For an institution as ancient as the Catholic Church, reform need not represent an opposition to tradition. On the contrary, meaningful reform can involve recovering dimensions of the Church’s earliest traditions that have been overshadowed, forgotten, or diminished over centuries of institutional development.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply deciding whether the Church should change. It is determining what must be preserved, what can legitimately evolve, and who should have a voice in making those distinctions.
Few people have approached these questions from as many perspectives as Rene Reid. A theologian, former religious sister, broadcaster, public official, author, and advocate for Catholic renewal, Reid has spent decades examining the complex relationship between faith, institutional structures, and the participation of ordinary Catholics. Her work with Catholic Church Reform International (CCRI) represents perhaps the clearest expression of that continuing inquiry.
Founded in 2013 by Rene Reid and the late journalist Robert Blair Kaiser, CCRI emerged shortly after the election of Pope Francis with a deliberately international mission: to support a vision of the Church in which clergy and laity walk together as a synodal people.
The organization brought together Catholic organizations and individuals interested in renewal, particularly greater participation by lay Catholics in Church governance, the development of synodality, the equal treatment of women in both service and ministry, and open dialogue about the contemporary questions confronting Catholic communities throughout the world.
Reform Without Abandoning Tradition
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Rene Reid’s approach is that reform is not presented as a rejection of Catholic tradition. Rather, it is an effort to bring renewal to the Church by recovering elements of its earliest Christian experience and asking how those traditions might speak to the Church today.
That distinction is important.
Religious institutions can become caught between two powerful instincts: the desire to protect inherited structures and the recognition that those structures exist within an ever-changing human world. CCRI occupies that challenging space, asking whether greater participation, consultation, transparency, and institutional accountability might strengthen rather than diminish the Church’s identity.
The organization has consequently advocated for reforms that include greater lay participation in Church governance, including a meaningful role in the selection of bishops, equality for women, optional clerical celibacy, effective accountability in responding to clergy sexual abuse, and greater inclusion of LGBTQ Catholics.
These are not merely administrative questions. They reach into a much deeper issue: Who belongs within the Church’s decision-making processes, and how should authority function within a global community that professes itself to be the People of God?
From Vatican II to Synodality
CCRI’s intellectual framework is closely connected to the participatory vision of the Second Vatican Council. Its work has consistently returned to the conviction that ordinary Catholics should not simply receive decisions handed down by institutional leadership. They should also have meaningful opportunities to participate in the conversations that shape the Church’s future. This belief does not belong to CCRI alone but is shared by all reform communities.
That philosophy became particularly visible during the Synod on Synodality. Between 2021 and 2024, CCRI organized international consultations involving participants from different regions of the world and compiled their reflections for submission to the Vatican’s Synod office.
But this commitment to participation did not begin with the Synod. In 2013, the organization organized an international teleconference involving Catholic reform organizations from several countries. That effort resulted in the group sending a letter to Pope Francis advocating greater lay involvement in Church governance. During the 2014 Synod on the Family, CCRI also convened reform-minded participants in Rome.
The pattern is revealing. CCRI’s approach has been less about issuing declarations from a distance than about creating opportunities in which people can be genuinely present, heard, and engaged in meaningful dialogue.
Church as a Conversation
That may ultimately be one of Rene Reid’s most significant contributions to Catholic reform. Through webinars, educational programs, international forums, podcasts, and Small Christian Communities, CCRI has treated dialogue not simply as discussion, but as a meaningful form of participation in the life of the Church.
This approach has significance beyond Catholicism.
At a time when institutions of every kind increasingly struggle to persuade people that their voices matter, CCRI raises a question that is both religious and universal:
Can an institution remain faithful to its identity without allowing the people within it to help determine what that identity requires in the present?
For CCRI, the answer appears to be yes. Indeed, meaningful participation may be one of the ways an institution remains alive and faithful to its deepest purpose.
A Return to the Church’s Earliest Traditions
One of the most compelling arguments for Catholic reform may therefore be found not in abandoning the Church’s tradition, but in recovering parts of that tradition that have been overshadowed by centuries of institutional development.
The earliest Christian communities provide a striking example.
Before Christianity developed the elaborate structures of dioceses, parishes, seminaries, chancelleries, and ecclesiastical offices that characterize the Church today, Christians gathered primarily in homes and small communities. Faith was lived and nurtured through relationships, hospitality, shared prayer, service, and participation in the life of the community.
The home itself often became the center of Christian worship and community.
The New Testament also identifies women who played important roles in these earliest Christian communities. Lydia, for example, opened her home to Paul and his companions following her conversion. Priscilla, together with her husband Aquila, became an important co-worker in the early Christian movement. Paul also refers to Phoebe of Cenchreae as a diakonos of the church, a term that has been translated as “deacon” or “minister.”
These examples challenge the assumption that women were merely passive recipients of the Gospel in the early Church. Women welcomed Christian communities into their homes, supported missionaries, cared for fellow believers, and exercised important forms of ministry and leadership.
The Church’s earliest communities were not without structure or authority. But they also reflected a degree of communal participation that invites renewed reflection today.
The Conversation Continues
For Rene Reid, reform does not appear to be a rupture with Catholicism or an attempt to discard its traditions. Rather, it is an effort to bring renewal to the Church by asking it to look again at the richness and diversity of its own history.
CCRI therefore occupies an intriguing position in contemporary Catholic life, not outside the institution looking in, but within a centuries-old conversation about what the Church has been, what it is today, and what it might yet become.
Perhaps that is where meaningful reform has always begun.
Not by abandoning tradition, but by asking whether tradition itself has more to offer than we have remembered.
Not by ending the conversation, but by insisting that more voices be welcomed into it.
And not by weakening the Church, but by trusting that a Church willing to listen, reflect, and walk together may ultimately discover a deeper faithfulness to the Gospel and to the earliest traditions from which it first emerged.
