R.I.P CTA

Call to Action, the Roman Catholic reform movement with roots in the liturgical reforms of Vatican II is dying, and many people - most especially CTA members - wonder why. After watching YouTube video from their last annual meeting in Milwaukee, I know exactly why they are dying. They are dying because they have not done a good job of keeping their message contemporary, and the truth is very few people under the age of sixty are energized by the things that energize CTA.

CTA sought to change the Roman Catholic Church from within. As I have argued in this blog before, you cannot change an international organization, religious or otherwise. As a priest who has served a small church full of CTA members in the past, I understand the problems of groups like CTA very well. You see, CTA developed in reaction to real and perceived oppression by Roman Catholic Church authorities, from the Vatican right on down to the local bishops and priests. They wanted to have a say in liturgy, they wanted women to be able to read from the lectern during Mass, they wanted to have someone acknowledge that their little feelings had been hurt. They wanted folk Mass, they wanted women priests, they wanted their Church to be responsive to them - and they wanted all of it to happen right now.

The problem is that life doesn't work like that. We don't get our way very often, even less often when we want our way in a multi-national organization in which we are a stunning minority.

So they started finding sympathetic priests to celebrate Mass for them at their meetings, and then (moving from the sublime to the ridiculous) they started designing their own Masses. If you search CTA 2009 on YouTube, you will see the result; geriatric "dancers" prancing around as if they were in a commercial for Geritol and carrying all sorts of things, a geriatric thurifier with no training doing his best to set the place on fire and/or hit the priest in his head with the thurible, absolutely absurd looking puppet costumes being worn by human beings, and a geriatric crucifer in a wheel chair struggling to hold the processional cross (which can be difficult for young ambulatory people) as she is wheeled up the aisle. There are a host of other nonsensical goings on, including representatives of the oxmoronic "Roman Catholic Women Priests" (who aren't Roman Catholic Priests at all - please see my blog on that subject) wearing scarves instead of stoles and butchering the "liturgy" in sing song voices while stumbling over the poorly chosen words of that same psuedo liturgy.

Good ceremony requires that one be educated in good ceremony and then that they stick to the rules. It requires that people rehearse ceremony, and that they do it over and over until it flows smoothly. It also requires that people be honest with one another about how something looks. Most of these CTA types are much too concerned about being nice, and the result is that they let their friends embarass themselves while they look on and say how wonderful it all is. They are the liturgical equivalent of these fools who convince their tone deaf friends to audition for American Idol.

Younger people will not join CTA - and by younger I mean most anyone under sixty - because they don't like making fools of themselves. When I served my CTA-like parish they had an absolutely horrid "Advent Wreath Procession" during the Christmas Eucharist that finally died when all the young people had embarrassed themselves by participating in it and refused to do so again. The same is true for these CTA debacles.

CTA is going to die - and that is OK, because everything dies sooner or later. In addition to not wanting to embarass themselves, the under sixty crowd has also learned that trying to change the Roman Catholic Church from within is like hitting their head off a wall. It felt so good when they stopped that they finally left and found a church home that actually accepted them for who they are.

The recovery movement has a saying. They define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. CTA is, by that definition, absolutely and incurably insane. Rest in Peace, CTA!