeting planner from Reston, Va. "I had even gone church shopping, but a friend told me about Voice of the Faithful, and it was exactly what I was looking for."

Yet the group has also faded somewhat from the public spotlight since its founding at the height of the clergy abuse scandal and is still kept at arm's length by many bishops. It has also faced staff turnover as it has spent much of the last year reorganizing its leadership structures to shift power away from Boston.

"We want to change the church in ways that it profoundly needs at this time," said the organization's president, Boston University management professor James E. Post. "There may be fewer of us, because too many have left over these past three years, but those who remain keep the faith while trying to change the church."

Post said Voice of the Faithful members around the country are pushing to lift statutes of limitations for the prosecution of sex abuse crimes, are urging dioceses to make abuse-related records publicly available, and in a variety of ways are encouraging greater accountability for bishops.

Leaders of the group also called greater financial transparency within the church a top priority.

"When all is said and done, the church is financed by contributions from the Catholic laity," said David Castaldi, the former chancellor of the Archdiocese of Boston and now chairman of the Voice of the Faithful board of trustees. "It is our money, and we deserve to have financial transparency and accountability within our church."

Castaldi said that settlements have already cost US dioceses more than $1 billion. After expected settlements in California, Oregon, and elsewhere, the church could face total direct costs of "$2 billion to $3 billion," he said.

Since its founding, Voice of the Faithful has focused on three goals: supporting victims, supporting what the group calls "priests of integrity," and pushing for structural change in the church. It has determinedly avoided hot-button issues that divide the church, such as ordination of women and priestly celibacy.

Illinois Appellate Court Justice Anne M. Burke, who served as interim chairwoman of the US bishops' national review board for the protection of children and young people, credited Voice of the Faithful members, particularly in Boston, with forcing the church to respond to the abuse crisis and with contributing to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law as archbishop of Boston.

"We will no longer be afraid," she said. "It is time for them, those who exercised the leadership of disaster, to be afraid."

Burke said she also understood the frustration of those pushing for change in the church, saying: "Why is it whenever we seek to do something good for our church we come away frazzled, spent, wiped out, and questioning our own sanity?"

Burke was critical of some bishops, who, she said, have tried to weaken their own rules for protecting children. "After the past three years of my work on the National Review Board, I find little to encourage my spirit and dry dust to inspire my imagination," she said.

Many other Voice of the Faithful members, though, said they believe the church has acted more swiftly and more openly in response to the abuse crisis because of pressure from laypeople emboldened by Voice of the Faithful.

"We are faithful people, and we are frustrated by not being able to actively participate," said Peter Amann, a 60-year-old businessman from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

In Boston over the last year, the group has been overshadowed by the Council of Parishes, a coalition of parishioners at churches slated to close. The Council of Parishes has been more confrontational than Voice of the Faithful, helping its members to occupy closed churches, and has been more critical in its rhetoric.

"My best assessment of VOTF's passivity, shared by others in the Council of Parishes, is that their national leadership's driving motivation is a 'seat at the table' in the governance of dioceses, and this puts them in a real bind when it becomes necessary to confront the hierarchy," said Peter Borre, cochairman of the Council of Parishes.

Borre said he expects the Council of Parishes to move beyond the reconfiguration issue by challenging the archdiocese on financial issues, "rather than theorizing about it, as VOTF seems to be doing."

Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of Boston has kept in place a partial ban on Voice of the Faithful, prohibiting the use of church buildings by affiliates formed after October 2002.

And he has had minimal contact with the group, repeatedly insisting that the appropriate forum for lay participation in diocesan oversight is through parish and archdiocesan pastoral councils.

But O'Malley did name Castaldi, a Voice of the Faithful founder, to chair a panel that will review the diocese's potentially controversial use of money obtained by selling the property of closing parishes.

The archbishop has also increasingly turned to laypeople for advice on key issues, a shift visible particularly in his decision to appoint a lay-dominated panel to review the parish closings and then to change about 20 percent of the decisions as a result.

O'Malley's spokesman, Terrence C. Donilon, said the archbishop "recognizes the genuine desire expressed by many members of Voice of the Faithful to assist with the process of rebuilding the church in the Archdiocese of Boston.

"We look forward to working with all of the people of the archdiocese to achieve healing and renewal and to provide for a strong and vibrant future," Donilon said.