GOSPEL OF CHANGE

...The reason, she insisted, is that the churches' contribution cannot advance beyond the organizational and ideological capacity of the U.S...

...The impact of these leadership bodies was limited by the caution or outright hostility of affluent communicants and by the reactionary opposition of the fundamentalists mobilized by television preachers...

...Each year's tally showed more dioceses, more priests, more nuns, more students in Catholic schools and colleges, more charitable institutions, more wealth...

...In an endorsement of the Sanctuary Movement, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston said that Arizona activists Stacey Merkt and Jack Elder had been convicted "on the evidence that they were Christians...

...It draws on Marxist analysis to identify the oppressive structures in society and summons Christians to redress the balance...

...policies...

...Toward the end of the Carter Administration, revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua prompted dramatic shifts in U.S...

...Though he was not yet ready to practice civil disobedience himself, Dingman said, he was there because he believed in what the others were doing...

...Such religious activists are carrying on an ancient and honorable tradition...

...Though it is based on the realities of the Third World, liberation theology has had a profound impact on social activists in the Christian churches of the United States, forcing them to address economic issues as fundamental religious and moral questions...

...They also carried with them an intellectual rationale for their social ministry—the theology of liberation, developed first in Latin America on the basis of insights provided by the Vatican Council and by parallel evolution within the Protestant churches...

...aid to the Nicaraguan con-tras...

...Left as a whole...

...Similarly, when an unprecedented Government surveillance campaign against religious institutions became public knowledge with the indictment of sixteen Sanctuary workers in Arizona last January, more than two hundred bishops, priests, ministers, and rabbis joined with thousands of lay people in urging Congress to investigate the threat to freedom of worship and the assault on privacy involved in electronic eavesdropping by official snoopers...

...The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and such action groups as U.S...

...The ecumenical group that calls itself Plowshares has carried out twelve separate actions since 1980, including symbolic destruction or pouring of blood at nuclear sites...

...It reinterprets Scripture, especially the Exodus account of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, as a call to all oppressed people to free themselves...

...Change has come swiftly to an institution as notorious for its immobility as the Catholic Church...

...Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle has been withholding half of his income tax since 1982 and turning the money over to the World Peace Tax Fund...

...Such radical activism has significantly muted the conflict between denominations as churches reevaluate doctrinal differences and stress agreement on social issues...

...As the movement began to take root, however, another paradox emerged...

...The mass organizational and ideological base is still to be created...

...It is a far cry from the time, barely fifteen years ago, when Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York could confer the Church's blessing on American intervention in Vietnam without a word of protest from a single fellow bishop...

...Planning for prolonged periods of repeated nuclear strikes and coun-terstrikes, or 'prevailing' in nuclear war, [is] not acceptable...

...They continue to appeal for compassion and concern, but evade the inevitability of struggle and conflict...

...The irony was summed up by historian David J. O'Brien: "At the very moment when America gave its complete acceptance to Catholicism as part of the natural order of the nation, the nation no longer appeared a safe haven for the Christian conscience...

...In a recent article in Monthly Review, she wrote, "Despite its high degree of visibility, legitimacy, consciousness-raising effect, and the pressure Christian Left activity has created on public policy debates, it has limited effect in producing binding Congressional resolutions against the Administration's foreign and military policy designs...

...Obviously, the Church was doing something right...

...The mass media prefer to focus on the enormous crowds mesmerized by the charisma of a traveling Pope or drawn to the television evangelists who dabble in right-wing politics...

...Witness for Peace sent an all-Jewish group to Nicaragua at Hanukkah last December, and its teams regularly include Jews,, adherents of Native American religions, and secular humanists...

...foreign policy...

...The content of these letters is no less radical a departure...

...These efforts have become the cutting edge of religion-inspired social and political activism...

...Catholic support of such Protestant initiatives as Sanctuary greatly increased their impact on public opinion...

...The National Lawyers Guild and ACLU no longer feel uncomfortable in supporting and defending church people whose interpretation of their faith has led them to defy unjust laws...

...The change has been most visible and most dramatic in the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy, priesthood, and laity have traditionally tended to toe the line on Government policy...

...For many Catholics, the threat of nuclear war has raised not only a question of survival but a crisis of faith...

...Eventually, however, their prophetic challenges helped bring about some profound changes...

...Support of the mainline Protestant churches-Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, and others—was found mostly at the structural or bureaucratic level, led internationally by the World Council of Churches and nationally by the National Council of Churches...

...Still, there is a radical weakness in the position of those who direct the institutions of organized religion: They lack an effective strategy for change...

...But the gears of change had already been set in motion...

...they yield only to superior power...

...In the past year or two, official reprisals against Sanctuary activists have brought an enormous upsurge in the number of churches willing to harbor political fugitives from Central America...

...Defection by any significant part of this fifty-million-member denomination was perceived as a threat...

...When the Reverend Douglas Roth of Pennsylvania was arrested in November 1984 in a dispute over his sermons castigating corporate "institutional evil," he was joined not only by his own congregation but by ministers of twenty other congregations...

...Gospel of Change BY GARY MacEOIN This is a time of turbulence for the Christian churches in the United States, and especially for the religious enterprise that was once deemed the most staid and conservative of them all, the Roman Catholic Church...

...Arrests of demonstrators exceeded 5,000 in 1984, and the number grows each month...

...Rather, we must say no to the idea of nuclear war...

...Today, the bishops protest South African apartheid and issue pronouncements challenging the Administration's military policies and its shifting of the tax burden from the rich to the poor...

...Obviously, many Americans—and many church members—remain unconscious of the ferment within organized religion...

...The first draft of the economic order directly challenged the philosophy and programs of the Reagan Administration, describing the United States as "a country marked by glaring disparities of wealth and income" and noting, "The level of inequality in income and wealth in our society and even more the inequality on the world scale today must be judged morally unacceptable____Both our cultural values and our tax structures need to be revised to discourage excessively high levels of consumption...

...A small number of determined individuals had to swim for a long time against a strong current of church opinion...

...Proponents of change insist that too much emphasis has been placed on worship and worldliness, when the true measure of the Scriptures is liberation and self-fulfillment...

...Increased economic participation for the marginalized takes priority over the preservation of privileged concentrations of power, wealth, and income...

...Until just a few years ago, the bishops' semiannual deliberations were entirely off limits to the public and the press...

...Out of Central America now welcome alliances with church-related groups...

...But some hard realities remain for what Kathleen Schultz, a Roman Catholic nun, calls the Christian Left...

...He had just sponsored a three-day retreat on nonviolent resistance at which participants in the protest were addressed by Jesuit Dan Berrigan, Father Robert Branconnier of Boston, Sister Evelyn Jegen, and the preacher-editor of Sojourners, Jim Wallis...

...That message was most forcefully articulated in our time by a Catholic leader, Pope John XXIII, but, paradoxically, it was heard more clearly at the outset by Protestants, while Catholics almost ignored it...

...While under ecumenical Christian leadership, they have succeeded in attracting significant numbers of adherents of other religions and of none...

...Under no circumstances," the bishops wrote in their letter on war and peace, "may nuclear weapons or other instruments of mass slaughter be used for the purpose of destroying population centers or other predominantly civilian targets...

...Religiously motivated activism has become a powerful challenge to the neocon-servative forces that dominate U.S...

...These activists are facing increasingly severe prison sentences-one indication that their efforts are having an impact...

...The change is visible not only among activist churches but also among traditional ones: Alliances have been forged between such unlikely partners as conservative Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestant sects united in their alarm at the trend toward church revitalization...

...For the first time since John Carroll was named bishop of Baltimore in 1789, American Catholic bishops have challenged major policy positions of the U.S...

...Liberation theology is a radical departure for Christian thought...

...The number of support churches and groups is in the thousands and still growing...

...More than a thousand members of Witness for Peace have shared with Nic-araguans the risks of U.S.-sponsored war...

...domestic and foreign policies...

...Most of today's protesters are rank-and-file church members, and their actions take many forms, from daily civil disobedience outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., to nationwide sit-ins at the offices of members of the House and Senate who voted for U.S...

...But those who bear witness today are finding more support than ever before within the formal framework of organized religion...

...The waiting line for Witness for Peace delegations stretches into the middle of 1986...

...In the preparation of these letters, however, they invited public participation, issuing drafts for comment and then engaging in extensive rewriting...

...Religious activists are a small elite...

...The mostly Protestant founders of Clergy and Laity Concerned made few friends within their churches when they began voicing opposition to the Vietnam war twenty years ago...

...Single-issue groups found they had common concerns that crossed organizational lines...

...Pope John's call for a rethinking of world priorities in the encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) was universally hailed, but it found little resonance among his coreligionists...

...But ministers and priests like Paul Kabat are beginning to leave their mark...

...Many thousands have traveled to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to protest interventionist U.S...

...American "military advisers" were sent to El Salvador, the first covert actions were mounted against Nicaragua, and the press disclosed that the CIA had long used religious personnel abroad—some knowingly, some unwittingly—to gather intelligence...

...On the contrary, "a church remade in the American image, the goal of Catholic liberalism for over a century, now seemed to many the basest form of blasphemy...

...Among the Plowshares, six are behind bars, including Elizabeth McAlister, Phil Berrigan's wife, who is serving three years as a "terrorist...

...The Catholic bishops' draft letter on the economy is the latest sign of the churches' growing determination to help set the nation's social agenda...

...Retaliatory action, whether nuclear or conventional, which would indiscriminately take many wholly innocent lives . . . must also be condemned...

...Last February, Maurice Dingman, Catholic bishop of Des Moines, Iowa, stood by the white-painted line at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, to offer his "wholehearted support" to 200 men, women, and children walking toward arrest in a civil disobedience protest against the Strategic Air Command's nuclear weapons...

...Similarly, the Berrigan brothers, though ordained as priests, were scorned within the church when they carried their protests beyond the bounds of convention...

...Catholic bishops and comparable leaders of other churches tend to receive headline attention...

...In theological terms, the upsurge of social activism reflects a new concept of the churches' role in society...

...We have to refuse to give incense—in our day, tax dollars—to our nuclear idol," he says...

...Two recent statements by the Catholic bishops—one on war and peace and the other on the economic order—are particularly noteworthy, both for their content and for the way they were prepared...

...This coalition opened up a new field of church-oriented social activism—a challenge to the basic rules of capitalism— about which we are likely to hear much more in the years ahead...

...Far too many people are homeless and must seek refuge from the cold in church basements...

...National reliance on weapons of mass destruction and expressed readiness to use them is increasingly perceived as blasphemy and idolatry...

...the churches, after all, have never lacked for prophGary MacEoin, a founder of and consultant to the Washington Office on Latin America, writes frequently about the Catholic Church...

...public policy today...

...Religious protesters against the nuclear arms race have moved to the vanguard...

...In 1960 came the final breakthrough, the election of a Catholic President...

...Plowshares includes thirty-eight Catholics, thirteen Quakers, other Protestants, humanists, and a Jew...

...Similarly, the changes proposed by the Council he summoned, Vatican II, were received more seriously and enthusiastically by Protestants than by most of the Pope's own cardinals and bishops...

...On this point all historical experience is clear: The powerful are unmoved by appeals to their compassion...

...Within their own constituencies, new "reflection and action" networks urged faith-oriented citizens to engage in critical social analysis and to participate actively in social protest...

...In a recent letter from his cell in the Federal prison at Sandstone, Minnesota, Father Paul Kabat, one of the Silo Pruning Hooks who tried to disarm a missile silo in Missouri, wrote, "Being realistic, I know that 99.9 per cent of all Americans are not aware of our action and do not even want to know about it...

...Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, exerted an incalculable influence on people of all faiths and of none, but she was dismissed as an eccentric visionary by her church...

...Dingman represents a small but growing number of Catholic bishops...

...Within the Catholic Church, social activism has moved gradually up the hierarchical ranks...

...The ecumenical Washington Office on Latin America, for example, established in the early 1970s, shared its expertise with many newcomers whose interests encompassed such issues as the status and role of women and minorities in church and society...

...Catholic participation was also more disturbing to Ronald Reagan and the Right, since Catholics had always been especially supportive of U.S...

...The media respect authority and invest with credibility those who wield power and influence...

...Almost invariably, however, the laity, whether Catholic or Protestant, waits for a clerical leader to issue a call to action...

...Other factors moved the churches along...

...Witness for Peace and the church-based Sanctuary Movement constitute direct challenges to the Reagan Administration's policy toward Central America...

...An informal tally conducted last spring listed ninety-nine Protestant, thirty-six Catholic, thirty-six Quaker, twenty-eight Unitarian, and eight Jewish sanctuaries...

...So even as we rejoice in the newly discovered or rediscovered social conscience of the churches, we must acknowledge that a wide gap separates conscience from constructive and effective work toward meaningful change...

...The emerging Christian social activists responded in various ways—displaying international solidarity, engaging in urban political work, and forming national policy lobbies...

...The Catholic response, on the other hand, began at the grass roots, though the leadership was at first provided mainly by priests and nuns...

...The growing gap between a small minority (including Catholics) in a few rich countries and the vast majority in the poor countries, which emerged as a central issue at the Vatican Council, was brought home to Catholics in the United States by missionaries returning from Latin America and Africa...

...The rise of the New Right, with its highly visible religious component, elicited a strong response from social activists, culminating in the construction of a "peace church" spanning every denomination and confession that has moved rapidly from protest to civil disobedience...

...Government...

...From where it was sitting comfortably, the Catholic Church in the United States had everything going for it in the 1950s...

...Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Brownsville, Texas, agrees: "I am proud of Jack and Stacey and those who lay their reputations and lives on the line to protect, nourish, and care for the poor of other nations who seek nothing more than the same opportunity our refugee forefathers sought and obtained during the past two and more centuries...

...Paul Kabat and three other members of the Silo Pruning Hooks, a kindred group, received even harsher sentences—up to eighteen years—last February for damaging the hatch cover of a Minute-man II silo...

...ets...