Coexistence of AHG and GSA at your Parish?

[losh14]

I’m placing this in Catholic Living because it has to do with Parish life. I’m asking for advice from other Parish leaders, in particular where both American Heritage Girls troops and Girl Scout troops are active.

In our parish school’s incoming Kindergarten, there is a group of parents who have reached out to AHG to form an American Heritage Girls troop, while another group of parents has already formed a Daisies troop. The girl scouts are long-established at our parish and active at all grade levels, while the American Heritage Girls have not been vetted for approval at our parish. I know this because I sit on our Parish Council, and our Parish by-laws require all new ministries and organizations to receive Father’s approval after review by the Council.

I’m concerned about divisiveness between the two organizations. We are in the lamentable situation where the leaders of AHG have had personality conflicts with the leaders of GSA, even before the topic of AHG was brought up. It is important to us to support an alternative organization to GSA because our Archbishop has asked every parish to seek alternatives, and this is the first time that parents have expressed an interest. I almost wish that a different group of parents would be interested in AHG, it would make it easier.

We have two groups of very involved moms who regularly attend Mass, send their kids to the parish school, participate in parish Life including sports and other organizations. This is good, but the two groups have had significant personality clashes and if I had to measure the mood of parents of daughters, I’d expect that AHG would not be able to successfully start a troop at our parish because of the antagonism. Parents of school-age children are generally very happy with our scouting program, while older parishioners whose children are grown, are quite adamantly against it. Without going into detail there have been conflicts in which the Parish Council has had to intercede, and in some cases ask ministry leaders to resign for what we consider bullying.

Have you successfully seen both programs co-exist, or alternatively have you seen where AHG has been brought to your parish to replace Girl Scouts without losing parishioners or seeing the Girl Scouts continue off-campus where there’s no oversight as to curriculum?

 

[Usige]

Have you successfully seen both programs co-exist, or alternatively have you seen where AHG has been brought to your parish to replace Girl Scouts without losing parishioners or seeing the Girl Scouts continue off-campus where there’s no oversight as to curriculum?

We had some initial hostility because our bishop encouraged replacing GSA troops with AHG. Many GSA supporters rejected any concerns about Girl Scouts and bridled that AHG was given support when GSA was not. The GSA troop had already merged with another troop in a different protestant community so there was no question of coexistence. We did have a number of girls leave GSA to join AHG once they saw that the AHG troop did not suffer any “taint” associated with GSA. There were also one or two girls that stayed active in both.

Ultimately my parish avoided the issue by not considering either group to be ministries because they were not focused on delivering the gospel message to the people of the community. The main difference was in them being allowed to use the parish building. Because GSA dropped acknowledgement of the goal of forming girls in Christian virtues it was deemed that it was not a group grounded in the mission of the Church and therefore not an extention of the community with the parish having a vested interest in sponsoring.

We might have lost some parishioners when the GSA troop was told the parish would no longer sponsor them, but the pastor had to decide if backing a group with some conflict with Catholic teaching was worth the scandal. Bringging in AHG was really secondary and gave him the opportunity to explain how similar goals could be achieved without the ambiguity of what the local troop stood for versus the national organization.