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"As soon as I lie down, I fall peacefully asleep, for you alone,
O God, bring security to my dwelling." Ps 4:9

For all the press and media attention VOTF does and doesn't receive in our 24/7 efforts to realize our goals, there remains a constantly thriving aspect underlying all that we say, do and try to do - prayer for each other and inclusive of other.

Catholics are pray-ers. It is our tradition. But our praying seems to be taking on a dimension that is putting our critics on notice - it is binding us across boundaries of location, opinion, politics and personal experience. The survivors have taught us the irrelevance of all that divides by moving us en masse toward justice. The Church has taught us the price of separation from Gospel values and the place of those values among Catholics, by the public response to morally bankrupt bishops and archdiocesan hardball legal cowering.

VOTF is teaching, too, by learning alongside Catholics everywhere that we are called to pray as Jesus taught us and to speak out as Jesus taught us. The promise that comes of this communal understanding is evident in many places - among priests who sit in dialogue with laity, among lay people who sit in dialogue with bishops, and in the bond that continues to grow stronger between survivors and laity. Recently, this last was demonstrated again in the standing ovation VOTF received at SNAP's St. Louis, Missouri convention in June. VOTF is both humbled and energized by this resounding "thank you." Our own thanks to the survivors for all that they continue to teach us about courage and truth will ring out for generations.

What seemed audacious two years ago is now routine all over the country - lay people writing and planning liturgies, using as models the Prayerful Voice initiative begun at the earliest meetings of a fledgling VOTF. You will read in Affiliates' News of one diocese after another engaged in VOTF-sponsored healing masses and liturgies and interactive homilies, all of these animated by support for survivors, our priests and our Church.

Survivor Vinnie Nauheimer reminds us in his poem, reprinted here, that the "power of God is still in the pews." Wherever VOTF representatives are giving witness - St. Louis, MO or Dallas, TX or New Zealand or the local parish - the truth of Vinnie's words resonates. Together, we pray - a tradition that seems better than ever.

Peggie L. Thorp, editor

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