Voices: Telling Our Stories
- ISBN-10
- 1482562480
- ISBN-13
- 9781482562484
- Series
- Voices
- Pages
- 332
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013-03-20
- Authors
- Donna Doucette, Barbara Lapinskas, Voice of the Faithful Members Staff
Description
Read Voices: Telling Our Stories and learn why and how Catholics firm in their faith, but disenchanted with their Church, turn to advocacy as a way to remain whole-remain Catholic-remain committed to the Church they want for future generations. Unlike tens of thousands of discontented Catholics who left the Church, these are some of the "voices" who stayed. A decade after scandal began lacerating the Church's moral authority, these "voices" suggest what healing could look like. When revelations about clergy sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church erupted in 2002, it spawned multiple responses both within and outside the Church. From those responses emerged Voice of the Faithful(r), a reform group that rapidly grew into an international movement. Undaunted by the tasks required to move a 2,000-year-old hierarchical institution, Voice of the Faithful members supported survivors, supported those priests who had spoken out (and sometimes been silenced) for reform, and sought ways to ensure a responsible lay voice in the governance and guidance of the Church. Here, after a decade of media reports, sociological analyses, and citations in thousands of news stories and books, are the words of those members themselves. Voices: Telling Our Stories gathers the words and the hopes of individual Voice of the Faithful members who continue working to break the Church's silence, hold the perpetrators of scandal accountable, and foster justice and healing for the Church. Faithful Catholics who, in many cases, are present or former parish Eucharistic ministers, religious education leaders, and pastoral council members, or otherwise serve centrally in parish life, they refuse to remain silent while their Church hierarchy protects itself instead of the weak and innocent. Voices: Telling Our Stories reveals, in their own words, who Voice of the Faithful(r) members are, why they joined and remain a part of the movement, what being Catholic means to them, what they look for in their Church today, and what they see in a reformed and renewed Church of tomorrow.
