A year of new collaborations
This year we leaned heavily into partnerships. We focused on reaching groups outside our normal circle of close friends within the reform movement. At the beginning of the year, we identified key topics and looked for partners who are already skilled or comfortable in these areas. Here's a recap of our most fruitful collaborations by issue from 2021.
Labor: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
First, we explored a labor analysis of the Catholic church. There are few forces in history with the potential to truly stand up to institutions as powerful and oppressive as the Catholic Church. Organized labor is one such force. We spent much of this year thinking about how employees of the Catholic Church can organize themselves — despite the total lack of protection from federal labor law due to the Supreme Court's "ministerial exemption" ruling.
Any serious challenge to the Catholic Church that wishes to be more than ceremonial or symbolic will have to understand the Church's current labor structure, and have the vision to see how to change it. We partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America's Religion and Socialism Working Group to host a panel discussion on this topic. The DSA in general is at the forefront of today's workplace organizing, and a strategic alliance between our organizations should keep church workers in their field of vision.
Mutual aid: Catholic Worker
We've recently written a lot about our new Catholic Worker-inspired intentional community program, the Rye House in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We'll continue sending updates as this program evolves. We invested heavily in this area because we understand that Call To Action — and the rest of the Catholic reform world — needs to move beyond thoughts and prayers for a new church and become materially based. In other words, we need to balance our calls with action that will benefit the daily lives of the people our church oppresses: LGBTQ people, women, people of color, church employees, and so many others.
Our partnership with the Rye House is a small first step for CTA, but the Catholic Worker, from which the Rye House draws so much wisdom and support, has a long tradition of people meeting their own needs and the needs of their community through intentional living communities. The Rye House is also drawing on the wells of experience within the trans community, where people have supported each other without state or church support (mutual aid style) for decades.
Movement organizing: Sunrise Movement
At some point in the past 5 to 10 years, many of us working for church reform started referring to ourselves as part of a "movement.” But no one described what being in a movement means. It gives the impression that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, but is it more than a rhetorical move? The Sunrise Movement has thought about what it means to work "as a movement,” and their leaders have identified clear and specific skills that people and organizations within the movement ought to cultivate. We partnered with Sunrise for a two-part series on some foundational skills, including the art of the one-to-one conversation.
The idea is that "movements" should act as though they believe that people power (ever-expanding organized and coordinated groups of people) is the greatest agent of change, rather than money or institutional influence. The first step in building people power is to make sure every single person is connected to the group through their relationship to other people, through the one-to-one conversation. This allows us to make difficult asks of each other, to trust each other even as we disagree, and it ensures that our visions for the future remain as inclusive as possible.
Immigration: NETWORK Lobby
Call To Action's Immigration Working Group began with an in-person "border experience" hosted by the Rio Grande Valley Chapter in 2019. The working group, which is led by CTA volunteers from around the country, has continued gathering the attendees of their 2019 experience and expanded their network with regular Zoom updates on the situation at the US/Mexico border. They have brought speakers from both sides of the border, and people from around the country who are organizing in solidarity with refugees. Yet members of the Immigration Work Group mirror CTA at large in that they want more than education: they want to take action.
Leaders of the work group identified lobbying as a key strategy to focus on, and reached out to the professionals at NETWORK Lobby for support. After a zoom session with NETWORK staff where attendees learned about NETWORK's immigration agenda and priorities, work group leaders developed a weeklong Advent campaign with NETWORK called A Letter to Joe.
Next year we plan to build on all our collaborations, deepening ties with these new groups as well as maintaining our decades old friendships within the Catholic reform movement. Every collaboration is important because we cannot face the Catholic power structure alone, and by standing alongside old and new friends, our role in this work will become clearer.
In the coming weeks and months you will see more reflections from CTA leaders on how we see our unique role and perspective with regard to the synod, strategy, spirituality, and much more. But for now, thank you for another year of focus and commitment to our work!
