Call to Action: Excommunicated!

Call to Action: Excommunicated!

Catholic World News reported today that the Vatican has confirmed the excommunication order by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, for members of Call to Action. (I reported on this for Catholic World Report when it first happened back in early 1996; It was my first article for the magazine.)

At the time, Bruskewitz announced the excommunication of anyone in his diocese who belonged to Call to Action, Catholics for a Free Choice, any Masonic organization, the SSPX-affiliated St. Michael the Archangel Chapel, the Hemlock Society, or anyone who worked with or for Planned Parenthood. The bishop called these groups “totally incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Call to Action’s local chapter appealed his decision and on November 24, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, wrote a letter to Bruskewitz informing him that the disciplinary action was “properly taken.”

The Vatican has determined that “the activities of ‘Call to Action’ in the course of these years are in contrast with the Catholic Faith due to views and positions held which are unacceptable from a doctrinal and disciplinary standpoint,” Cardinal Re writes. He concludes: “Thus to be a member of this Association or to support it, is irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic Faith.”

Now the decision is specific to Bruskewitz’s order in Lincoln, but it raises an interesting question. If membership in Call to Action is “irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic Faith” in Lincoln, Nebraska, wouldn’t it also be the same everywhere else? And what about membership in organizations that have grown out of CTA, like say We Are Church and Voice of the Faithful? Hmm.

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