By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 3
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of the book Call to Action or Call to Apostasy, consisting of a detailed description of the current forms of dissent and how to fight them, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” — Jesus, quoting the Prophet Isaiah in the Gospel of Matthew [15:8 9].
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The Role of Small Faith Communities: Why SFCs? While they “dialogue” with activist Catholics, dissenters certainly do not neglect those Catholics who do not know their faith. Dissenters have invented an ideal mechanism for “weaning” these Catholics away from the “hierarchical” Church: Their version of “small faith communities” (SFCs) or, as they are sometimes called, “house churches.”
There are many kinds of SFCs (or small Christian communities, SCCs) in the USA today. Most forms have specific beneficial missions and are approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The different types of small faith community include:
Small generic communities, such as Buena Vista, the North American Forum on Small Christian Communities, the National Alliance of Parishes Restructuring into Communities, and other groups;
Charismatic prayer groups;
Hispanic ministry groups;
Campus ministry groups;
International Eucharistic Communities, created to provide for Sunday worship by working with or contracting with a priest; and finally,
Call to Action-style small faith communities.
Fr. Art Baranowski explained the purpose of CTA-style SFCs:
“We must begin again as church, reinvent the church, refound the church — with a different structure and leadership. Small faith communities are no longer an option but a necessity. . . . The refounded parish will be formed of clusters of communities relating regularly with the home church under the direction of parishioner leaders. . . . This new model of church is happening all over the world.”
Apparently, Fr. Baranowski and his fellow dissenters believe that Jesus Christ did not do it properly the first time, and intend to improve upon His plan.
The SFC Process. Another dissenting priest stated that radical Catholics must begin by restructuring parishes into communities or “house churches” of 8 to 12 people each. These parishioners initially sign up for meetings to hear a particular speaker, and after several meetings, they begin to relate more strongly to each other and less strongly with their home parish.
During this period of time, an experienced dissenter watches the group and identifies those Catholics who are most likely to be anti-authoritarian and “revolutionary” in their thinking.
The “dissent organizer” then approaches these selected people with the prospect of organizing a “house church.” They continue the process of “weaning” away from the parish by evolving into a permanent group, and they elect leaders that connect them to the parish in a purely superficial manner. Gradually they weaken their tenuous bond with the home parish and the Church, develop their own unique variety of prayer life, rituals, and even beliefs, and complete the process by developing into a small alternative “house church” whose purpose is not to worship and glorify God, but to give a supportive environment to its members.
It is possible that such a “house church” could comprise hard-core pro-abortionists who act as clinic escorts for a local abortion mills, or homosexuals who hold their meetings in a “gay” bar or bathhouse. The people participating in such groups could adopt any morality or beliefs they liked, since they acknowledge no Church authority.
The movement of CTA-style small faith communities seems to be dying out. When they were thriving, however, only about 20 percent of their members attended Mass and received Communion on Sunday, and only six percent were involved in any kind of evangelization — and those, usually for liberal causes. Two-thirds of the members of these CTA communities were women, and more than three-fourths of their meetings took place in a member’s home, not at the home parish.
Only about one-third of these CTA-style “communities” survive their fifth year; in fact, very few still exist today. The vast majority of their members do not return to the active practice of the sacraments; they become Catholic in name only. They have been effectively and efficiently “transitioned” out of the Church by the SFCs.
And this, of course, is apparently the core mission of Call to Action-style “small faith communities.”
Mad “Theologians” at Work. Activist dissenters see small faith communities as fertile ground for experimentation, where they may try any liturgical or dogmatic “innovation” without having to fear the prying eyes of the “hierarchy.” CTA-er Virginia Hoffman said that SFCs are “not authoritarian…[they are] completely participatory.” She stated that “we’re all a priestly people called upon to continue his ministry in the world, which is not primarily offering sacrifice in the Temple, but a change in the perception…acting out a different vision of church is how the revolution happens, and house church is one of the places that does it.”
The late dissenter Fr. Bill Callahan revealed that the SFCs would be used as an agent of change in the Church, and that dissenters would then attempt to inject these changes back into the Church: “It is important for these communities to move forward with married priests, with women priests.”
These “small faith communities” or “house churches” are ultimately meant to be a replacement for the Church, and may partly explain church closures in some of the more liberal dioceses.
SFCs are a refinement of the “small faith sharing groups” envisioned in the RENEW Program, which itself was developed by Archbishop Peter Gerety, an organizer of the original 1976 Call to Action conference in Detroit.
It is obvious that CTA-style small faith communities are antithetical to the apostolic mission of the Roman Catholic Church because they cause people to turn in toward themselves instead of directing their energies outward toward evangelizing the world. Every dissenting SFC is as unique as the beliefs of its members, and in no case do these beliefs reflect those of the One True Faith or further the cause of evangelization of the world.
Many Causes For Hope
To be a dissenter from the One True Faith is to live in a world that is unrelievedly dismal and depressing. As previously described, modernists create discouraging statistics on the priest shortage out of thin air, making it appear much worse than it actually is, and they prattle on endlessly about oppression, patriarchy, and the empowerment they so desperately crave.
But this is the distinctly limited human way of looking at things, not the Godly way. We cannot measure the health of the Catholic Church purely with graphs and numbers and statistical trends (although recently these are encouraging). The work of the Holy Spirit does not conform itself to human standards.
So, in the midst of widespread dissent, we have a flourishing diocese in the plains of Nebraska, while huge numbers of Catholics in metropolitan archdioceses lose their faith; while liberal seminaries stand virtually empty, the Priestly Society of St. Peter and other orthodox seminaries have a huge number of qualified applicants; while many Catholic children are traumatized and scandalized by explicit sex education programs, hundreds of thousands of Catholic home-schooled children are receiving instruction in the true faith from their parents; and Catholic families are working together and flocking to flourishing communities like Steubenville, Ohio and Front Royal, Va., to strengthen and support each other and to defend the faith.
There are many signs of the apostolic zeal and unquenchable energy of the emerging Roman Catholic Church in America, as it sprouts up everywhere.
Conclusion
As those who travel it well know, the road to Heaven is not an easy one. It is steep, winding, and littered with obstacles to the faith. Because of these difficulties, the Church has erected guardrails in order to keep the faithful on the road to Paradise. Beyond the guardrails lie many dangers — the high cliffs of apostasy, the impenetrable thicket of moral relativism, and the deep, swift rivers of modernism.
Since they cannot distinguish between licit and illicit freedoms, dissenters see the guardrails not as safety measures, but as barriers and restrictions. They not only want to move freely beyond the guardrails, they want to tear them down so that other souls will more easily stray from the path to sanctity.
Our job as evangelizers for the Culture of Life is to warn people of the dangers that lie beyond the guardrails.
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