Five years on, Catholic group tries to hold the center

In 2003, Jim Post, cofounder of Voice of the Faithful, asked a scholar whether the Catholic reform group might merit a footnote in the 2,000-year history of the church. "Maybe even a paragraph," Post recalls the scholar telling him with a smile.

Five years after Voice of the Faithful was started in the basement of a Boston-area church, the group's place in Catholic history remains unclear.

The group's leaders count 120 affiliates and 35,000 members. The lay-led grass-roots group says it has achieved significant feats--tougher sex abuse laws, increased transparency in some dioceses and more lay involvement in parish governance.

But Voice of the Faithful also promised to promote "structural change" in the Catholic church--an institution that takes pride in standing firm on shifting cultural sands. Some group members, frustrated with the pace of reform, want to confront the Catholic hierarchy with broader demands and sharper criticism. Others counsel patience and cooperation, said current president Mary Pat Fox.

As Voice of the Faithful passes the five-year milestone--an accomplishment rare among social movements--it faces crucial questions about the church reform it lobbies for, as well as the younger Catholics and momentum the group will need after the headlines and anger are gone.

"I think you have to move from anger to love," Fox said. "Anger can get people riled up but it's not sustainable. People get tired of being angry."

Voice of the Faithful's founders set three goals: to support survivors of sexual abuse, to support "priests of integrity," and to push for "structural change in the church."

The group says it's made progress toward the first two goals, joining successful efforts in six states to reform statutes of limitations on child sexual abuse laws and prodding legal officials to censure a California bishop last year who had delayed reporting an abusive priest to law enforcement.

Achieving "structural change" in the church has proven more difficult. The reform group's leaders said the sex abuse scandal resulted from a lack of lay involvement in decision-making. Problems could have been detected and stopped far earlier, they say, if power had not been concentrated in the hands of clerics.

But "the Catholic church in the United States, as elsewhere, is not easily ,. reformed 'from below,'" said R. Scott Appleby, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Lay Catholics, he added, are congregational and remain rooted in their local parishes. While noting that Voice of the Faithful "remains one of the two or three lay reform movements still alive, barely," Appleby said, "VOTF has been tenacious but not sufficiently national in scope and scale."

Fox and Post said the group has built up a national infrastructure, with a 26-member council representing 14 U.S. regions and affiliates in every state. Members are linked through a monthly electronic newsletter, In the Vineyard, as well as by nationally coordinated working groups and projects.

More than 85 percent of Voice of the Faithful members are college-educated and registered in a parish, according to a 2004 survey by William D'Antonio and Sulpician Fr. Anthony Pogorelc of the Life Cycle Institute of the Catholic University of America. They also tend to be products of Catholic schools and active in their parishes. Voice of the Faithful members, however, also tend to be older than the average Catholic, with 89 percent over age 44.

Donations, however, have been up and down. After peaking in 2002 at about $825,000, they fell to about $550,000 in 2005 before creeping up to $760,000 last year, according to Fox. The Newton, Mass.-based national staff cut three part-time and one full-time staffer in early 2006, Fox said.

And while membership in Voice of the Faithful has increased, it's a constant challenge to keep all members working toward the same goals. The group's leaders are determined centrists and refused to stake positions on controversial issues such as women's ordination and mandatory clerical celibacy, said Fox and Post.

Voice of the Faithful's call for changes in the church has spooked some bishops and conservative critics. About 20 percent of the 186 U.S. dioceses ban Voice of the Faithful affiliates from meeting on church property, Fox said.

James Goodness, spokesman for the Newark, N.J., archdiocese, said the group is banned from church property there because "the goals of the organization are in complete contradiction with the Catholic church."

"At the national level and even at the local level, it seems like the kind of changes they're seeking--like marriage for the priesthood and the end of celibacy--are not in agreement with the teachings of the church," Goodness said. He acknowledged that the organization itself may not take such positions, but said many people serving in the group's positions of responsibility do.