Conservatives gain visibility on charity

With a mix of traditional theology, cutting-edge technology, and deep determination, a group of Catholic conservatives has changed the atmosphere surrounding tonight's Catholic Charities annual Christmas fund-raising dinner from gaiety to guardedness.

They demanded that Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley withdraw from this most glittering social event of the local Catholic calendar and, after O'Malley did so, generated hundreds of letters to archdiocesan officials and to City Hall urging that Mayor Thomas M. Menino not be honored as the gala's keynote speaker.

But they were unable to force Menino to step aside or to persuade Catholics to boycott the Christmas party in opposition to the mayor's support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage. A Catholic Charities spokesman said yesterday that the $500-a-seat event was sold out and that the $163,000-plus raised so far was over $25,000 more than last year's net.

So just how influential are these people who call themselves ''authentic Catholics"? They may not have fully succeeded in working their will on Catholic Charities, but even their opponents acknowledge that they are commanding attention where once they could safely be ignored.

Bettnet.com, the website and blog of one North Shore Catholic conservative, is attracting an average of 3,000 people and 30,000 hits a day.

A conservative advocacy group, the Catholic Action League, says it is receiving regular donations from about 1,100 Catholic families and has an advisory board packed with politically connected Catholics like former governor Edward J. King and former state Senate president William M. Bulger.

Opponents of the conservative activists say they amount to no more than a handful of web loggers and pamphleteers, with an agenda more political than religious. But they acknowledge that no one really knows how many conservative activists there are, and they recognize that the activists' recent successes have brought increased attention to their activities.

The activists themselves say that while they are pleased by the archbishop's decision, they are far from achieving their goal of saving Catholicism from those who they believe would destroy the church by liberalizing its teachings.

''We are more the rearguard of a retreat than the spearhead of an advance," said C. J. Doyle, one of the most widely known conservative activists in Massachusetts.

Clergy, traditionalists, and liberals contacted by the Globe suggest that the conservatives' ranks include seasoned political veterans like Doyle, relative newcomers, such as Carol McKinley of Pembroke, and those in between, such as Domenico Bettinelli Jr., 37. Bettinelli earns his living as editor of the hard-copy monthly magazine Catholic World Report and operates the popular blog Bettnet.com. ''so that I don't scream at the television or the newspaper."

McKinley, a mother of three, describes herself as ''a prolife activist working to preserve the authentic faith."

McKinley started out distributing leaflets in 2002 outside a convention in Boston of Voice of the Faithful, a parishioners' group whose president says it supports victims of sexual abuse, priests of integrity, and accountability in the church. McKinley is now an active blogger, and she was a key organizer of the effort to have Catholic Charities rescind Menino's invitation.

''I speak as a mom defending the faith," says McKinley, who moved into activism after spending most of the 1990s searching in vain for what she considered a proper Catholic religious education for her children.

''When I saw what was going on . . . I was shocked," McKinley said. ''Where was my religion. . . . If you want to teach children about confession, you have to teach them what the sins are."

Parish educators ''wouldn't let you do it," she said. ''Administrators and priests gave my children the idea that 'your mother's a religious dinosaur.' They gave them the idea that it's OK to use contraception."

McKinley said she went from parish to parish looking for traditional moral education and found instead ''dissenters holding meetings" on how the church should change. ''They were saying we were going to have married priests," she said. ''They had Planned Parenthood ideas. We saw that this was a network of people advancing a schism, and it was eventually called Voice of the Faithful."

In response, McKinley said, she helped found Faithful Voice, to advocate traditional Catholicism. ''We made a little stinkeroo on the Internet," she said, ''and after that the press would come to us for alternative views."

Doyle, who lives on the Roxbury-Jamaica Plain line, is the most politically experienced of the leading local conservatives. Since 1991, the 51-year-old Boston College graduate has been full-time director of the Catholic Action League of New England and its predecessor, the regional office of the Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights.

Before that he worked for James J. Craven Jr., who was a longtime power in the state and city politics, and for a conservative economic think tank.

Doyle says the conservative efforts to counteract the influence of Voice of the Faithful must be understood in the context of general hostility in Massachusetts to traditional Catholic ideas.

''We won't have any chance of defending Catholic values in society at large if these values are not first vindicated and preserved in the church's own institutions," Doyle said. ''A culture of dissent in the church itself is more dangerous to Catholicism than open opposition to Catholic values in secular society."

Such sentiments and much harsher language directed at Menino and the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, the president of Catholic Charities, may have set off a counterreaction, judging by the expected presence in tonight's sellout crowd of some noted Catholics who had not planned on attending.

''I'd rather be home reading to my kids," said Lawrence S. DiCara of Jamaica Plain, a lawyer and a former member of the Boston City Council, ''but I think people have to show their faces on this one.

''The fundamental principles of the church are that those of us who have should help those who have not," DiCara said. ''C. J. Doyle and that crowd are taking food and shelter from the poor because of their political agenda."

James E. Post, president of Voice of the Faithful, said he was shocked when the conservative activists ''began whacking us as dissenters, but I came to understand that they have a very large political agenda" that is helpful to antireform church officials.

''Some of the bishops and cardinals find these people useful as pit bulls, attack dogs," Post said. ''Bishops won't do this, it's unseemly, but they don't mind having a C. J. Doyle or a Carol McKinley out there frothing at the mouth. The attacks on Mayor Menino and Father Hehir clearly are in this pattern."

Hehir declined yesterday to comment on any of the groups. But he said that when Catholic Charities interacts with the government on social issues on which the church and state disagree, ''it is guided by Catholic teaching" that reflects centuries of cooperation.

''We are using the principle of material cooperation," Hehir said.

It is an elaborated body of church teaching ''that guides activity when . . . you do not totally agree with the policy, but you try to find a way to cooperate with it for the sake of the goods that can be accomplished," he said.

Controversies ''don't affect me too much," said Hehir, a veteran social service worker and Harvard professor. ''You take a job, do the best you can, and let the chips fall where they may."

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.