Let's cut right to the chase. Everyone talks about the weather in the U.S. Catholic Church but no one does anything about it. We propose to do something about not only the weather, but the climate as well -- with your help. In fact, without your help, and the help of a million others like you, we won't be able to demand the action necessary to create the Church we need. If you've been following the horror stories for the past four years, you know it isn't only the spectacle of sex abuse by a relatively few American priests that makes us ashamed of our Church. It is the systematic cover up of that abuse by most of the nation's bishops. Bishops have covered up because they labor on the mistaken assumption that this is their Church, not ours, a Church that is constitutionally unaccountable because of a history that goes back almost a thousand years. In 1086, Pope Gregory VII created a monarchic papacy and a two-tier citizenship in the Church, with elite, celibate priest-people on one side, who set the rules, and common, non-celibate people-people on the other who obeyed them. In 2001, a cardinal in Rome would tell a roomful of reporters how far the modern Church had run with Gregory's high-jacking of the Gospel. "Bishops are only accountable to the pope," said Cardinal Jan Schotte. "And the pope is only accountable to God." This was a far, far cry from the way Jesus envisioned the life of his followers. We learn in Luke 22 that Jesus told the apostles he was giving them a different kind of authority than "the kings of the Gentiles" who lord it over their subjects. "Among you it shall not be so. Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant."

We have a few servant-bishops today. We wish we had more of them. But we would like to do more than wish. We want to push for new laws in the American Church that will make us all accountable to one another, grounding our stand in scripture and the traditions of the primitive Church. In the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great laid down a principle that is eerily appropriate today: "Who presides over all must be chosen by all." Americans who take that principle seriously can only make one conclusion: we must elect our own bishops. And retain the power to un-elect them if they fail to serve us. We don't do that by trying to change the thinking of a pope. Not right away, not unless we think we can persuade a man of power to simply give it up. That's psychologically unsound. History tells us change occurs in the Church from below. Recall St. Francis of Assisi's revolution in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, and St. Catherine of Sienna's in the fourteenth, and the turning in the Church marked by the rise of the Jesuits from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. We can think of one exception: Change did come from the top at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the 1960s, when the bishops wrote a charter for a new kind of people's Church and planted the seeds of further creative change when they worked out the rationale for an incultured Church, revising 400 years of Roman imperialism by righting Church history and re-writing its theology. They recalled the 15th century, when European missionaries began to arrive in Africa and Asia, and imposed their culture and their language on the so-called God-less savages. Backed by colonial soldiers, and relying on colonial law, they taught colonial devotions and a colonial theology in a colonial Church. Enough of that, said those writing the charter for Vatican II. Christ had to be African. He had to be Asian. Christ shouldn't need a passport. Since Vatican II, authorities in Rome have cautiously endorsed inculturation, most notably in the Congo. There, the native Congolese clergy have fashioned a native Congolese liturgy, with drums and dancing and Mass in any of a number of Congolese dialects. American Catholics can understand why Africans need a Church that accords with the way Africans think and feel. But few Americans have thought about building a Church in the United States in keeping with the way most American think and feel. Some Americans tried to do that at the beginning of American history. The first American bishop, John Carroll, was elected by a popular vote of the nation's priests in 1789. And in the 1820s, John England, the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, wrote a constitution for his diocese that gave his people a voice and a vote. After that, unfortunately, Rome insisted on the right to name this country's bishops, often foreigners chosen for their loyalty to Rome, not their willingness to serve the people, and those bishops set a pattern for the American Church that has persisted to this very day. Many bishops act like they work for the pope, and many priests act like they work for the bishops, and the people-people are left to pray, pay, and obey. What can we do? Some say nothing, given the Rome's 200-year-old chokehold on America, and the habitual, almost automatic suspicion in the Vatican itself toward any kind of change. Some say we can revolt, following the example of America's Founding Fathers. But we say it's not necessary to go into formal or practical schism. We just have to persuade the bishops (never underestimate the power of public opinion) to inculturate the Gospel in the United States, creating a modern autochthonous American Church, on the model of the Maronites, the Melchites, the Byzantines, the Copts and sixteen other autochthonous churches in the Middle East that are loyal to the pope, but glory in their own governance, their own married clergy, and their own liturgies. Autochthonous (pronounced aw-TOCK-thun-us) doesn't mean autonomous. It means homegrown. Most of these homegrown churches are very ancient, but John Paul II once said he could approve new autochthonous Churches in mission lands. He may have been thinking of China, where he so dearly wanted to get recognition for the Catholic Church that he was ready to pay Beijing's price — the right to nominate new bishops. If Benedict XVI does that, he would give the Church in China a measure of autochthony. He might also approve autochthony in the United States if he realized this was a way (maybe the only way) to make the American Church credible once more and, by the way, reverse the extraordinary outflow of young people, particularly young women, from a Church that finds itself stuck, for example, in a theory of ministry that bars half its members from serving as priests at a time when priests are in terribly short supply. Canon law endorses a time-honored way for a nation to re-structure its governance. It is called a regional, or national synod. The American Church had three of them in the 1800s, the First, Second, and Third Councils of Baltimore, where rules were set for American Catholics by the delegates, all bishops, no laymen. Updated canon law now says, however, that a national synod can include non-bishops -- up to fifty percent of the delegates. If those delegates were elected by Catholics in every state and claimed active voice, the synod might take on the character of a constitutional convention, and delegates could end up writing a charter for a people's Church. Delegates would surely wrangle over the charter's specifics. But if they want to lead a Church of and for the people, this synod should follow an American constitutional model, with an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. It might call for the popular election of two parliamentary bodies -- a Senate of Bishops and a House of Commons, an elected president (or executive board), and a judiciary appointed with the advice and consent of both houses. Radical? Yes, because such a change in the way we govern ourselves (not a change in what we believe) goes to the root of our problems. Revolutionary? Yes, we're Americans, proud that our country began with a revolution. But what would prompt the bishops (and the pope) to open the gates to such a radical revolution in the American Church? You would. That's why we've created takebackourchurch.org -- to tap and mobilize public opinion. In a mass-mediated age, we've seen the effectiveness of public media campaigns. If public opinion is massive enough, it can topple governments without the firing of a single shot. And it doesn't even have to be that massive. Experts in group dynamics say as little as five percent of the people are enough to create the kind of public pressure that moves even the most dictatorial governments. Did the whole population of Manila (some eight million people) march against President Ferdinand Marcos and force him to flee the Philippines in 1983? No. Just five percent of them: some 400,000, marched down the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a main highway in Metro Manila, while Marcos' military stood aside. We make the modest assertion here that Catholics in the United States have the power to start a radical revolution in the American Church. What they need most is the realization that they are not alone. Before the revolution begins, we need to know who we are, how many we are, and where we want to go. This is why we have built takebackourchurch.org. If the word revolution frightens some American Catholics, good. It is time to become seriously frightened, and the feeling should stir us to act as our Founding Fathers did when they wrote a Declaration of Independence, and resolved to fight for it with musket and ball. But we're not talking about a violent revolution. We won't even write a Declaration of Independence. We will write a Declaration of Autochthony, one that will challenge our priest-people and our people-people to work out a constitution for the American Church that carefully puts aside the Rome-based secretive, half-vast, culturally-conditioned legalisms codified in canon law in return for the kind of servant Church envisioned at Vatican II. Since Vatican II, mainstream theologians, including Pope Benedict XVI himself, have described the Church as something more like a family. If that's the updated model, then the Church should function in the spirit of modern families, where fathers and mothers share authority, and where even the kids are invited to speak their minds. Many American Catholics, moreover, who are far more educated than many of their priests and bishops, won't be treated like kids much longer. We're adults. We want ownership and citizenship in our Church. If you'd like ownership and citizenship in your Church, please sign in here. We want a million people or more to support the cause. Welcome to takebackourchurch.org. Robert Blair Kaiser Rob W. Miller