Strategy 4: Alternatives

Liturgical leaders at CTA’s 2018 conference in San Antonio

When we first introduced our 2020 National Campaign, we shared three strategies: education, lobbying, and direct action. Over the past few months, though, it became increasingly clear that we needed to include a fourth strategy: alternatives. 

Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin described the Worker’s task as “building a new world in the shell of the old,” and that’s what alternatives do. They are prophetic in that they embody and model new ways of living together and doing things. They prove that the status quo is not inevitable. 

Alternatives are central to the Catholic reform movement. Over the years, many CTA members have found homes in chapters that they could not find in their parishes. The innovative and liberative liturgies that are a hallmark of CTA conferences draw on decades of wisdom from alternatives like Women-Church communities and other house churches, RCWP and independent Catholic communities, and intentional communities that live, work, and worship together. 

We’ve decided to add alternatives as a fourth strategy for several reasons. First of all, they are critically relevant right now as a means for basic survival. In this time of pandemic, we find ourselves in a destabilized world, especially if we’re already economically marginalized due to our race, gender, sexual orientation, or age. As many of you know, CTA is a burgeoning hub for young progressive Catholics, and young people in particular are graduating into an economy in disarray. Hopes of paying off debilitating student debt look less likely by the day while the costs of basic needs like food and housing take up larger portions of income. And even in “good times,” capitalism cultivates isolation by pushing euphemisms of rugged individualism and the bootstrap mentality. This takes an emotional, spiritual, and physical toll. Considering the financial necessity and the desire for authentic connection, it is little surprise that young people increasingly live in communities, co-ops, and other alternative setups.  

Recognizing young people’s circumstances is critical to bringing them into our movement. How can we empower young people who may have to work two or three jobs to also work for Catholic reform on their own time? If we want to build a movement that is accessible to low-income people, we must think creatively about how to empower them to work with us. 

But creating alternatives is not only a strategy for empowering young and economically precarious people. Experience tells us that alternatives are also how longtime church reformers sustain this work over the long haul. 

Many CTA members are particularly passionate about creating alternatives. They may be burned out from years of lobbying and education work — and see creating alternatives as both fruitful and spiritually enriching to their own lives. They may not attend mass at their local parish anymore but consider themselves irrevocably Catholic. Though CTA has never consciously positioned itself as an alternative to the Roman Catholic Church, we have nevertheless become a spiritual home for many who seek alternatives. It is time that we consciously nurture the alternative Catholic communities that have sprung up around the country — and coordinate them with the people who continue to lobby the Catholic institutional leaders; who are educating their fellow Catholics; and who are disrupting the oppressive status quo through direct action. 

We need to coordinate with these other strategies because alternatives on their own are not enough. They too easily become a form of withdrawal from the world, a utopian endeavor that ignores the plight of people beyond their walls. That is why we combine alternatives with the other three strategies. While education, lobbying, and direct action push for change in the hierarchical church, alternatives demonstrate what a new church could look like. 

In other words, we need the skills and passion of those who have already begun to build a new world to sustain the efforts of those who are still wrestling with splintering the shell of the old world.