Standing in the Light: A Parishioner's Story

By Michelle Redonnet

In fall of 1998, Corpus Christi Church in Rochester, N.Y. underwent the loss of its priest, its female pastoral assistant and most of its staff over the issues of the role of women in leadership, the blessing of homosexual unions, and an invitation to "anyone who loves the Lord" to share in communion at Mass. That winter, about a third of the parish formed a new church, Spiritus Christi. In February of 1999 the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester announced that those who had joined the new parish had incurred automatic excommunication.

Spiritus Christi is today a thriving community of about 1,500 people, renting space for services in three Protestant churches in downtown Rochester. The community runs a Prison Ministry, a Mental Health Outreach, and the Grace of God Recovery House.

This is the story of a community that had to face profound spiritual questions about their relationship to the church and their responsibility as Christians to live the Gospel message: it's a story about the cost of discipleship.

Proceeds from the sale of this book will be used to support the Spritus Christi Prison Ministry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 26, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469752396

Michelle Redonnet

Chava Redonnet has been a member of the Spiritus Christi community since 1980. She serves as a Eucharistic Minister and as a facilitator of the Spiritus Christi Parish Community Forum. The mother of three teenagers, she is a student at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and works as a research technician at the University of Rochester.

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© 2002 by Michelle Redonnet

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New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of theChurches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Yes. Lord, Yes by Lynn Keesecker, copyright 1983 Manna Music, Inc. 35255 Brooten Rd., Pacific City, OR 97135. Used by permissoin (ASCAP)

We’ve Come This Far by Faith by Albert Goodson, copyright 1965, copyright renewed 1993 by Manna Music, Inc. 35255 Brooten Rd., Pacific City, OR 97135. Used by permissoin (ASCAP)

ISBN: 0-595-22638-8

ISBN: 978-1-4697-5239-6 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Prologue: August 13, 1998

Part One: Who Has Known the Mind of God?

Part Two: The Refiner’s Fire

Part Three: God is Giving Birth to God

Part Four: A Flower Blooms in the Desert

Part Five: Interlude: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Part Six: The New Community

Epilogue: February 26, 2000

About the Author

To the children of Spiritus Christi.

Introduction

º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º

Seek first justice and the Kingdom of God and everything else will be given to you besides.

—Matthew 6:33

Most of us have moments of truth in our lives. At some point an occasion will arise when we have to choose between safe familiarity and some inner conviction which, if we follow it, will change our lives dramatically. Suddenly, after all those years of shades of gray, things are laid out in black and white: compromise and be safe, or obey the voice of conscience and inner truth, and face the loss of your job, your home, your friends, the good opinion of the world. Those moments—those teeth clenched, let-go-of-everything-and-live-your-truth moments—are steps out of the shadows into authenticity and into life.

That’s what this book is about. It’s what Christianity is about: losing your life to find it. Give up everything, stand unprotected, die to what is safe and secure and familiar, and life roars in fresh through the gap, spilling light all over the place. Don’t be afraid, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear. Seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s justice—be honest, and stay close to God—and everything else will be given to you.

This is the story of a whole parish full of people who did just that.

Spiritus Christi Church in Rochester, New York, is a community that is both new and old. As Spiritus Christi, it has been in existence only since January 1999, meeting in borrowed or rented space in several locations around Rochester. The parish defines itself as a Christcentered Catholic community, reaching beyond the institutional church to be inclusive of all. It is a warm and vibrant community, alive with three outreach programs and liturgies that pulse with life. Until the last months of 1998, however, most of the people who now make up Spiritus Christi were part of the Roman Catholic parish of Corpus Christi, a community which for over twenty years had been a positive presence in a run-down city neighborhood. Corpus Christi was well known for its service to the poor, with a health center, a supper/shelter program for homeless people, a prison outreach, a home for the dying, a child care center and a clothing outreach, as well as missions in Haiti and Chiapas, Mexico.

In the fall of 1998, the Corpus Christi community underwent a traumatic series of losses and a dismantling of the parish as it previously existed. On one side in the conflict was the authority of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, in the person of various diocesan representatives, reportedly instructed by a letter from the Vatican. On the other side was the authority in the hearts of the people of the parish, each of whom was faced with a choice between obedience to Rome and the local bishop, or obedience to the voice inside which said, This is the path of love and justice.

At issue were three parish practices: an invitation expressed at each Mass by the celebrant to all those who love Jesus and want to follow Him to come to Communion; the blessing of gay and lesbian unions; and the active participation of women in the leadership of the liturgy. The latter practice involved the female pastoral associate, who said some of the prayers at Mass, and wore an alb and a banner, a half-stole, as a sign of her role as a parish minister.

Each of those things moved beyond accepted practice within the Roman Catholic Church. Ordered to desist, the parishioners faced a choice. Some chose to stay, to remain Roman Catholic and to work for change within the institutional church, whether at Corpus Christi or somewhere else. Others, about a third of the parish, could not in conscience stay, and opted to form a new church, known today as Spiritus Christi.

A story that affected the lives of thousands of people has many truths, and many versions. It would be presumptuous to say that this book is the truth about what happened at Corpus Christi.

This is my truth, the story of Corpus Christi as I experienced it.

To the best of my knowledge, everything I have written is factual; I have relied on interviews, meeting minutes, journal entries, taped homilies, calendar notes, bulletins, and various other papers accumulated throughout the year, as well as my memory and the memories of others.

Writing this book has been itself an experience of community. All my life I have processed experiences by writing about them; I began writing this book simply because I needed to write it. It soon became apparent that I would not be doing it alone. I wasn’t halfway through the first chapter before I realized that it would be necessary to ask permission of those about whom I wrote to use their names and to quote them. Soon I had established a habit of emailing whatever I had written to whomever I had written about, to check accuracy. The process got particularly complicated when writing about complex interactions in which I wasn’t involved; the story of the staff firings in December, in particular, involved several interviews, running it by those who were involved, and rewriting until everyone agreed that it was an accurate portrayal of what had happened (or at least, a portrayal they could live with), and that things that were a matter of opinion were clearly stated as such.

It was also necessary to obtain permission to use names, especially where personal life details were involved. The names Colleen and John Upshaw are pseudonyms, used at the request of those individuals.

This book necessarily reflects something of the personality of its author. While my own opinions are surely clear to any reader, I am also a facilitator of our Parish Community Forums. Hearing all the voices, wanting other opinions heard, is also a part of who I am, and therefore, of this book.

I am especially grateful to those whose opinions or responsibilities put them on the other side in this conflict, who were willing to talk with me and share their points of view, in particular Fr. Dan McMullin, Charlotte Bruney, Anne and Tony Liotti, Larry Jones, and Betty and Don Potter. There are others whom I approached for interviews who respectfully declined, notably Bishop Matthew Clark, Fr. Joseph Hart, and Kathleen Cannon. I wish each of them peace.

There are hundreds of people who pretty much put their lives on hold for months, doing everything in their power to stave off the inevitable destruction of the parish we loved. Twenty people in particular must be mentioned: the Board of the Spring Committee. Peg Rubley, Bridget Casselman, Bill Barry, Lee Vester, Howard Moscowitz, Jeanne Chirico, Michael Martella, Carol Trapasso, Maureen Nielsen, Allen Bennett, Leslie Rauner, Carl Merritt, Bill Rubley, Terry Arnold, Rosanne Hickey, Don Gordy Gordon, Karen Kelly, Pat Murphy, Tom Wright, and Mike Kelly, who served as the group’s lawyer. Without them, there would have been no New Faith Community, no Spiritus Christi. It was their foresight, at the very beginning of the crisis, that provided the means to support our staff members who were eventually fired, as well as the means to begin getting the new community off the ground. And it was their dedication that saw us through the dark autumn days, when, as Peg Rubley once figured out, we were averaging a new crisis every four days.

If I were a sculptor, I would be working on a statue instead of a book—something like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais comes to mind. There really is no adequate expression of thanks, but I’ll say it anyway, to those twenty people and to hundreds more who prayed and loved and worked and wept, and kept on, knowing that the One who loves us will never drop us, and that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people for their help and support.

Margie Payne, Tim Geen, Peg Rubley, Mary Bickel, Mike Reimringer, Sib Petix, Terry Arnold, Kathi and John Albertini, Bryan Hetherington and my mother, Mary Doyle-Feder, read early versions of the manuscript and offered their comments and encouragement. Howard Moscowitz made sure each of them had a copy of the manuscript.

Charlotte Barnard, Myra Humphrey Brown, Enrique Cadena, Jim Callan, Edwina Gately, Margie Payne, Mary Ramerman and Angie Vukosic each gave permission to include their unpublished written work or homilies in this book.

Thanks to the Burns Sisters band for their kind permission to quote the lyrics to No More Silence, and to Manna Music for permission to quote I Say Yes and We’ve Come this Far by Faith.

Margaret Wittman could always be relied on to find the tape, video or piece of paper I was looking for.

Allen Bennett, Myra Humphrey Brown, Charlotte Bruney, Jim Callan, Richard Conheady, Denise Donato, Mary Doyle-Feder, Myra Humphrey Brown, Larry Jones, Mike Kelly, Trisha Koomen, Sylvia Kostin, Tony and Ann Liotti, Rosemary and Gerry Lynch, Michael and Sybil Martella, Fr. Dan McMullin, Maureen Nielsen, Tip Owen and Marty Zuber, Margie and Frank Payne, Betty and Don Potter, Mary Ramerman, Wally Ruehle, Peg Rubley, Mary and Michael Theisen, and Mimi Youngman agreed to be interviewed or to write their stories for me, and endured many phone calls and email messages while I endeavored to get the facts right or to tell their stories from their own points of view.

I thank the following people for their help in making the story as accurate as possible and/or allowing me to include their insights or points of view: Kathi Albertini, John Albertini, Kevin Aman, Mary Aman, Charlotte Barnard, Bill Barry, Jan Bezila, Mike Boucher, Diane Breslin, Myra Humphrey Brown, Enrique Cadena, Jim Callan, Lisa Callister, Jeanne Chirico, Dee Coistek Carr, Georgia Cosgrove, Denise Donato, Claire Drexler, Joan FitzGerald, Joe Flood, Rich Gardner, Tim Geen, Rev. Richard Gilbert, Elizabeth Gillmeister, Don Gordon, Jody Graves, Brenda Greenfield, Doris Gruber, Margie Henninger, Lauree Hersch Meyer, Rosanne Hickey, Eileen Hurley, Robin LaVergne, Sharon Lewis, Sweet Grass Longhouse, Tom Malthaner, Doug Mandelaro, Dave Marshall, Terry McArdle, Barbara MacCameron, Sue McVey, Paul Menges, Howard Moscowitz, Maureen Nielsen, Joe Piersante, Lillian Piersante, Andy Pokon, Kathie Quinlan, Mary Ramerman, Jim Ramerman, Mike Ramich, Marcy Ramich, Wally Ruehle, Ginny Richards, Tom Riley, Peg Rubley, Chris Schenk, Judy Simser, Charlie Smith, Jim Smith, Donna Rae Stevens, Kathleen Tranelli, Carol Trapasso, Jennifer Ulrich, Roberto Vasquez, Lee Vester, Chris Votraw, Angie Vukosic, Kathy Welch, Mary Kay Williams, Margaret Wittman, Mimi Youngman, and Lorraine Zeigler.

Posthumous thanks are due to Jennifer Deas-Vasquez and Maureen Nielsen: Jennifer sent me a message from her deathbed, after I wrote to ask permission to use the story of her wedding. About a month after she died, I saw Roberto at Thursday Night Mass, Oh, yeah, he said, I was supposed to tell you. Write what you want! I wish I could have interviewed her, but then, we all knew how she felt that day: it was the happiest day of her life. Thank you for everything, Jennifer, and much joy to you in heaven!

To track down every contribution Maureen Nielsen made to this book would be impossible. Besides being part of the story, and interviewed (once formally, and many times informally), Maureen was the person I called when I needed someone’s phone number or to get verification of some detail, like the exact wording of the letter received by the six staffers who were fired. Maureen got it, she got what Jesus was saying: be the last and the least, and serve the rest.

My daughters, Clare, Bridget and Emily, endured many hours of Mom at the computer, and listened patiently to portions of early drafts of the manuscript. I am very blessed, to have three such wonderful girls.

Lastly, I would like to thank Tim Geen and Doug Mandelaro, both of whom suggested that I write this book.

Prologue: August 13, 1998

Roberto Vasquez stood in the vestibule of Corpus Christi Church, wearing a white tuxedo and a top hat. The evening sun streamed through the open front door of the church. Friends and family crowded around him: bridesmaids, ushers and well wishers, their energy high, excitement in the air. Jennifer Deas, in her wedding gown, was standing outside, waving to people as they came in to Mass. A van from a local group home pulled up at the side of the church, and soon the sidewalk was crowded with people in wheelchairs. One of the staff people saw Jennifer and Roberto. The invitation to the entire parish to come and celebrate at their wedding had somehow not reached the staff of the group home, and they were expecting an ordinary Thursday Night Mass.

The woman apologized—We didn’t realize it was a wedding!—and prepared to leave.

No! Please, Roberto stopped them. This wedding is for everybody. Please stay.

Everybody from the group home was wheeled or escorted into the crowded church and found their usual spots in a spacious alcove near the front. The room was full of energy and the noise of people chattering, hugging, greeting each other. Black people, white people, gay people, straight people, people with disabilities, people with gray hair, people with little children, wealthy people, poor people, people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, people who had been in prison, Protestant people and Catholic people were there, filling the church, eager to worship the God who made them all and to celebrate the wedding of two of their own.

Our community gathered for Mass each Thursday night, as we had done every week for twenty-two years, but the church wasn’t usually packed for this Mass. Jennifer and Roberto had invited the whole community to share the happiest day of their lives, and the community had come.

The Gospel Choir sang, Jennifer and Roberto were married, and the Mass went on. In this moment, this wedding, this liturgy, everything the Corpus Christi community had tried to be and to build was in full bloom. These two beautiful people had met here, both of them recovering and building new lives after years of pain, addiction and incarceration. The two of them were surrounded by the love and support of our whole community, which not only wished them well, but challenged them to grow, helped them to become all that they could be, and treasured them.

Fr. Jim Callan looked out at the gathered people and saw the joyful culmination of over two decades of prayer and work. Hundreds of us had made it our life’s work to build this community that served the poor of the city and the world, that welcomed everybody, that tried—broken, sinful people, all—to follow Jesus and to live the Gospel. The parish was alive with love.

Surrounded by the fulfillment of his dreams and by the energy and love of the gathered community, Jim was crying. Crying as he had cried all afternoon, making a valiant effort to stay focused on Jennifer and Roberto, blocking out his pain, sometimes forgetting, for five or ten minutes at a time, that there was any reality but the Mass and the wedding that he was celebrating. Then it would hit him again, fresh, a new reality, a coming reality.

The parish would go on, he was certain of that. He knew who was sitting in the pews, knew they would continue working with all their might to bring God’s love and mercy to a pain-filled world…but he would not be there.

The very obedience to God which had driven Jim Callan to inspire others to radically alter their lives, follow Jesus, and serve the poor of the city had driven him to disobey the Church. He had welcomed all who loved Jesus and wanted to follow Him to come to Communion; shared his leadership of the parish and of the liturgy with pastoral associate Mary Ramerman, who said some of the Eucharistic Prayers at Mass; and had blessed or been present at the unions of five lesbian or gay couples. He believed in the One who ate with tax-collectors and healed on the Sabbath, who spoke to the Samaritan woman and sent her out to preach, who touched lepers, and who prayed that we all might be one; yet these acts of love and discipleship had earned him a letter to his bishop from Cardinal Ratzinger in the Vatican, ordering him out of his position as administrator of Corpus Christi parish.

On this Thursday night when our diverse community came together to celebrate the wedding of two people who would never have met if not for the work of the parish, none of those sitting in the pews yet knew what had befallen us. Unimaginable as it was, the structure that bore us was about to crumple, like a great tree that crashes and decays and fertilizes the ground for new growth. Our lives would never be the same.

Part One: Who Has Known the Mind of God?

August 13–September 6, 1998

There are phrases that let you know that your life will never be the same. There are welcome phrases like, We’re going to have a baby!—and there are unsought, catastrophic phrases, like I want a divorce or We did everything we could… For me, and for several thousand other people in the summer of 1998, the phrase that sent us reeling with shock and electrified us into life and loss and change and growth and pain, the phrase that changed our lives, was, Jim Callan has been fired.

I was away when it happened. I missed that first terrible weekend, the newspaper headlines, the three hour long Sunday night parish meeting, the tears and shock and anger. The Sunday before, August 9, I had come to Mass alone. Kneeling to pray before Mass started, I asked God to bless the parish, to let us be the church God wanted us to be, a prayer I had prayed many times through the years. On this day I found myself adding to the prayer: Please God, set us on fire.

I realized what I was saying, and wondered, Where did that come from? Then I quickly prayed, Never mind—do what you want to do!

Sometimes when I pray, words come that I don’t plan. About a month before, I awoke one morning praying for a friend who had experienced a difficult pregnancy and was due to give birth soon. I found myself praying that she would have an easy delivery—but that’s not how I pray. Right away, I amended the prayer: "Never mind, Lord!

Please just give her whatever she needs!" I got up and went to work—and found that my friend had given birth in just one hour, after the easiest labor of any woman I have known. Remembering the prayer I had awakened with that morning, I can only conclude that it must have been the prayer God wanted to hear.

My August ninth prayer to set the church on fire was like that—unintended, an eruption from the Godhead deep in my soul, a spontaneous prayer for what would be, from God and to God.

And set the church on fire, God did.

We were away, my daughters and I, vacationing in Washington, DC. We started home a day early because I sprained my ankle, meandering our way back to Rochester in the car, listening to tapes of Broadway shows and singing. We pulled in the driveway at 9:30 p.m. The song that was playing was The Impossible Dream.

Entering the house we found notes—on the door, on the phone, on the table—from my Mother. They all said the same thing: CALL ME BEFORE YOU LISTEN TO YOUR PHONE MESSAGES. CALL ME RIGHT AWAY. Oh, no, I thought, Something’s happened to the cat.

It’s your church, my Mom said on the phone. Jim Callan has been fired.

What?!!

Jim’s been reassigned. He has to leave Corpus Christi.

As the news sank in, my first thought was, Why are they singling Jim out? It’s all of us!

After twenty years of shared leadership and decision-making, I had forgotten how priest-centered the Roman Catholic Church is. I was accustomed to thinking of the church as all of us, the responsibility for the church as all of ours.

I believe conflicting understandings of church and of ownership of the church to be central to the events that unfolded throughout the months to follow. The diocese and the parish were operating out of different world-views, speaking different languages. The story of this conflict is a story of conflicting paradigms. Our vision of church and the reality that we were quite imperfectly living at 80 Prince Street was not the reality of hierarchy experienced by those at the Diocesan Pastoral Center on Buffalo Road. Again and again, we would encounter non-comprehension of the reality that was our experience of church for twenty-two years.

I picked up the phone to call Peg Rubley.

It would be months before I finished unpacking from our trip. The autumn yard work was never done. Bedtime stories, a family habit for fifteen years, came to an end. The following days, weeks and months were packed with work: services, meetings, rallies, phone calls. Our community was the pearl of great price. Everything else went by the wayside in the effort to rescue it.

Peg and I talked a long time, that first night. She told me about what I’d missed: an intense week shot through with adrenaline, a week of dropping everything and heading to church, of working late into the night. Both of us served the community as facilitators of our parish meetings, along with Tim Geen, Colleen Upshaw and Paul Menges. She told me how she had received a phone call from Mary Ramerman at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, asking her and the other Parish Community Forum facilitators to come to the rectory to discuss how to tell the parish about Jim’s firing. She told me of the Sunday night meeting, the church crammed with people—a thousand, she thought—the meeting which defined our direction for the coming weeks and months: resist, try to get Jim reinstated, stay the course, remain Corpus Christi. Peg told me of the Spring Committee, six hundred strong, which was organizing the effort to speak out and, hopefully, to return to normal. She was a point person for the Spring Committee—some sort of contact person—new concepts to comprehend along with the still fresh reality that everything had changed while we were gone.

I might have been useful if I had been here, I thought —but I’m glad I didn’t know. I thought of all the mornings that week, waking up in the tent with my girls, listening to the cicadas at night and thinking how they went on, eon after eon, singing their ancient song, concerned with cicada lives, finding each other in the dark with their song, unaware of human realities, needing us not at all. We had toured the monuments, discovered the Library of Congress, read the preamble on an original copy of the constitution, made s’mores at night, had seen a DaVinci, some beautiful Monets, the Hope Diamond and the Ruby Slippers, had learned to navigate the subway, had spent a day in the Holocaust Museum. We had ten days of rich time together, oblivious as the cicadas to the new reality at home.

Peg invited me to a meeting in the rectory on Saturday afternoon, a catching up meeting with the facilitators and the staff. On Friday night, August 21, we would hold a rally, and Sunday night a Parish Community Forum. Fresh from my trip, it would be my turn to facilitate. The others had already done about six months’ worth of meetings in a week.

My children were standing by the phone throughout this conversation, alert, waiting for direction and news and sense to be made of it all. Needing to respond, to DO SOMETHING, the same urge felt by three thousand others in the previous week, each of my girls sat down and wrote to Bishop Clark.

I did not write that night. This great swelling of energy, this crashing of the tectonic plates of Vatican, diocese and parish would destroy much and cut deep gashes in our day-to-day realities. That same force would drive many of us creatively and change our lives in positive ways. Soon I would begin to write, and would find that for me the work of love and obedience, the work of ministry, would take me to the computer and keep me there for a long time to come. A new life would begin, for me and for many others, even as the old was destroyed.

At eleven o’clock my girls and I watched the news and saw coverage of the Thursday Night Mass earlier that evening, where parishioners had been working on a Statement of Faith. In the weeks to come, we would grow accustomed to the ubiquitous presence of TV cameras, microphones, and reporters. Any part of me that ever wanted to see my friends in the news, that was proud of my church and wanted everybody to know about it, would be utterly fulfilled. In the morning we went downtown to the Democrat and Chronicle office and bought all the papers from the past week. Corpus Christi had been on the front page four days in a row, even knocking President Clinton’s Lewinsky hearings to the side. It was heady stuff—exciting and awful at the same time. It was too soon to grieve. There was still hope of getting Jim reinstated and returning to normal.

Friday night my daughters and I attended a vigil at the church. We got there an hour early in order to find a place to park where I wouldn’t have to walk too far on my sprained ankle. The church was already full of people, and the energy level was high. People were wearing T-shirts that said, Can’t Hold Back the Spring! That was the title of a book Jim Callan had written about Corpus Christi, which had been published the preceding winter. The full quote was from Alejandro Gomez, a man who had been a refugee from El Salvador, who with his family had been given (illegal) sanctuary in our church in 1984: You can cut back some of the flowers, but you can’t hold back the Spring. An enormous banner with that saying was suspended over the altar in front of the church, and another one outside, above the front door on Main Street. Someone distributed buttons with the same slogan.

I looked for familiar faces, and found Colleen and John Upshaw. Colleen was also a Parish Community Forum facilitator. The room seemed full of strangers, and it was comforting to be with friends once again.

A culture had sprung up in that week, with its own traditions of foot stomping, hollering and cheering. Everyone’s energy was up. Adrenaline was flowing, and it expressed itself in noise. I had expected a church full of tears, but these people were well past the first shock and bewilderment. That first night, I did not share their energy and was somewhat overwhelmed by it. Over the next week or so, people would continue to return from vacations and experience this enormous change. You could always tell who they were by the dazed looks on their faces.

The plan that evening was for a vigil walk to Corpus Christi Center on Webster Avenue, our parish’s first outreach, a heath center. My children joined the walk, and I stayed behind to pray. A circle of us prayed together on the altar: old friends and a few unfamiliar faces. Everyone had buttons that said Can’t Hold Back the Spring. A woman I did not know told the story of how a little girl had come up to her in a store and said, I know what that button means! It means you’re a lesbian! The woman’s offense at this assumption was the first little sign that we were not, in fact, all of one mind.

It was good to pray with these people, some of whom I had known for many years. When it was my turn to share, I read a prayer by Thomas Merton in which he tells God, I can’t always see the path in front of me and I don’t even know if I’m going in the right direction. But I know that the desire to please you, does in fact please you. It is a prayer of perfect trust.

An incredible level of organization had taken place that first week. At a parish meeting on Tuesday, August 18, six hundred people had organized into seven interest groups: a vigil/rally committee, a media committee, a website committee, committees for prayers, for outreach to other faith communities, for outreach to other groups, and letter writing. Soon a finance committee would be added. Collectively, these groups were known as the Spring Committee. That first night I was back, there was already evidence of their work: a website address was scrawled in large letters on a sheet of newsprint, taped on the wall by the church door; address lists were posted, for letters to the Bishop and Vatican functionaries. Parishioner Kathleen Welch had designed a Can’t Hold Back the Spring T-shirt and was selling them at cost. The Youth Group had T-shirts printed as well, with Corpus Pride on the front, and a quote from Jim on the back: My heart is broken, but my spirit is strong. We were the church defiant.

The belief that protesting can change things is deep in the American psyche. When my girls and I were in Washington, we had seen the words carved in marble at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. I often thought of those words, and the spirit behind them, during these early weeks. Ours was a very American reaction—get the news out there, write letters, make your opinion known. Did we really expect it to make a difference? In those early days, we had some hope. We knew what was at stake. It wasn’t just about Jim being our priest; it was about the preservation of that whole unique parish, Corpus Christi Church, a place where everyone was welcome, and everyone came. On a typical Sunday, there would be people from a local group home in their wheelchairs; ex-convicts, residents at Rogers House; gay couples, some with children; and middle-class suburban families. We were rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, Protestant, Catholic, black, white, Anglo, Hispanic, conservative and liberal, and we were all hungry for God, celebrating together—people in tears, people hugging, people working together day by day to build God’s kingdom of love and justice and compassion. We had something wonderful, and we did not want to lose it.

2

On Saturday, August 22nd I attended the first (for me) of countless meetings. Some staff members—Mary Ramerman, Sr. Margie Henninger, Mike Ramich, Denise Donato—met with the Parish Community Forum facilitators—Colleen Upshaw, Peg Rubley, Tim Geen, Paul Menges and myself—upstairs in the rectory at three in the afternoon. Maureen Nielsen was there, as well.

We discussed how Jim was being scapegoated, and that others had been removed or sanctioned in our diocese as well. It was noted that Bishop Clark did not appear to be in charge: Something bigger than just us is going on. The bishop had not been a part of any meetings, including Jim’s meeting with Fr. Bob Ring, Diocesan Director of Priest Personnel, at which he was supposed to have been present.

Mary told of other Catholic pastoral assistants who would not allow public acknowledgment of their support. They have been silenced, she told us. At a meeting with other Catholic women that day, no one would speak or give their names until the reporters left. Mary was saddened by the fear.

Denise said that in her opinion the bishop was acting out of fear, not conviction, and that the diocese was a pawn in a battle with the Vatican. She said, Jim embodies all the issues. They can’t remove all the gays, all the women—but they can remove one man.

The question of who was behind Jim’s removal has never been answered. The day he was told that he was to be removed from Corpus Christi, he was told about a letter from the Vatican, but was not allowed to read it. In public statements from the diocese, questions about Vatican involvement were answered only by the statement that the decision to remove Fr. Callan was the Bishop’s.

The task of that Saturday afternoon meeting was to outline a procedure for voting on the Statement of Faith. Parishioner Lee Vester had written a two-page statement of our values and vision, including our intention to remain Catholic, to continue to empower women, to welcome all to the Eucharist, to uphold the place of gay and lesbian people in the church, and our hope of working with the Bishop in doing so. The statement had been crafted with input from those present at Thursday Night Mass, as well as staff members and facilitators. We decided to take the unprecedented step of a show-of-hands vote after Communion at the weekend Masses. This was to be our statement of response to Jim’s firing. In time, we facilitators would come to realize that the process we used on the Statement of Faith left a lot to be desired: people could not read it for themselves because the media was constantly present, and we could not risk a copy of the statement being unofficially issued before it had been approved by the parish; there was no opportunity to discuss the final product, only a yes or no vote after hearing it read; and we had never before done an all-parish vote that was not confidential. A signed but confidential ballot was standard for all-parish votes. We decided that the logistics of getting ballots printed, distributed, collected and counted were too cumbersome in this case. Five o’clock Mass was about to start. To attempt a printed ballot would delay the issue of the statement by a week, and we felt that time was of the essence. We still believed it possible to turn the situation around. Hope, or denial, or disbelief—whatever it was, we had to try.

The Statement of Faith was passed at the Masses that weekend by a vote of three thousand twenty-two to seven: 99.8%. Overwhelmingly, we were in agreement. Yet it was a feverish vote: a temperature of ninety-nine point eight is a sign that the body is fighting infection—and fighting, we were. But what of those seven? As a facilitator, I had a concern for them. Without a secret ballot, it took courage to vote no. The dissenting seven were a sign of things to come. Our solid front had a crack in it, a crack that was to grow wider, and finally split us. In those early, heady days, that seemed utterly impossible.

Sunday evening we had a Parish Community Forum. Before the crisis, we considered fifty people to be a healthy turnout for a PCF. Now there were over five hundred! The numbers meant new logistical problems: how can you hope to have an in-depth discussion with five hundred people? But a group discussion was not on the agenda that evening. It was all updates: each of the Spring Committee subgroups gave a report. Sr. Margie Henninger gave a short talk that was just electric. I got a taste of how it feels to be on the receiving end of a standing ovation when, after Margie spoke, I said into the microphone, Margie is a good example of why women should be preaching! The energy of a roomful of people leaping to its feet and cheering—everybody should get to experience that, once in their lives! Someone who observed our crisis only in the news commented to me once that Jim Callan smiles too much—that a person going through a trauma shouldn’t look so happy. But that person had never been in front of a standing ovation. It’s impossible not to smile. All that positive energy, an ocean of it, rising at once. Wow.

That night’s meeting was the easiest I have ever facilitated. We were in solidarity, or at least, we appeared to be. We were not trying to make any decisions that night, only to keep everyone informed about what was going on. I wish I could remember what Margie said that was so electrifying, but at that point, no one was taking minutes. Spirits were burning, and adrenaline was high—does anybody stop to take notes when the house is on fire?

Later that night, I had my first experience of the Spring Committee. When the Parish Community Forum was over, the Spring Committee meeting began. We were in the rectory living room until midnight. Working late had become standard, I was told. Now I had my first glimpse of the enormous organization that had been set in motion in only a few days. Six hundred people had organized themselves into a well-ordered corporation. Parishioners were using their job skills to try to rescue their church. Website coordinators, publicists, writers, videographers, lawyers were all doing their utmost to preserve our parish. Peg Rubley, in particular, had been working around the clock. With her energy and skills, as well as her serendipitous availability during the day, she was soon the unofficial leader of the Spring Committee. Most of the people in the room were strangers to me. My friend Lilia Castellejo was there, representing the rally committee as a cochair. This group consisted of the leaders of the various sub-committees, and met to keep each other up to date. I was invited to attend as a PCF facilitator. Staff members were sometimes present, as well.

Just as I was overwhelmed by the energy of the group at the Friday Night rally two days before, the Spring Committee seemed an almost incomprehensible flurry of new people and activities at first. These people were running a business, or conducting a war, defending something they loved. Their organization and competence impressed me.

We saw ourselves with a mission to change the church, and keeping the three issues at the forefront was a priority. We had some slim hope of turning the situation around, and three parishioners had filed an appeal with the diocese on August 20, asking to have Jim Callan reinstated. Eventually the appeal was denied, but on this Sunday evening the door had not yet closed on that possibility.

Soon our attention would begin to turn to long-term survival with the beginning of the process of incorporation of the Spring Committee as a not-for-profit organization.

There was confusion for several months over the name of this group, as the term Spring Committee was used interchangeably to describe both this smaller group of nineteen or so, leaders of the subcommittees, and the larger group of over six hundred people that made up the various subcommittees. The confusion would not be resolved until November, when the smaller group began to call itself the Spring Board. A question that would begin to arise was that of voice. If something was issued by the Spring Committee, who was speaking? Was it nineteen people, or six hundred? Questions of authority and voice were to arise frequently and become more urgent as the parish divided.

For now, we were dealing with an emergency, and such questions were not yet being asked.

On Monday, August 24, I returned to work. The three days that had passed since my vacation were more intense than any I’ve lived, except for times when a loved one was in the hospital. On Friday morning on our way to the Democrat and Chronicle, we drove by the church and saw for the first time the huge Can’t Hold Back the Spring sign over the front doors. It was the first visible proof of our parish’s crisis. Tears came to my eyes—the same tears that come at reminders of my Mother’s heart surgery, or the time one of my girls was ill and in the hospital. Just as with those illnesses, there was nothing concrete I could do to affect the outcome of the situation; I could only wait, and be present, and pray for the well being of those I loved.

It is hard for me to pray when my adrenaline is flowing. Most of my prayers in the preceding three days had been reflexive, automatic: Dear God, take this. Take our church. Use us for your glory, hold us in your care. I love you. I trust you. Your will be done. But during the coming week I began to feel a deep reassurance that all was well. God, who had taken this broken inner-city parish and given it new life, its numbers burgeoning from two hundred to three thousand in the previous twenty-two years, who had caused six outreach ministries to the poor of the neighborhood and the city to take root and flourish, who had blessed us with amazing Spirit-filled Masses, who had brought so many wonderful people to this parish, and caused so much healing, was not about to drop us now. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew that God was in charge, and nothing else mattered. This must be our latest blessing! I told anyone who would listen. I had asked God to bless the parish before I left—many others must have been praying in the same way—the God who loves us does not give us stones when we ask for bread. Somehow, this was a good thing. Somehow, God was going to take this scary time and use it for great good. I knew it. Everything in my life says, trust God and thank God, no matter what. Do not be afraid. I knew, deep in my soul, that all was well. That assurance never left, through all of the pain and grief and loss to come: the One who loves us will not drop us and has not dropped us, and all is well.

But all that was yet to come. There could be no pain while Jim was still with us and we were still whole. To grieve at this point would have been to lose hope. I was not ready to do that. How on earth could this strong, healthy body be in danger of destruction? It was laughable.

Our name, Corpus Christi, meant The Body of Christ. Long ago when Thomas Aquinas was to be honored for all he had done for the Church, he requested instead that the Church honor the Eucharist. That was how the feast of Corpus Christi came to be. We took our name very seriously. The Eucharist was the center of our life as a church. Thursday Night Mass was the catalyst of the new life and growth we’d experienced. We were the body of Christ: Corpus Christi meant both the Eucharist, and us. It also meant the larger Church, those who loved the Lord all over the world. We are the feet of Christ, walking with the poor; the hands of Christ, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, stroking the hair of the dying; the arms of Christ, embracing people coming out of jail, people with AIDS, people broken in all the ways human beings can be broken; the mouth of Christ, speaking up for justice; the heart of Christ, loving, loving, loving. We were, and are, not perfect. We’re as blind to our own faults as any other bunch of human beings, but that has never seemed to matter to God. It is enough that we say yes—God can use us no matter how imperfect we are. All God needs to bring healing to the world, is hearts that say YES.

Saying yes to God does not mean that you are going to be doing things that are going to please everyone. In fact, it has a way of getting one into trouble. That’s why it’s so important to have a community—so there are people around you to give you strength when that trouble comes. Our Gospel Choir has a song—it’s my favorite song of theirs—that goes like this:

I say yes, Lord, yes, to your will and to your way. I say yes, Lord, yes—I will trust you and obey. When your Spirit speaks to me With my whole heart I’ll agree And my answer will be yes, Lord yes.

Now, that is a dangerous song! And if you get a whole parish of people, thousands of people, saying, Yes, Lord! in their hearts, you can expect some trouble, because the status quo is not important to God. People are important to God, and if the status quo is getting in the way of the healing and growth and well being of human beings, watch out! The spirit of God is a blade of grass pushing up under the asphalt, breaking through the artificial barriers that keep life and growth down, buckling that asphalt with its living power, growing and becoming and being, alive and strong. And you know what happens then: the people who poured the asphalt in the first place are going to try to get back in control of the situation, and it’s going to hurt. They’ll uproot that blade of grass, and pour fresh asphalt…but don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. God is still in charge, and that grass is going to grow eventually, somewhere.

Our situation was