Making the Church Our Own: How We Can Reform the Catholic Church from the Ground Up

by Leonard Swidler

A longtime leader among liberal Catholics lays out a practical program for democratizing and opening up the Church from the local parish and diocese level up, drawing on the unrealized potential of models and reforms through history. As background, he especially focuses on the Enlightenment reform movement in 19th-century Germany that presaged the reforms proposed by Vatican Council II, many of which are still unfulfilled or even reversed. He also discusses the remarkably democratic and lay-involving practices of the Catholic Church in early America. He concludes with a draft constitution for parishes and dioceses to adapt.