The Dilemmas of Social Movement Identity and the Case of the Voice of the Faithful

*† This article focuses on the dilemmic nature of identity for challengers within organizations and on their emergent responses. It is based on ethnographic research of one affiliate of Voice of the Faithful, a group of Catholics that formed in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The abiding faith of the group and their commitment to change the church created a dilemma that encapsulates the central question of this article: how do challengers pursuing change of an institution balance commitment and critique, mainstream membership and otherness? Internal challengers manage these dilemmas by rescripting existing stories and telling novel ones to navigate group boundaries and formulate new understandings of their individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures. We trace the ways in which challengers work through contradictions and ambiguity in their emergent identities. This provides an opportunity to explore the existential dimensions of collective identity and focus on the processual nature of storytelling. In February 2002, a small group of parishioners at St. John the Evangelist in Wellesley, Massachusetts began a series of informal meetings to discuss a burgeoning crisis. The crisis was precipitated by a series of stories in the Boston Globe highlighting decades of sexual abuse of young people by priests and the systematic cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese. Within weeks, these meetings swelled to hundreds of concerned Catholics from around the archdiocese, and quickly led to the formation of the Voice of the Faithful (Muller 2004: 56). The organization’s motto expressed the terms of its engagement: “Keep the Faith, Change the Church.” Within six weeks of its formation, the VOTF had settled on three broad goals that remain its cornerstones: (1) to support survivors of abuse; (2) to aid priests of integrity (those who spoke out against the abuses and cover-up) and support reformers; and (3) to pursue “structural change” within the church (Bruce 2011: 13-28; Muller 2004: 60-61). While the institutional church and many other Catholics see members of VOTF as dissidents, they see themselves as faithful Catholics seeking to save the church. Eleven years after the initial meetings, VOTF claims some 25,000 registrants and 150 parish affiliates. Most affiliate chapters of the national organization cluster in the Northeast, particularly in Massachusetts and New York. This research is based on two and a half years of ethnographic observation of one of the most active VOTF affiliates in the Boston area, St. Erasmus. The abiding faith of the members of St. Erasmus VOTF and their commitment to “change the church” creates a dilemma for them that encapsulates the central question of this paper: how do people who see themselves as a loyal opposition handle the dilemmas of individual and collective identity posed by this position? What kinds of identity work do they engage in as challengers-within to maintain both their fundamental identity as faithful Catholics and their identity as change seekers? How is such identity work an existential as well as instrumental activity? Relatedly, as challengers-within, in what ways do they rely on