Catholic but not Roman Catholic? Local faith leader’s book explains

While Eden Prairie resident the Rev. Trish Sullivan Vanni describes herself as a “cradle Catholic,” she’s no longer a Roman Catholic. Helping people understand what that means is the topic of her new book.

The word “catholic” spelled with a lowercase “c” means “universal.” “The big C ‘Catholic’ evokes Roman Catholic, although, as people will learn in the book, there are actually a number of different ways to be Catholic other than Roman Catholic,” Vanni said.

The 89-page “Reconstructing Catholicism” gives readers a high-level overview of some of those ways. Among them are the Old Catholic movement – which actually isn’t as old as Roman Catholicism – and independent Catholic churches. Vanni is the priest and pastoral director of one such congregation: Eden Prairie’s Charis Ecumenical Catholic Community (ECC). 

Charis is the first ECC congregation in Minnesota, but that branch of Catholicism is only one within what Vanni’s book calls the independent, inclusive Catholic movement. Rather than calling themselves “denominations,” a word often used to distinguish different types of Christian churches, groups within this movement often use the term “jurisdictions.”

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A desire for more inclusiveness

Local control is important to churches within the independent Catholic movement. It’s a concept that, under the term “subsidiarity,” or the principle that every decision should be made at the most local level possible, “is actually a principle in the Roman Catholic Church, although it’s kind of fallen by the wayside, I think,” Vanni said.

Many members of the independent Catholic movement, which has become more prevalent in the U.S. in the last 25 to 30 years, have a Roman Catholic background, Vanni said. Often, they became disillusioned as the Roman Catholic Church pulled away from the momentum of changes inspired by Vatican II. The mid-1960s effort, led by Roman Catholic leader Pope John XXIII, had a goal of updating the church.

“I don’t think we really felt the need for this (independent Catholic) movement in the United States until people began to realize that some fundamental changes that we wanted to see were not happening, and probably were not going to happen,” Vanni said.

Those changes included equal rights and dignity for the LGBTQ+ community, empowering non-clergy to fully participate in the life of the church, and full participation for women in ordained leadership. Ordination is a requirement for many career paths within the Roman Catholic Church.

Vanni originally came to Eden Prairie from New Jersey in 1997 to be director of the Leaven Center, which was inspired by the ideals of Vatican II. The Leaven Center was a project at Pax Christi Catholic Community. Vanni said she recalled the late parish priest, the Rev. Tim Power, leaning over her desk around the year 2000.

He told her, she said, “‘You know, the way the church is moving, we only have about 10 years.’ And he was optimistic, because by the time he retired, in 2004, things were already changing very dramatically under conservative bishops.”

Defining a Catholic identity

Although ordination of women, married people, and LGBTQ+ individuals is more common among churches within the independent Catholic movement, “the truth is that we don’t all relate to every piece of this movement the same,” Vanni said.

For example, some jurisdictions might conduct their prayers in the exact same structure as the Roman Catholic Church. At Eden Prairie’s Charis, the prayer is sometimes traditional and sometimes drawn from other denominations, including non-Catholic. 

The Catholic identity for Charis and other churches within the independent Catholic movement includes honoring Mary, the mother of Jesus, and other saints; observing the same church-year calendar; and recognizing and celebrating seven sacraments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls sacraments “visible rites” and says that, by these rites, “divine life is dispensed.” Among the Catholic sacraments are baptism, marriage, and ordination, or being formally recognized as a member of the ministry.

“I’m hoping that when people discover that you can be Catholic in a setting where sacraments are not denied to anyone, and that you can be Catholic in a system that’s democratic, that’s led collaboratively by laypeople and ordained people, that you’ll say, ‘OK, wow, I want to check that out,’” Vanni said. 

That type of outreach is one goal of her book. Charis members, Vanni said, could use it as a tool for starting conversations. She also thinks it lends itself well to discussion groups. “Reconstructing Catholicism,” she said, is “not filled with, you know, five-syllable, million-dollar theological terms. It’s designed to be something that anybody could read and find very interesting.”

“Reconstructing Catholicism,” subtitled “How Faithful Catholics are Embracing an Inclusive, Emergent Way of Being the Church,” is available in paperback or Kindle format.

Charis: a small community with a geographically wide reach

When Charis Ecumenical Catholic Community got its start in 2017, it involved conversations in an Eden Prairie Library meeting room. It took a few meetings to get everyone up-to-speed on what it meant to be part of the ECC, the Rev. Trish Sullivan Vanni said.

The congregation currently celebrates its Sunday Mass in-person at Prairie Lutheran Church, 11000 Blossom Road, as well as via Zoom webinar. The small congregation has about 80 people on its member list; up to 30 participants could be dialing in via Zoom. They’re coming, Vanni said, “not only from Minnesota, but from around the country, and from Cameroon, where our deacon is.”

“That is just the most wild ride ever, and not typical of ECC churches, or churches in the movement. We are very much an outlier,” Vanni said. 

In pre-pandemic days, Charis was renting a meeting space on Washington Avenue. “The community was growing, and we were gaining momentum and holding workshops. We had a rosary group and a meditation circle,” as well as yoga, Vanni said. “And then suddenly it was me, a tech person and a helper every Sunday in this rental space.”

Using video conferencing skills gained earlier in her career, Vanni moved the Mass onto Zoom, broadcasting from member Karen Goon’s basement. “It was very interactive because unlike, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, we don’t have any liturgical law that says you cannot have a virtual Mass,” she said. 

Charis used the Biblical passage of Matthew 18:20, in which Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” to rethink what it means for modern people to be gathered, Vanni said. 

With existing members already attending the Zoom meetings in 2020, people mentioned it to their friends and family, who told their friends. A doctoral student in Pittsburgh who’d been following Vanni’s career due to an interest in ordination started coming to Charis’s Mass via Zoom, and continued to do so after she finished her program and moved to Cameroon. 

When in-person events returned, “It was, well, what do you do when half the people connected to you are not local?” Vanni asked. “I felt that something really exciting and new was happening, and that we could no more walk away from the people who are remote than have me walk into the sanctuary one Sunday and say, ‘OK, everybody wearing black shoes, you’ve got to go. Everybody that has brown shoes, you can stay.’”

With investments in technology, remote participation in the Mass is now seamless, Vanni said. In addition to the Rev. Besem Etchi, Charis’s deacon, and others who participate from Cameroon, there are community members in Bismarck, North Dakota, and a family in Alexandria, Minnesota, whose teenagers regularly perform some of the readings, which are televised for those attending in-person.  

“It’s like I said, we are outliers. This is not something you’re going to find in the ECC as a whole,” Vanni said.