ARTICLES

Our Model is the Early Christians

New Groups Seeks to Organize the Catholic Voice in Politics

By Skip O'Neel

A number of local Catholics have embarked upon a mission: to rouse the sleeping giant that is the Catholic electorate. They are convinced that if they can get enough Catholics knowledgeable and excited about the Church's social doctrines, they can transform the culture.

The group, principally led by Bill May of San Francisco and Ray Tittmann of Walnut Creek, was formed in the wake of Bill Simon's campaign for governor. Men and women -- many of them active in the pro-life movement -- came together to discuss the Catholic vote. They talked about their great concern over Catholic voters supporting candidates who work against the Church's teachings on life and family. They decided they needed to form an organization that would help Catholic voters see the need to vote Catholic.

Taking similar stock of the public square, groups of the orthodox faithful have periodically come together in the past, pledging to inform the polity with Catholic principles and ideals. First it was the Catholic Campaign for America, headed by now-Congressman Michael Ferguson (R-NJ) and supported by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon and former secretary of education Bill Bennett. Then it was the Catholic Alliance, which was originally intended to become the Catholic adjunct for the Christian Coalition and later became its own organization. It was run by Deacon Keith Fournier, a close associate of Coalition founder Pat Robertson. Later, shortly before its demise, it was run by former Boston mayor and Clinton ambassador to the Vatican, Raymond Flynn.

These were followed by the Republican National Committee's tangential effort to get pro-life Catholics to vote the Republican ticket, as well as a current effort called politicsandvirtue.com, which seeks to bring a Catholic perspective to public policy.

All of these attempts followed the same basic premise: get Catholics organized parish by parish, help them learn the Church's social teachings, especially on culture of life issues, and then get them to the polls. Most of these efforts have failed, however, either because of lack of funding, organization, focus, or a combination thereof.

So what makes this new group called Your Catholic Voice think its efforts will meet with any more success?

According to May, Your Catholic Voice will succeed because it plans to do things differently than its predecessors. "There've been a couple of flaws with past faith-based political organizing efforts," May said. "One common to almost all is that they start with ideology and then use quotes from Scripture or Church teachings to prove their ideology. The second, with some of the Protestant conservative movements is that they don't have the deep social teachings that we Catholics have, which has led some of these groups to become conservative political organizations rather than organizations of faith.

"Our approach is to start with faith, and to remember first and foremost that the Catholic faith is neither liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, but simply true. And we are only going to focus on the truths of our faith as they spring from the four pillars of participation."

May said these pillars are the dignity of life from conception until natural death; the primacy of the family; human freedom; and solidarity with the poor and vulnerable.

May said he believes Your Catholic Voice will never succeed purely through the efforts of the people involved. "It must be led by the Holy Spirit," he said. "So, consequently, prayer is a very, very important part of this movement."

According to each of the organizers, the idea behind Your Catholic Voice is that the more people understand the richness of the teachings and the truths of their faith, the more they will be able to talk about them within their own families and communities. In turn, they will put them into practice through political participation.

"Basically our model is the early Christians," May said. "They came into a culture that is not altogether different than where our culture is today, and they had a major impact on that culture and changed it by the lives they led and the examples they set."

When I pointed out to him that this sounds a lot like Catholic Campaign for America, May responded, "don't use Catholic Campaign as an analogy. We also hope to be a center for coordinated Catholic action. The Your Catholic Voice Web site has all kinds of technologies for supporting grass roots political activities for people to post documents, develop lists, transmit materials by e-mail, an online voter file. So we're using state of the art technology to support coordinated political action."

Former Catholic Alliance head, Ambassador Ray Flynn, agreed that the reach of the internet will help Your Catholic Voice do what no other similar organization has done before. "Before, I did it with a lot of shoe leather, going out to Modesto and Phoenix on all these red-eye flights across the country, speaking to Catholic groups. It was effective and important work. But I never had access to this sort of elaborate technology."

Indeed, in early July, Your Catholic Voice sent out 600,000 e-mails asking Catholics to contact their senators and urge them to confirm former Alabama attorney general Bill Pryor, who is Catholic and unashamedly pro-life, to seat on the federal court of appeals. As Flynn noted, "you send out a press release, and often the press doesn't pick it up. But with the internet, there it is, reaching vast numbers of people out there. It's an incredible way to reach out to so many people and invite people like me to act."

That particular part of the effort will stand or fall with Bakersfield resident Michael Galloway. At the same time that May and his group were discussing forming a Catholic voter outreach, May knew Galloway and his wife Sandy were working with Deacon Fournier to form a similar effort, which they were already calling Your Catholic Voice.

Galloway is a charismatic individual with a compelling background and more verbal energy than seven people combined. After spending 15 years in the motion picture industry, where he worked with the likes of Ray Dolby (of Dolby Sound fame) and Star Wars creator George Lucas, Galloway left Hollywood to found Catholic Online (www.catholic.org) in 1991, which he runs with his wife Sandy. The web site has over five million pages of content, hosts over 1,000 web sites and has the largest search engine of Catholic communities on the Internet.

According to Galloway's bio, in 2001, utilizing his experience and technical skills, he developed "revolutionary Web-based grassroots management and voter relationship management software." Called IntelElect, this technology "provides volunteers and resources to greatly enhance the effectiveness of grassroots activism." The system is used by both the Democrat and Republican Parties, and Galloway plans to use it as the basis for much of the work of Your Catholic Voice.

"We came up with the concept about two and a half years ago," said Galloway. "The GOP came to me because of our massive work with databases, and we were able to do some pretty good work there. But we ran into a problem in that, after the 2002 election cycle, we spent millions collecting data, only to throw it away in the end. At about the same time, some cardinals at the Vatican asked me to look into why issue organizations come and go."

Galloway spent $500,000 and nearly eight months researching the issue. In the end, he said, "the statistics were interesting. Alarming but interesting."

He found that most political organizations have poor business practices, which put them at a serious disadvantage to competitors such as Planned Parenthood and the homosexual Human Rights Campaign. Furthermore, he realized that in the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, despite the amount of awareness and education generated by numerous organizations, "the truth is that abortion is still legal in all 50 states and abortions happen every few minutes." With this 30 years of history, he became convinced that "we have awareness and education, but these have not proved effective."

He, his wife, and Fournier then founded the Your Catholic Voice Movement, whose motto is "Cultivate Your Faith -- Activate Your Voice." They then incorporated Your Catholic Voice as an activist organization and Your Catholic Voice Foundation as an educational arm. The foundation will serve as the evangelical and educational arm of the movement, which will take the Church's sometimes hard to understand social teachings and make them more accessible to a general audience. Long active in evangelical, educational, and policy efforts informed by Catholic faith, Fournier serves as the president of Your Catholic Voice Foundation.

"Education and getting back to understanding what it means to be a faithful Catholic -- not just in name or through baptism but in the way we live -- is critical," Galloway said. He also conceded this will "not be an easy process."

The other arm of Your Catholic Voice will be the political activist arm, which hopes to take those freshly educated Catholics and turn them loose on the electoral process. Galloway notes the "bishops wrote the pastoral document Faithful Citizenship, and they said Catholics have a moral obligation to participate in the political process in their community. The overwhelming question for so many Catholics I hear from through Catholic Online is, what does it mean to be a faithful Catholic? How do I vote? How often do I take Communion? How do we be objective, faithful, and Catholic again? Like our motto says, we want to get people to cultivate their faith and activate their voice."

One problem previous groups have had is an antipathy coming from the priests and bishops. Galloway doesn't believe this will be a problem with his group. "We're helping to get the bishops' message out," he said. "We're here to help them, especially in their vocation as leaders and shepherds of the Church."

"The big difference between us and the groups that have come before us is Catholic Online," said Galloway. "Those groups did education, and we're doing education. But they didn't have the huge database that we do. They didn't have the reach that we do. We are in every facet of the Catholic Church in America. We've worked with dioceses and archdioceses. We've worked with parishes, with publishers, with bookstores." Indeed, looking at the Catholic Online Web site, it is an impressive network that the fledgling organization has at the click of a button.

Hoping to draw upon this vast network, Your Catholic Voice has leased the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for November 8. The group is challenging one million Catholics to show up to celebrate John Paul II's twenty-fifth anniversary as pontiff as well as the canonization of Mother Theresa. Over 20 senators and congressmen have already agreed to come, and every bishop in the country has been invited. Undoubtedly helping their efforts, Ambassador Flynn has agreed to act as the president of Your Catholic Voice, and he will act as the group's chief spokesman as it embarks on its mission of social and political participation. May is happy about Flynn's appointment. The San Francisco resident says, "he makes a wonderful example of a Catholic living his faith in the way the U.S. bishops have called us to."

Flynn said that, for his part, "I think the Catholic voice has been disrespected and even ignored in the political arena today. What I'm going to try to do is organize Catholics across the country and have their voice and their vote not taken for granted or ignored any longer."

The question, however, is how the Catholic voice today is any different than the broader culture, when polls show 80 percent of Catholics contracept, and the same percentage as the general population divorce, abort their babies, and get vasectomies and hysterectomies.

Flynn acknowledged that this is a problem.

"I'm here in Boston, and I'm seeing the voice of the Catholic faith being diminished by the liberal elite and the media," the former politician said. "We need to become an important voice once again for life, family, freedom, and solidarity. That's what my politics is all about and, more importantly than that, that is what the Catholic Church is all about.

"All young people are hearing is, it's politically correct, it's trendy, and it's fashionable to go along with this current culture that we're living in. But it wasn't always that way. When I grew up in working class Boston, we had great reverence for community, for our faith, our country. We worked hard, we played by the rules, we loved the Church. That has gradually been eroding because the media culture is giving young people a different image of what it means to be an American.

"To be an American is to be somebody who loves this country, its religious values, and is concerned about their neighbor and supports and cherishes family. Well, look what we're watching on television. Americans are being conditioned for a different America than the one we grew up in because power has shifted to Hollywood. We need now to begin a new grass roots movement to bring about the teachings of Christ and the value of religion to our country, and this internet technology is what will do it. We've tried the rest, let's try the best. The best was what our parents and grandparents were all about. I agree the country has taken a rather dramatic, negative turn, but we've been down that road. It is not leading us in a right direction. It's time to take a turn and head in the right direction."

Asked what he thinks will help people, young and old, make that turn, Flynn replied simply, "The truth."

"My father, a humble union dock worker, used to say to me, 'Everything will crumble -- money, power, fame will crumble. The only thing that never changes is the truth. The truth remains the truth.' And that's what Church is all about. Our faith is not about a political party or prominent people or wealthy business people. It's really about truth. People will try many things, but they'll always come home to the truth.

"Young people love the pope because he levels with them, he tells them the truth. If people don't believe you're telling truth, they're not going to follow you. The Church needs to get back to that. Be not afraid, that's what the pope tells people. We need to 'be not afraid' of telling people. They may not like to hear it, it may not be popular, but everything will crumble but the truth."

Galloway is confident this venture will succeed. "I am not in this to come in second place anymore," he says. "I'm in it to save the next baby and help change our culture for the better. We signed up 150,000 for Your Catholic Voice before we began any marketing campaign. We've got priests, nuns, even people in the Philippines."

For May, it is not the numbers or tactics that will ultimately guarantee success, but something less temporal. "Again, this will only succeed with the Holy Spirit," he noted. "It's obvious to me we're just along for the ride on all of this."

To learn more about Your Catholic Voice, go to www.yourcatholicvoice.org

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