Year-end appeal: Community
In October, the members of Call To Action’s Vision Council gathered in Sacramento to re-affirm the importance of community to everything we do at Call To Action. For more than four decades, your support built and expanded the CTA community. We hope you will help us cultivate our community’s growth again now with a year-end gift.
Our country is fractured by oppression. At CTA, we believe it is our challenging and urgent task to build a community that includes progressive Catholics of every age, who are at any stage of the faith journey. As the hierarchical, white male-dominated, clerical culture dies we are helping give birth to Catholicism’s next incarnation; where the gifts of all people are recognized as holy.
Every aspect of CTA’s work is vital to our task because each part intersects, feeds, and is fed by the others: anti-racism; solidarity with LGBTQ+ people and women seeking full inclusion in the church; labor rights for church workers; and communal stewardship of the Earth. Only by getting more and more honest about the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy, not just in the world around us, but in our Church and in CTA itself, can we learn from all these experiences.
This is indeed hard labor, but it will bring forth new life. Modern leaders like Valarie Kaur, Clarissa Pinkola Estés and other past national conference speakers tell us to think of justice-making as a form of birth-labor, progressing through alternating series of breathing and pushing. In this they echo St Paul’s famous image of “all creation groaning as in the pains of childbirth”, waiting, hoping, laboring for the new world.
BREATHE.
Since 2017 we’ve organized a dozen conferences, retreats, and trainings. We’ve launched two young leadership cohorts through the ReGeneration Program, (follow all the ReGeneration projects at https://ctaregeneration.home.blog/) and will launch a third cohort in 2020. And we have begun archiving CTA members’ unique stories through the People’s History of Vatican II project. These past three years of ground work have prepared us for a pivotal 2020. We’ll announce details for our 2020 plan in January, so stay connected.
PUSH.
At the West Coast Regional Conference in October, speaker Ched Meyers suggested that in order to reach people under 30 and keep people over 60, Call To Action ought to act like an extended family. The younger members should do much of the physical labor — including literally bearing and birthing children. Meanwhile, elder members should share wealth, wisdom, and support to the young people who labor to shape the future. He told the crowd, mostly aged 60+, to “turn over the keys, turn over the title — but keep paying the mortgage.”
While we wait with Mary and Joseph for the birth of our sibling and teacher Jesus in this Advent season, please consider making a financial commitment: a one-time gift, a recurring monthly contribution, or make us a pledge. If you would like advice on how to give directly from your IRA or if you want to join our legacy circle by including us in your will, let us know.
Let’s work together, each of us according to our gifts, to become a beloved community, called to action this next year.
With Prayer and solidarity,
The Call To Action Vision Council
P.S. All of us on the Vision Council want to publicly welcome Margaret (Margo) Dean Pach Johnson, born September 2, 2019, and congratulate proud parents Zach Johnson and Molly Pach Johnson! Love abounds!
