VOTF Working Group
Goal #3 – Structural Change
Submitted by Margaret Roylance

What does VOTF mean by structural change? Many lay Catholics express concern about this issue. They are reluctant to become involved with any group that might damage our precious heritage of faith, even as they acknowledge that the events of the past year have revealed profound flaws in the human institutional life of our Church. A year ago, the Representative Council of VOTF directed that a group be formed to clarify what VOTF wishes to change, and how we intend to go about changing it. That group was the Structural Change Working Group or SCWG. Its membership was drawn from four states, and its first eight months of existence was dedicated to preparing a statement on what VOTF means by structural change. That statement was approved unanimously by the Representative Council at its meeting on February 22, 2003.

Since the unanimous passage of the statement last February, the SCWG has been working with great dedication to put the words of the statement into action. VOTF and the SCWG said that we would work to empower active, collaborative, effective and representative pastoral councils, finance councils, and safety committees in every parish in the US. In order to achieve this national goal, we recognized that we would need to provide significant educational support and resources, and that we also needed a forum for a national discussion about these issues.

The first step we took was to expand our membership from the original nine members to more than twenty. Since our membership is spread across a wide area of the country, we have relied heavily on technology to communicate with each other and coordinate our efforts. Between monthly meetings we use e-mails, chatting and teleconferencing to stay connected. The photo shows SCWG member Mary Freeman of Kingston, RI, chatting electronically with members of the group within the SCWG that is working on supporting parish pastoral councils (PPCs).

Mary leads this group, together with Gaile Pohlhaus, who lives in Wayne, PA and teaches theology at Villanova. They are currently designing a questionnaire to learn more about the status of PPCs throughout the country. We have discovered that no such survey has been carried out since the 1980’s, and understanding more about how PPCs actually function across the country is a critical first step in helping to renew them. We have strongly encouraged individual VOTF members to become members of their PPCs, and we hope to provide them with solid suggestions for operations and best practices when they do.

Similar groups have been formed within the SCWG to support finance councils and to form and support safety committees. Every parish should have a finance council, according to Canon Law, but increased breadth of representation, openness and accountability may be required to ensure that we are prudent stewards of the gifts God has given us. Parish safety committees are new lay groups, formed in response to the current crisis that work to ensure that all members of our faith communities understand the importance of protecting our children and are committed to it. We believe these committees are of the utmost importance for the safety of our children and anyone who may be at risk, and that they offer an opportunity to begin rebuilding the trust in our Church, which has been so badly damaged by all that has come to light.

In the structural change statement approved last spring, we promised to provide a Primer (a guide that seeks to impart a basic understanding of a subject) on Church Structures. We identified the need for such a resource early on when we realized that, despite many decades of Catholic education among us, we didn’t fully understand how our Church functions as a human institution. If we are to propose changes, we must first understand what we seek to change. For example, if we are aware that Diocesan Statutes actually carry more legal weight than policy directives from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, we will focus our energies for change where they will be the most effective – on dialogue with our local Bishops. We are currently going through a final review of the Primer with Fr. Ladislas Orsy, S.J., who has been retained by VOTF as a professional outside consultant in canon law and related matters. We hope to make it available to affiliates across the country some time in September.

In response to the need for a national forum on shaping change in our Church, we have developed the Structural Change Network or SCN. The SCN has been operating in a test phase for the last several months, and will be officially launched on September 8, 2003. The SCWG would like to thank those VOTF members across the country who have participated in the SCN during this period. During the test phase, many issues have been addressed, and there will continue to be room for creative, free form discussion. Initially, there will also be four focused topics for discussion on the SCN: pastoral councils, finance councils, safety committees and lay involvement in pastoral selection. Each of these topics will have a facilitator, who will keep the discussion on track and give a monthly report to the SCWG on suggestions or recommendations that have emerged. The SCWG will try to provide the best of these ideas with the national attention and recognition that they deserve, since a good idea from Michigan might be used to solve a problem in Connecticut, or vice versa. If you are interested in being a part of the SCN, you must have an account on Yahoo (available at no charge) and request membership at SCN_Moderator@yahoo.com. In order to participate in the launch, you must join by August 28, 2003. If you wish to propose a new discussion topic for the SCN, and are willing to moderate, or have any other questions or comments, please contact us at scn@votf.org. If you would like to read the VOTF Structural Change Statement, please go to the VOTF website at http://www.votf.org/Structural_Change/structural.html

Voice of the Faithful, VOTF, "Keep the Faith, Change the Church,"
Voice of Compassion, VOTF logo(s), Parish Voice, and
Prayerful Voice are trademarks of Voice of the Faithful, Inc.

Voice of the Faithful is a 501(c) 3 tax-exempt organization.