Strategy 1: Education
Over the next few weeks, I’ll introduce you to the three strategies of the National Campaign: Education, Lobbying, and Direct Action. After we introduce these strategies to the assembled leaders at the Minneapolis Convergence, we’ll develop and practice them in monthly Strategy Team calls facilitated by CTA staff and team leaders. It’s important to remember that no one strategy can exist without the others: Lobbying, Education, and Direct Action are strategically woven together in the National Campaign. Look for more in parts 2 and 3 of this series!
- Abby Rampone, Communications & Activities Coordinator
Attendees at a CTA 2011 Pre-Conference Program
Education in the National Campaign
Education is often the first, most foundational step in making change. Discussion circles, book studies, lecture series, training sessions, or other common educational events usually have no direct confrontation with the dominant power structure, and they rarely ask participants to make a specific commitment. For these reasons, attending educational events is the easiest way for new people to enter our work. They’re also a great low-key way for veterans of the struggle to stay focused, energized, and informed. This is why education is well-suited as the foundation of our overall campaign.
The National Campaign will coordinate a network of educational events which reflect the local interests, needs, and experiences of the communities that organize them. We’ll also offer online educational sessions in the forms of webinars, virtual discussions, and reading lists. (Stay tuned for details and invitations!) These events will serve as the entry point for new allies to our progressive Catholic community, and will give seasoned church reformers the chance to recharge with the energy of new allies. This dynamic may sound familiar to long-time CTA members. For over forty years, our national conference was a first step for so many into the Catholic reform community while it simultaneously recharged the individual and communal spirits of longtime attendees. Conference introduced, educated, and challenged the Catholic reform community with new issues.
The limits of education as a strategy for change are also clear in the history of our conference. On its own, education is generally non-confrontational, and requires little commitment from participants. In other words, education is a strategy with no teeth. It is an excellent strategy for building and sustaining power, but it is a poor strategy for using it.
Education as Raised Consciousness
In a campaign like ours, which seeks to change the status quo, a baseline goal of the education strategy is to help people become aware, conscious, and intentional about their own contexts and circumstances. Education should help us learn to see and describe our experiences with new language and open connections with other peoples’ experiences. When done well, we should leave an educational event realizing that our feelings are more common than we imagined. This realization gives us power. A good educational session helps us realize that injustice isn't a fluke: our experiences of injustice are symptoms of an unjust system.
As a kid, I was very involved in religious education at my struggling rural parish in Vermont. Even after I’d aged out of the program, I helped teach the younger children. I remember flipping through a Bible and coming across one of the exhortations attributed to St. Paul: wives, obey your husbands. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I showed it to my best friend and she said, “that’s an old rule for a long time ago.” That didn’t satisfy me, so I took the book to the religious ed teacher, an older man whom I admired. He always brought us donuts. He looked at the verse, nodded, and said, “that’s what God teaches us. That’s the way it is.” I ran into the other room and cried, but I wasn’t quite sure why. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t name it.
When I studied religion and feminism in college, things started to click. Upon reflection, I realized that I was upset about what the teacher said because it made me feel belittled and inferior as a young woman. It hurt my feelings to hear from someone I admired, someone who had actively encouraged my leadership by letting me teach the younger children. It made me angry and indignant on behalf of my mother and all the other religious women in my life. Worst of all, it all fit together: my religious ed teacher’s comments had something to do with the attitude of the priest who forbade female acolytes from serving when the bishop visited our church. The devaluation of women in the church was no accident -- it was systemic.
My consciousness-raising happened in school, but more to the point, it happened in and through community. I talked to my friends about their experiences in other religious traditions and they knew all about the feeling that I was describing. We educate each other even when we’re simply sitting in a circle, talking about the experiences that give us a sinking feeling in our stomachs.
Education in our History
Recommendations from the 1976 Detroit Call To Action conference included criticism of the Church’s insufficient attention to justice in its teaching endeavors. Many attendees suggested that the Church give high priority to quality adult formation, which would enable adult lay Catholics to participate in making decisions about “Catholic educational policies at the local and diocesan level.” Others commented that parishes needed to provide programming relevant to “racial, ethnic, and cultural concerns” and support Catholic education in low-income communities. Homilies, too, were described as inadequate: priests too often failed to engage deeply with the text, the congregation, and the issues of the day -- and by prohibiting lay homilists, churches ignored the voices of marginalized Catholics.
Call To Action has maintained its commitment to creative education since 1976. Sharing our unique knowledge and experiences, we prepare ourselves to do God’s work in the world. Understanding ourselves, each other, and the systems in which we participate is critical to any action. Education gives us power.
