Co-Founders of 'Call to Action' to Retire

In March 1996, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska excommunicated diocesan members of CTA,calling the group's goals "totally incompatible with the Catholic faith".

CHICAGO, IL (LifeSiteNews) - The co-founders of the Call to Action (CTA) lay organization, renowned for its long-standing rejection of the Catholic Church's teaching on life and family issues, announced their September retirement in a recent letter to friends of the organization.

"Inspired by the 1976 U.S. Bishop's Call To Action Conference in Detroit, this powerful movement has grown from a handful of Chicago activists to more than 25,000 Catholics throughout the U.S. and Canada. Although our work for Church renewal is far from over, we have decided it is time to retire from our positions as Co-Executive Directors of CTA USA," wrote CTA co-founders Dan and Shelia Daley.

The letter noted that Shelia has not been able to work full time since suffering a serious July 2006 accident. Confident of their organization's future, the couple claimed that CTA has never had "a better foundation of staff members, board members, leadership constituencies and general members to carry us forward."

CTA is the US' leading anti-Catholic "Catholic" organization, founded in the 1970's to enact a radical alteration of traditional Church doctrine and practice. Membership of CTA draws heavily from former clergy, feminist nuns, and homosexuals.

"It was a lot of people like us who were trying to figure out: How do you live out your Christian commitment in this contemporary world? We had tried traditional religious life as options and found those didn't function for us. So this was really a way of trying to search out a new model," Sheila Daley told the Chicago Tribune on Saturday.

CTA's website claims that "the church must reevaluate its positions on issues like celibacy for priests, the male-only clergy, homosexuality, birth control, and the involvement of every level of the church in important decisions" in order to properly address the modern world.

CTA has aligned itself with other dissident groups, such as the pro-abortion Catholics for a Free Choice and the pro-homosexuality New Ways Ministry.

In March 1996, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska excommunicated diocesan members of CTA, writing that the group's goals and actions were "totally incompatible with the Catholic faith".

A letter from the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Church's supreme tribunal and the highest judicial authority after the Pope himself, dismissed the CTA's request to overturn the excommunication with a terse message that it had "no competence" to overturn the decree.

The Signatura's letter reiterated a December 2006 letter from the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops, Giovanni Cardinal Battista Re, upholding the 1996 decree.

In his letter, Re said CTA and other dissident groups were "causing damage to the Church of Christ" and that the Bishop's action "was properly taken within your competence as pastor of that diocese."

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