UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Thomas C. Fox | Apr. 3, 2015 NCR Today
Robert Blair Kaiser, journalist and inveterate church lover and critic, died at the age of 84 in a hospice center in Phoenix yesterday, on Holy Thursday, with daughter, sons, and grandchildren at his bedside.
Janet Hauter, co-chair of the American Catholic Council, a church reform group, today called Kaiser “a courageous man with the biggest heart of any (church) reformer I ever met; he was dauntless in pushing, prodding and confronting injustice in the church.”
Nearly a decade in the Jesuit order, Kaiser left to become a journalist, covering the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine, and going on to write a half dozen books about church post-conciliar life.
He became an outspoken critic of those he felt were trying to slow down or stop council’s reforms, most notably Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and the bishops they were appointing.
He pressed for reform to the last breaths of his life, a computer on his chest while hooked up to oxygen. In recent months he was finishing a book on Dominican Father Tom Doyle, who for forty years has been one of the church’s most outspoken critics of clergy sex abuse. I worked with him, writing an epilogue for that book, “Whistle: Tom Doyle’s Steadfast Witness for Victims of Clerical Sexual Abuse,” set to be published in June.
Kaiser, lecturer and author, found every vehicle he could to fan the flames of church reform. He was the editor of Just Good Company, an online journal of religion and culture, and co-founder of takebackourchurch.org, a web community of American Catholics whose stated mission was to seek “ownership and citizenship in the people’s church envisioned at Vatican II.” The group advocated the election of local bishops and the power to dismiss them. More recently, he co-founded Catholic Church Reform International, with which American Catholic Council, another church reform group, is associated.
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