Strategy 2: Lobbying
In this series, I 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 part 3 of the series next week!
- Abby Rampone, Communications & Activities Coordinator
Lobbying in the National Campaign
As Catholics who choose to locate ourselves with the Roman Catholic Church, lobbying is a necessary part of our work. We’re directly engaging the USCCB through this campaign because the Catholic Church still has spiritual and material grace and gifts to offer and because many Catholic leaders continue to use the institutional power of Catholicism as a tool of oppression.
Lobbying requires structural analysis, so CTA is collaborating with talented organizers in our membership to power-map the USCCB. Power-mapping is a tool that helps us identify the best individuals to target to promote social change. It can feel overwhelming and impossible to win over a sprawling hierarchical structure, but power-mapping will help us see how and where effective dialogue with “moveable” bishops and clergy is possible if we leverage our connections and strengths. Power mapping will also show us which bishops are not open to dialogue. In these places, we’ll use other strategies, and focus our lobby strength elsewhere.
While it often seems like the USCCB is a monolith, and that bishops act as a unit, this is a myth. Off-the-record conversations with bishops reveal a stifling sense of fear and tension at play in official USCCB gatherings. There are many church leaders who quietly support the goals of the National Campaign, and who might even concretely, materially, support our goals.
But it will take a careful blend of pressure and support to coax these bishops to break ranks with the dominant conservative wing of the USCCB and join the majority of laity who seek change.
Lobbying strategically targeted bishops, clergy, and other church officials in the form of letters, phone calls, in-person dialogue, or social media campaigns is how we achieve our concrete objective: official buy-in and participation from church leaders in our 2021 Constituent Assembly. We want priests and bishops to join us on a level playing field, acknowledge our grievances and their failures, and commit to co-creating a more just church as our partners.
Some long-time CTA members are no doubt disillusioned from the failures of lobbying bishops. The limitations of this strategy are clear: as some within the hierarchy are fond of reminding us, “the church is not a democracy.” Despite Vatican II-era theologies asserting that the church must rise out of its local context, priests and bishops are under no ecclesiastical pressure to heed the will of the people. Furthermore, members of the hierarchical church have become increasingly unwilling to dialogue with CTA and its partners due to institutional crackdowns on dissenters. Unlike a democracy, the church institution is governed as an autocracy, brittle beneath the weight of its misogyny, hypocrisy, and Euro-centric clericalism.
So while we acknowledge the limits of lobbying, it is one of the three strategies for our National Campaign because we believe that the other two strategies, education and direct action, can help address these limitations if all three strategies are intentionally coordinated.
Finally, we lobby church leaders because they have control of our church. We are not here to sever our relationship with the Roman Catholic Church: we are here to change it. As a reform movement, we are committed to the long-term struggle for change within this powerful global institution, to reclaim its gifts, and to account for its sins. By pairing lobbying with education and direct action (see next week’s email for more), we will make our demands impossible to ignore.
Lobbying Hurts!
I know that lobbying is hard. This strategy can be uniquely painful when we experience rejection or dismissal -- when religious leaders demonstrate a lack of moral authority, it’s a betrayal of trust.
Years ago, I was very involved in the programming of a school’s interfaith chaplains’ office. I showed up to practically every activity and event. As the years went on, though, my friends and I became increasingly concerned with sexism in religious life on campus. As we processed our experiences together, we decided to lobby the school to address our concerns. We wanted to galvanize the student body to convince the institution that hiring a diverse chaplaincy staff should be a priority, with attention to hiring women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.
I was absolutely devastated when we received backlash: we’d tried to frame our campaign as a systemic critique rather than a personal attack, but this intention didn’t seem to translate. And then? Nothing happened, or so it seemed. Months later, though, the school hired a Black woman to an open position. Our campaign was not the only factor in the hiring, of course, but I’m sure that the voices of students contributed to the outcome.
Lobbying a religious authority is particularly draining because of the spiritual power invested in their office. When we fail or when we face backlash, we can feel spiritually powerless. Our faith can take a hit and victory isn’t guaranteed. As a committed Catholic, though, I believe that it’s necessary. We have to discern when to lobby and when to put our energies elsewhere, but as long as we believe that there is some good in our institutions and that they have yet to account for their sins, I don’t think that we can entirely give them up.
