Call To Action - History

History

In 1971, Pope Paul VI wrote that the laity of the Catholic Church should "take up as their own proper task the renewal of the temporal order". He further wrote that, "it is to all Christians that we address a fresh and insistent call to action." In response to this, the bishops of the United States put together the Call to Action Conference in Detroit, Michigan in 1976.

At the conclusion of the three-day conference, the 1,340 delegates voted that the Catholic Church should "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," though they never explicitly proposed changing the Church's position on these issues. They also called for an end to racism, sexism, and militarism in the United States.

Although many of the United States bishops were sympathetic to the political aims of Call to Action, most of them disavowed or avoided discussing the conference's demands for changes to doctrine and organisation within the Catholic Church. As a result, the Call to Action organization that was born out of the Detroit conference was run by laity. By 1978, it had been securely established in Chicago, and by the 1980s it had spread throughout the United States.