It is still a violation of copyright to copy and distribute the pattern without permission. The magazine offers the free pattern in order to get people to come to their web site. So you can't legally copy the pattern and distribute it to everyone in the group without permission. However everyone in the group could go to the web site and download the pattern if it is still online.
In this case, it doesn't sound so much like you want to copy the pattern as that you want multiple people to be working on the quilt that uses the pattern. If you don't hear back from the magazine, I would suggest that someone who legitimately has the pattern should divvy up the work and write your own instructions for each part to be done by others. We ran into this situation with an opportunity quilt one of my guilds was making. We assigned several members to make a certain number of one type of block, and others made a different type of block. It turned out that the instructions in the magazine were fine if one person was making the whole quilt, but were confusing if that person only needed to make a subset of it, so we wrote our own instructions for making each block. The blocks themselves weren't original to the copyright holder, so this was not a violation of copyright.
What this may not get around is another little known copyright protection. If the quilt in the pattern is copyrighted (and not just the pattern itself), then the copyright holder's permission is required if copy of that quilt is displayed in public. Most quilts are not themselves original enough for copyright protection, and pattern authors almost always give their permission. But it's something to think about.