Teenagers Take Direct Action at Kennedy Catholic High School

Students protest at Kennedy Catholic High School. Image source.

Dear members,

Two weeks ago, I was in Seattle meeting with the Western Washington chapter. As I was there, news was breaking that two LGBTQ teachers at the local Kennedy Catholic High School had just been fired. I had a few hurried, spontaneous conversations to brainstorm how our national Call To Action team could support the teachers and organize an appropriate response. In the days after my trip, our staff received a few calls from CTA members—and some non members, just good Catholic people from around the country—asking what we could do to support: could we, perhaps, lobby church leaders or call in our partners? Could we organize a demonstration? 

I made a few calls, drafted some plans, but generally came up empty. I concluded that CTA’s capacity to directly respond would be limited. The situation clearly called for a dramatic public action or a well-placed ally willing to forcefully lobby a potentially movable bishop to respond on the side of justice.

Instead, within a week of the firings, young people from Kennedy High School did the work of their own accord without any outside prompting or organizing. Young people responded, as they have in arenas around the country to all sorts of injustice over the past few years. As one local Catholic parish’s young minister stated powerfully in his call to lobby the Archdiocese of Seattle, “The Laity has the power. WE are the Church. WE are the Body of Christ.” CTA unequivocally supports the high school students who exercised their power and prophetic voices by organizing their own walk-out, sit-in, and rally to support the fired teachers and the entire LGBTQ community at their school.

This instance of injustice, and how the response was organized, demonstrates why our model of church reform needs to change. We need to invert the old model, in which Catholics turn to agencies like CTA to respond, and build a model in which local leaders use the organization to connect with each other. Nonprofits like CTA are not built to provide the rapid, radical response which is called for in situations like this. This is why CTA’s focus for the past three years has been on connecting young leaders to each other in order to facilitate and build community, offer the basics of leadership skills through mentorship with movement elders, and begin the transfer of wealth and resources to the efforts and aims of young people.

For example, we believe that the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, which is currently suffering under a reactionary anti-LGBTQ bishop, would be better served if young people there could build connections with the young people in the Archdiocese of Seattle. Our current structure does not yet facilitate such collaboration and movement-building—but we’re building with this goal in mind. The young people in Washington are the Body of Christ. We must follow them and the lay grassroots organizers like them around the world who are the true leaders in our Church.

In Solidarity,

Zach Johnson, CTA Executive Director