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  Catholic Group Convenes to Change the Church

By Delfin Vigil
San Francisco Chronicle [San Francisco CA]
October 10, 2005

With their gray hair and their overwhelming preference for decaffeinated drinks, the nearly 100 members of the lay Catholic group Voice of the Faithful who gathered inside St. Matthew's Catholic Church gym in San Mateo on Sunday didn't look intimidating.

But theologian Sally Vance-Trembath of San Francisco said leaders of the Catholic Church see the group as a force to be reckoned with.

"Fifty years from now, the Voice of the Faithful will be remembered as the tiny pebble that rolled down the hill and became the biggest thing to hit the church," Vance-Trembath, 51, said before delivering a keynote address to the group, which gathered to discuss its potential role in choosing the next archbishop to lead the San Francisco archdiocese.

The post has been vacant since August, when Archbishop William Levada left for the Vatican, where he now runs the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that oversees matters of church teachings. The San Francisco archdiocese includes Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

Vance-Trembath, who holds a doctorate in theology from Notre Dame University, said it was common during the first millennium of the church's history to include the laity in choosing bishops, but in the past 500 years, that power has shifted exclusively to church leaders.

Founded in the suburbs of Boston in 2002, the Voice of the Faithful has grown from a group of 25 to an organization of dozens of affiliates with several thousand members across the country.

"Keep the faith, change the church" is the Northern California affiliate's motto, according to a sign taped beneath the basketball rim at St. Matthew's on Sunday.

The group sang, read Scripture, broke into small groups for discussion and ultimately named people they could see as new archbishop of San Francisco.

"We're here to revive a very ancient tradition where the laity are intimately involved in the designation of the archbishop," said local Voice of the Faithful leader Jim Jenkins.

Selecting a new bishop is the Voice of the Faithful's focus right now.

"Sexual abuse is not the biggest crisis in our church," Vance-Trembath said. "A bishop's deceit is the crisis -- because bishops did not tell the truth about priests abusing children. If we can have a say in who becomes bishop and what qualities they must have, we can end that crisis."

Jenkins said leaders of the San Francisco archdiocese have tried to stunt the group's growth.

Archdiocese spokesman Maurice Healy acknowledged Sunday that he rejected the group's attempt to buy an advertisement announcing the meeting in Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocese's monthly newspaper, which he edits.

Healy, who cited Levada's recommendation not to endorse Voice of the Faithful, said he has no problem with parishioners wanting to meet at Catholic churches to discuss the qualities they would like to see in a new bishop.

But he refuses to promote any event affiliated with the Voice of the Faithful.

"I'm a faithful Catholic, but they are not my voice," said Healy, calling the group presumptuous. "They are a small number of Catholics who have liberal agendas that are not conducive with my understanding what it means to be Catholic."

Peter Davey of Danville said that a similar request to advertise in an Oakland Catholic newsletter was "conveniently lost" and that most churches frown upon the group distributing leaflets.

"As soon as we start meeting and talking about it at church, they respond with a sort of 'How dare you?' " said Davey, 65, a parishioner in San Ramon and Oakland. "But this is our church. You the bishops are the messengers. It's become a power issue."

The group publicizes its events and mission statements mostly through its Web site (www.votf-sf.org), where it gets mostly positive feedback, said Hugh O'Regan, 59, who runs the site and attends services at Most Holy Redeemer in San Francisco.

"Sometimes we get criticized for 'trying to bring the church down,' " said O'Regan. "And sometimes we'll get messages from nuns who want to come to our meetings but are afraid to because they think they'll lose their positions."

Everyone but perhaps six people at Sunday's meeting in San Mateo appeared older than 40 and all appeared to be Caucasian.

Participants in the meeting named several church leaders they would like to see as archbishop, including the Rev. John C. Wester of San Francisco, who is acting head of the San Francisco Archdiocese. Also on their short list were Richard Garcia of Sacramento and St. Matthew's pastor Anthony McGuire, who helped the group by allowing it to meet at his church.

The group praised such traits as "being a man of the people and not a prince of the church," being "someone who is down to earth and not full of himself," and not having "an imperial stance."

The selection of the archbishop is ultimately the decision of the pope and may take up to a year, Healy said.

 
 

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