Thursday, December 26, 1985

Akron Beacon Journal

MAVERICK
CATHOLICS:
~
The Covenant
Communities
After 8 years, Bread of Life went stale for one member.
"Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to Thy Word." Luke 1:38.

By Laura Haferd Beacon Journal Religion Writer

 Peggy Norris was probably the highest-ranking unmarried "handmaiden" in the Bread
of Life administration. But her duties were modest in the close-knit Christian community:
She was an office manager for the community's leader, Dick Herman. In November 1984,
after devoting eight years to the community, Miss Norris decided she had had enough. She
left the Bread of Life, convinced that Herman and the community coordinators were
preparing to lead the group out of the Catholic Church.

Now an executive secretary to two vice presidents of Akron City Hospital, 32-year-old
Miss Norris speaks of her years with the Bread of Life without bitterness, but with a tone
of soft regret. "I had made a lifelong commitment" to become a covenant member, she
said. "About 65 of the members had it. I was the first one to break it. It was pretty
devastating."

When she left the community, its headquarters was in the former St. Peter's convent on
Russell Avenue in Akron. Before that, the community rented administrative property
owned by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland at 138 Fir Hill, near the University of Akron.
The Bread of Life no longer leases Catholic Church property for its office, now located in
one of the community's homes at 777 Biruta St. Members either in family households or in
group homes of single women or single men live in neighborhood clusters. One district,
Miss Norris said,' was formed near St. Peter's Church, another in west Akron in the St.
Sebastian Church area and a third in Firestone Park. In all, there were about 300 members
when she left a year ago.

An early' Bread of Life policy statement outlined the community's intended relationship
with the Roman Catholic hierarchy: 5 "The Bread of Life is: (1) under the authority of the
local bishop; (2) loyal to the church's teaching . . . and (3) aimed at supporting the church's
mission." - But when Miss Norris began to question the leaders' negative response to
directives from Cleveland Catholic Bishop Anthony Pilla in 1984, Herman questioned her
sanity, she said. "The more questions I asked Dick, he implied I had a mental problem,",
she recalled. "He said I had been under a lot of stress. 'We've noticed you have not been
able to think clearly lately,' he told me. 'We think you should move in with an older
married couple. "

During her years with Bread of Life, Miss Norris embraced the group's philosophy of
unquestioning subservience of women to men, she said. She said she was accustomed to
following Herman's directions on how to live, submitting her personal plans and activities
to community approval. For example, she said, she had accepted a decision by her
"spiritual head" revealed in a "prophecy" that she was meant by God to remain single.
 Now, she said, she thinks that prophecy was no more than a convenience for the
community leadership, which couldn't afford to lose her full-time office skills. If she
married, she would be expected to stay at home. "Of course they thought I should be
single," she said. "It filled their needs so well."

In the Bread of Life, women and men are strictly segregated "so men can learn to be
men and women can learn to be women," she said. A married woman's role is "to support
her husband and raise a family and to learn all the things involved, things like canning,
homemade bread, making all of the clothes," she said. "The father is the final authority,
and the mother's authority comes from the father," she said.

These strictures of the committed Christian life are aimed at combating the influences
of the degraded modern world, she said. "I had a pretty hidden life, really," Miss Norris
said. "I was removed. My whole day was spent in my job for the community, my evenings
in community activities."

She didn't read newspapers, she said. Her home didn't have a television. She attended
no movies. "I would go shopping now and then," she said, "but not very often" because she
made her own clothes.

For a time before learning that the leaders felt she should stay single she was a part of
the dating mode of community life. "It's the man's initiative the whole way through," she
said. "It takes definite steps."

First, she said, a couple joins in group dates with other couples. "We went to a lot of
museums," she said. In the next stage, a couple would begin "service dates," helping
others. "We would go to a married couple's house and paint their living room," she said,
"or get a group of community children and take them for a hike or something along those
lines. " If a man thought that a woman would be suitable as his wife, he would ask her to
selectively date." Then would come the final stage before formal engagement: courtship.

The leaders of the community suggest to the men which women they should date. "I
used to type those notes up," Miss Norris said. "It was kind of fun. It was the most
interesting thing going on." On a couple of occasions, her spiritual leader criticized Miss
Norris for "usurping men's power or authority," she said. For example, she said, "when we
were going on a youth activity using my car with a lot of kids in it, I was told I should have
let the man in the community who came with me drive instead of me driving."
 After leaving the community, Miss Norris returned to her university education, which
had been interrupted eight years before. Today, she has almost finished her management
degree at the University of Akron and is learning to cope with life in the outside world
again. Still, there have been tears when she wished to talk with her former community
friends and found them shut off to her.

When she called her best friend in the community two months after leaving, she said
the friend told her, "We couldn't have a relationship because it wouldn't be 'in the truth.' ".
As for her religious convictions, "I'm not even in any religious life today," Miss Norris said.
"I want a vacation from it." '

Covenant group kept at distance by local bishops.

Network has own leaders.
Ann Arbor unit is headquarters
Continued from page B1

[unknown content] munities profess is praised by some church experts as a way to

make Christianity more vivid and involving. Many communities boast priests as members
or chaplains. But some ex-members complain that the lifestyle is too authoritarian, and
the communities sometimes find themselves in conflict with fellow Catholics.

In the New Jersey case, Bishop Dominic Marconi responded to complaints Dec. 11 by
directing the People of Hope to stop holding separate Masses and baptisms and to promise
not to establish Little Flower School as their own separate institution. Critics of the Hope
group reportedly have accused it of being a "separatist cult" that placed women in a
subservient role and was bent on controlling their local parish.

Newark, N.J., Archbishop Peter Gerety met with the People of Hope and told told them
that while he praised their faith, he wished them to enter the mainstream of the church
and redefine the status of female members.

The Baltimore parents who complained about the Lamb of God community objected
most to alleged practices of buying houses in clusters, recruiting young people into an
authoritarian counterculture and excluding others from their society. "People (in the
neighborhood) live in fear of chastisement by this Gospel-living community," a couple
complained in a letter to the archdiocese chancellor.

However, covenant community leaders want nothing more than to structure a life
"faithful to love of the Lord Jesus Christ and enter ever more deeply into the mysteries of
His death and resurrection," said spokeswoman Angela Burrin of the Mother of God
Community in Gaithersburg, Md.

Word of God founder Steve Clark, head of the umbrella Sword of the Spirit Assembly of
Communities, wrote the book on how to govern a covenant branch. His teachings,
contained in Patterns of Christian Community, have been adopted by local coordinators
from Steubenville to Beirut, Lacroix said. "While we have an individual identity in these
various places, we still recognize one common source of authority that governs over our
life," Lacroix said. "So we are, in effect, one international community."

In 1984, Auxiliary Bishop Gilbert Sheldon of Akron recognized "cult-like tendencies" in

the local [community].
Beacon Journal photo by Paul Topie
Hymns are sung by worshipers at Akron University backed by Bread of Life community
By Laura Haferd Beacon Journal religion writer

Akron's covenant community of Catholics is the Bread of Life, founded in 1968 and
known for its evangelistic organizations: the Christian Businessmen's Fellowship and
University Christian Outreach. Bread of Life is also known to church authorities for its
struggle to maintain teaching and recruiting autonomy in the face of "directives" handed
down by Bishop Anthony M. Pilla of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese in November 1984.

The Bread of Life has not complied with the directives and has not "normalized" its
relationship with the church, according to the Rev. Kenneth Wolnowski, diocesan parish-
life coordinator. Former members had accused the Bread of Life of being a cult, devoted to
controlling its members' lives. A church investigation launched by Auxiliary Bishop Gilbert
Sheldon of Akron expressed concern for the practices of personal submission to
community leaders and organizational submission to the interdenominational Word of
God Community of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Asked about the community's association with Word of God, Bread of Life members
would not comment. However, Word of God spokesman Dick Lacroix identified Bread of
Life as a fully "covenanted" community under Word of God's governing structure. A
covenant, in Biblical terms, is a binding contract, patterned after Jehovah's covenant with
the chosen people of the Old Testament.

The Bread of Life has not regained the status it once held as a Catholic organization
recognized by the diocese, Wolnowski said. "There is an amicable relationship" between
Bread of Life and the diocese, he said, "but no official relationship."

Wolnowski said the severing of ties came because Bread of Life founder Dick Herman
has not obeyed Pilla beyond directing members to return to regular parish Mass and
accepting a packet of church teaching materials for consideration.

Herman did not carry through on three other directives: to discontinue recruitment,
publish a document on the community's identity and organization, and send its leadership
for formal religious training. Herman's office said he was not available for comment, and
issued a "blanket refusal" to speak with the press.

The group continues to conduct its evangelistic programs and charitable efforts,
ranging from care, for the handicapped to [] Dick Herman . . . founded Akron group
donations for needy families.

Bread of Life also offers spiritual enrichment programs within Catholic parishes, such
as a Life of Prayer workshop at a recent Catholic singles' seminar at St. Sebastian Catholic
Church. Bread of Life members Tim O'Connor, Mary Murphy, Libby Cook and Tim
Mickunas led participants in religious songs, Bible readings and prayer. "We want to go
out into the wilderness to worship the Lord," said O'Connor, an earnest young man whose
well-thumbed Bible was held together with fabric tape. "It says in the Proverb: 'Fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom.'

Miss Cook, soft-spoken and quietly dressed in a high-necked blouse and serge skirt, told
the group how her regimen of daily prayer had improved her life, gained blessings for
family members and helped her to overcome shyness.

All of this spiritual enrichment is gratifying to pastors, but for Bread of Life to continue
operating under a Catholic identity may be misleading, Wolnowski said. The Bread of Life
extended its evangelistic programs during 1984 and 1985 with a series of "FIRE" events,
spiritual revivals named for "Faith, Intercession, Repentance and Evangelism.,'

[Editor comment: F.I.R.E. was an outreach of the Sword of the Spirit, an umbrella
organization for Charismatic Covenant Communities created by Steven B Clark and Ralph
Martin in 1980. The Bread of Life Covenant Community was a covenanted member of the
Sword of the Spirit. ~ F.I.R.E. was lead by Fr. Michael Scanlan, TOR President of
Franciscan University, Sr Head Coordinator of the Servants of Christ the King and a
Council Member of the Sword of the Spirit; Fr John Bertolucci of the Diocese of Albany, a
radio personality and Catholic Evangelist who was placed in a life of penance and prayer
by his Bishop when the zero tolerance rule was made for Catholic Clergy in 2002 due to
sexual misconduct with minors in the 1970s; Mr. Ralph Martin, a founder of the Word of
God Covenant Community and co-leader of the Sword of the Spirit with Steven B Clark and
currently the director of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit Michigan; Sr. Ann Betsy
Sheilds, a leader of the Servants of Gods Love, a community of celibate, religious sisters in
the Catholic Traditon. End comment.]

Cleveland Auxiliary Bishop James P. Lyke took part in the first FIRE Rally, which drew a
reported 4,000 Catholics to the Cleveland Convention Center last December. Wolnowski
said that the Catholic diocese now views Bread of Life as a group of Catholics; not an
officially recognized Catholic group. It is a fine distinction and one that Bread of Life
members do not consider important. "I go to Mass. I receive the sacraments," said Miss
Murphy,' "I'm a member of Bread of Life; I'm a Catholic. I will always be a Catholic."

Bread of Life community.

[Bishop Gilbert Sheldon] said he found signs that the group indoctrinated its members
with an us-against-them theology of "conflict between the believers and the world." This
attitude, the bishop said, is not consistent with contemporary Catholic teachings. These
complaints are not unique to the Bread of Life community or the Diocese of Cleveland.
Bishops in Baltimore and New Jersey, for example, convened special committees to
investigate the relationship between the covenant communities and the Catholic Church.

Still, in many parts of the country, the communities remain officially sanctioned
Catholic organizations. Taking direction from diocesan officials can be a sore point with
fundamentalist Catholic community leaders, who prefer to manage their flocks affairs
themselves according to their own interpretation of Biblical Christianity.

Another bone of contention is the process of "submission" within and among the
covenant communities. In some networks some Catholic and some independent the
communities are known as shepherding or discipleship groups, with men as the
shepherds and women as handmaidens. Everybody has a shepherd, or personal guide,
under this system. Within the Sword of the Spirit network, this relationship is known as
headship, with every member submitting to his or her personal head. Communities also
are covenanted with one another and "submitted" to one another.
 Some of the networks in the covenant movement, according to research by University
of Akron sociologist Margaret Poloma and cult researcher Eric Fetterolf of Akron, were
founded by Bob Mumford, Derek Prince and Charles Simpson of the non-denominational
Christian Growth Ministries; former Clevelander Larry Tomczak of the Body of Christ-
Christian Restoration Ministries; and Steve Neptune of the Kent Community of Believers.

Neptune and Tomczak's network resulted in the group of Northeast Ohio communities
that includes the North Coast Christian Community, the Tri-County Christian Community
and the Kent Community of Believers, all non-denominational communities, Ms. Poloma
said.

So many community networks have grown up over the years that it is difficult to keep
an updated register of them. They range from very liberal to the very conservative. ' Some,
such as the liberal Sojourners community in Washington, pool their members' financial
resources and own residential property in common.

Others, such as Sword of the Spirit affiliates, practice variations of tithing, from 10
percent of a member's income to much more. While expressing the Second Vatican
Council's emphasis on the spiritual revival of lay Catholics, founders of the covenant
movement paradoxically have harked back to an earlier era of strict discipline and a
radical reaction to the worldly aspects of contemporary American culture.

Ms. Poloma said the movement provides its members with trust in "a total and visible
collective entity" and fulfills their desire for dependence, and "the wish to share
responsibility for the control of one's impulses and the direction of one's life." In effect,
she said, the community replaces the imperfect nuclear family with a perfectable spiritual
community.

"A disciple enters into a master-disciple relationship in order to be formed," wrote

Word of God founder Steve Clark in 1975. "By agreeing to submit to the person who is
doing the formation, the disciple's growth in the Christian life can take place more quickly
and effectively."

[end story]

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