Voice of the Faithful v. Church?

1. Catholic “experts” will back the anti-Church bill.
2. The defense of the bill will sound reassuring and reasonable.
3. A big crowd will be there early on — but the Church needs Catholics to come later on, too.
4. We can win this, if we fight.

1. One objective of the new Connecticut anti-Church structure bill, I’m told, is for the Voice of the Faithful to get its message out about democratizing the Church.

Today’s Connecticut Post lists “Some details of the proposed ‘Act Modifying Corporate Laws Relating to Certain Religious Corporations’:

“A corporation may be organized in connection with any Roman Catholic church or congregation in the state by filing in the office of the Secretary of the State.

“The corporation would have a board of directors consisting of not less than seven nor more than 13 laymembers. The archbishop or bishop of the diocese would serve as an ex-offico board member, but could not vote on issues.

“The board members would be elected from among the laymembers of the congregation.”

Senate Bill 1098 was quickly labeled as payback to the bishops for the defense of marriage. But it may be worse than that: It may be part of a Voice of the Faithful strategy to “democratize” the Church. This is Voice of the Faithful’s plan that would gut the Church’s structure.

At annual meetings in Connecticut (at Fairfield University, for one place), Voice of the Faithful has been much more open about what it wants than it had been hitherto. Leaders in the movement dissent from bottom-line Catholic issues from women’s ordination to the sinfulness of homosexual acts to abortion. They also want to change Church structure (as a first step to changing Church doctrine, maybe?).

I’ve been told to expect professors from Fairfield University and Fordham to testify at the March 11 Hartford hearing—FOR the bill. They will make a historical “Catholic” case for a new parish structure that bypasses bishops. (Think Pelosi’s tangled logic on “when life begins” applied to the question “what is a parish?”)

Parish finance scandals will be used as a club to goad the Church to throw the baby — its very structure — out with the bathwater — the abuses of that structure.

This story helps set the stage. Notice the Voice of the Faithful members quoted in it who aren’t identified as such.

2. Co-chairmen Mike Lawlor (East Hartford) and Andrew McDonald (Stamford) are very capable trial lawyers.

They seem to have written this bill so that it is not mandatory. It does not require any Catholic parish to organize itself according to the statute it cites. (The statue it amends, by the way, is part of a number of statutes helping churches organize themselves. The Connecticut Catholic Church welcomed the statute in the 1940s and 1950s; but it leaves the door open for this.)

The two chairs will cite “faithful Catholic parishioners” (in fact, the Voice of the Faithful people) and say: “This bill comes from your own Catholic faithful. Your own people are begging us to do something. We’re only offering an option. What’s wrong with that?”

If anyone testifies and accuses these two chairman of promoting this bill as payback for same-sex “marriage,” they will go on the attack. How dare you insinuate about their motives! They will demand to know where you got your information.

Be careful! Remember: Make arguments polite and professional. Base them on the rights of the Church, not on personal judgments.

I’m told that if people show up and sign up for this hearing at noon or 1 pm, it’s possible they won’t get to testify until 6 pm, 9 pm, or even 11 o’clock at night (if they stick around). You won’t know until you see how many people are on the list above you. (Sign-up starts at 10 am).

If there are hundreds ahead of you: Go into town. Get something to eat. Check out what Hartford has to offer. Then come back to testify.

It’s important for people to recognize that if they sign up and there are hundreds of names before them, they don’t need to wait around getting irritated and burnt out and eager to leave — but they do need to come back.

The pro-Church side doesn’t want a huge crowd of people to disappears two hours later, leaving few. (They especially don’t want people to hear the reasonable sounding opening statement [Its theme will be: “There has been a lot of misunderstanding about this bill ...”] and then seem to leave en masse, convinced.)

Come early. Come often. And if you can’t be there at noon: Come after work. Let’s stagger our visits to keep the pressure up.

This can all sound discouraging. There’s no reason to be discouraged. Quite the contrary.

The prediction I heard: The bishops will come out of this stronger than they started. There will be a huge show of support for them. The fight against them may be nasty, but the Church will prevail on the merits.

Be heartened. If we were going to have a fight about something, this is a good one: We’re on strong ground constitutionally and faithfully.

Here’s our post about how one state senator says payback over the homosexual marriage fight is behind the bill:

Voice of the Faithful (VOTF)

From their mission statement, they are attempting to "3. Shape structural change within Church." This is intended to make a "democratic" Church which clearly violates the hierarchical structure which has always existed and is reemphasized in Vatican II Lumen Gentium. The chairman James Muller states in a National Catholic Reporter article on April 26, 2002, ìWe have donation without representation, and we have to change that.î Also on a CNN interview dated April 29, 2002, the chairman desires cafeteria Catholicism: "... our goal is to provide a democracy for the laity, so that the laity can decide what they want and then counterbalance the absolute power, which we have now of the hierarchy." See more details below.

Catholic Dissenting Organizations

From Senator McLachlan's blog:

Judiciary Committee Run Into a Ditch?

The Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly, chaired by Senator Andrew McDonald and Representative Michael Lawlor, seems to have run off into a ditch this session.

First we have an over-reaching attempt to codify the Connecticut Supreme Court's Kerrigan decision legalizing gay marriage - Senate Bill 899 - and now we have a bizarre attack of First Amendment rights against the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut - Senate Bill 1098.

I'm going to focus on Senate Bill 1098 -- "An Act Modifying Corporate Laws Relating to Certain Religious Institutions." The stated purpose of this bill is "to revise the corporate governance provisions applicable to the Roman Catholic Church and provide for the investigation of the misappropriation of funds by religious corporations." The real purpose of this bill is payback to the bishops and pastors of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut for opposing gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I think some well-intentioned, unhappy Catholics from Darien are being used as pawns by Senator McDonald and Representative Lawlor in a thinly-veiled attack on the Church.

This legislation seeks to eliminate bishops and pastors from all financial decisions of the Church. Currently, local parish corporations are governed by the bishop, diocesan administrator, pastor and two lay trustees as required in Canon Law. Senate Bill 1098 will change this to an elected board of directors of seven to thirteen lay members and will exclude the bishop and pastor. The pastor of the parish corporation will report to the board of directors.

This proposal turns the Catholic Church of Connecticut into a congregational church structure. The proponents claim this is necessary because of financial impropriety of two pastors from Darien and Greenwich in the past several years. McDonald and Lawlor claim the parishioners approached them for assistance making changes to the Catholic Church to hold the bishops accountable for their decisions.

Some would say this is an incredibly bold move by McDonald and Lawlor but the constitutional scholars say their proposal is a clear attack on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Connecticut Catholics are outraged by the proposal and are likely to fill the halls of the State Capitol and the Legislative Office Building on Wednesday, March 11th for the Judiciary Committee's public hearing on the bill.

I suspect this public hearing will be more like a zoo with the tone of an inquisition. Chances are the topics for discussion on Wednesday will go far beyond the bill proposed. I fear that we'll be hearing all kinds of attacks on the bishops, pastors and priests of the Catholic Church.

I pray fervently that we can dispense with this brutal attack on the Roman Catholic Church very quickly. Catholics don't deserve this attack and the proponents of this bill will hopefully hear this message loud and clear.

You can read about S.B. 1098 here: http://cga.ct.gov/asp/cgabillstatus/cgabillstatus.asp?selBillType=Bill&bill_num=1098&which_year=2009

You can reach members of the Judiciary Committee here: http://cga.ct.gov/jud/

One of the things that is going to be confusing about this is that the law was apparently written by parishioners at a parish that just had a scandal where their (blatantly homosexual) pastor embezzled a 7-figure sum, some of which he used to support his boyfriend. However, the phrasing is identical to the VOTF proposals, and obviously VOTF is behind it, with the help of the two gay state reps who have a grudge against the Church because of its anti-gay marriage activities.

VOTF is forbidden to meet on the property of the Diocese of Bridgeport, btw, and is recognized as an organization on the lines of “Catholics for a Free Choice,” that is, a radically anti-Catholic organization masquerading as Catholic.

But this article is valuable, because one of the problems is that this is going to be very confusing for the people who come to the hearings. The fact that VOTF and the gays have gotten two professors from supposedly Catholic colleges to come and defend the bill is appalling and is going to add a lot to the confusion.

I’m not at all surprised that Voice of the Faithful is behind this. VOF is nothing more than a group of dissenters that used the clerical sex abuse crisis to further its modernist agenda.

“Lay-run” parishes aren’t a new idea—there were lay-run parishes in the U.S. in the nineteenth century—but they are definitely a bad idea. Whoever controls the finances of the parish controls the parish. While the laity may not always agree with the the way that the pastor governs a parish or the way that the bishop administers the diocese, the pastor and the bishop are accountable to those above them in the hierarchy. In a lay-run parish, the board running the parish wouldn’t be accountable to anyone except itself.

I hope that the faithful Catholics in the state of Connecticut can defeat this bill.

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