BishopAccountability.org

Church renewal needs shared clergy-lay leadership, say experts

By Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Catholic San Francisco
March 11, 2019

https://bit.ly/2F5TOCn

Jennifer Haselberger speaks at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Feb. 25. Haselberger, a former chancellor for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, was invited by the law school’s Catholic student organization to discuss responses to the sex abuse crisis and the role of the laity in the church.
Photo by Nicholas Wolfram Smith

Changing canon law to allow lay people “authentic and honest participation” could encourage renewal in a wounded church, an expert in church law said in a talk to the Catholic student group at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Jennifer Haselberger has a Ph.D. in philosophy and a licentiate in canon law and served as chancellor at the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis before resigning in protest in 2013 over concerns about how the archdiocese handled clergy abuse cases. In her Feb. 26 lecture at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, Haselberger, one of many commentators across the ideological spectrum to emerge in a growing public debate over the roots of the clergy abuse crisis, discussed institutional factors and how they church can respond.

Haselberger said canon law restricts the power to exercise church governance to those who have received sacred orders. But she argued that the practice of the church makes that a “legal fiction.”

In single-judge annulment decisions, for example, the judge must be a cleric. Haselberger said small dioceses often lack a full-time priest for this work and instead use a lay person to author annulment decisions. By adding a digital signature, their work becomes valid in the eyes of the law.

Haselberger said a similar process can happen in parish finance, where the pastor has sole control but can often delegate all significant decisions to an administrator.

“There’s a fiction, that there’s a link between the power of orders and the power of governance. It’s time to eliminate that,” she said. “The lay people doing this work have a right to have their contributions acknowledged and to be compensated for them.” 

Haselberger said one change that could work at the parish level is removing the priest as the legal financial representative of the parish, and upgrading finance councils from their consultative status to giving them real power over spending.
 
“This is how parishes and dioceses currently operate  — we just pretend that this does not occur,” she said. 

Beyond specific legal requirements that are often fulfilled in a merely technical sense, Haselberger said, the laity are too disadvantaged under canon law to have much real impact.
 
“Right now, lay people can only cooperate in church governance,” she said. “They can't exercise power on their own, and their decisions — such as they are  —  are always subject to review and approval. This prevents lay people from effectively having any true impact when matters are contentious. We see this with diocesan review boards. A review board may advise the bishop not to assign a particular priest, but he can disregard their advice without consequence.”

Until laity no longer serve at the will of the bishop, lay participation is not a solution for church accountability, said Haselberger, noting that the church’s theology of the laity and the law covering their role in the church can seem at odds.

Clergy-laity co-responsibility was a much-discussed topic at Pope Francis’ February summit on the protection of minors in the church. Commentators such as Haselberger have become more vocal with their views, and organizations such as the Leadership Roundtable are providing research and counsel for dioceses. Some bishops have taken incremental steps within the existing legal framework, notably Pittsburgh’s David Zubik with his decision to form a 12-person lay Church Healing Commission to monitor a five-point administrative renewal plan, announced Ash Wednesday in a pastoral letter.

But the debate is far from new.

The Second Vatican Council fathers and subsequent popes proclaimed the laity to be co-responsible in the work of the church to proclaim the Gospel. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI said “co-responsibility demands a change in mindset especially concerning the role of lay people in the church. They should not be regarded as ‘collaborators’ of the clergy, but, rather, as people who are really ‘co-responsible’ for the church’s being and acting.” 

Dominican Father Michael Sweeney, in a lengthy article in the current issue of Commonweal magazine, traced the current paradigm of laity to the time of Charlemagne and the monastic movement of the early medieval church. He said the lay imagination that developed focused on personal piety and was disenfranchised in church affairs.  

Father Sweeney, cofounder and executive director of the Lay Mission Project and a former president of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, concludes that "the current crisis of the church can only be resolved through a new paradigm centered upon the redemptive mission of Christ" and shared by all regardless of status.

A.A.J. DeVille, an associate professor of theology and the director of humanities at the University of St. Francis, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and author of the forthcoming book “Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power,” said current church structures are a drastic departure from tradition.

DeVille, in an interview with Catholic San Francisco, said two factors combined to create the current system of governance. The first was an 1801 agreement between the French emperor Napoleon and Pope Pius VII, which granted the pope absolute authority to select and remove bishops in the church. DeVille said this was “a totally novel idea completely foreign" to Christian tradition before it.

Another development unique to the United States, he said, was the immigrant history of the church. Urban parishes were often built for, and controlled by, distinct ethnic communities. These churches exerted some independence from the local ordinary. 

DeVille said bishops “came to take a very dim view of this and sought to assert total control over the property of a parish and the appointment of its clergy.” 

“By the 20th century you had popes with a monopoly of power over the universal church and bishops, and bishops with a monopoly of power over dioceses, priests and people,” he said. “Neither is ‘traditional’ nor theologically justified.”

DeVille, who is the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, said the Roman Catholic Church can look to the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches for examples of how the hierarchy is accountable to its people.

“There are perfectly solid, venerable, and much more traditional structures of local and regional accountability than what we have today, which is very modern and manifestly defective -- to put it mildly,” he said. Failure to respect the role of the laity in the church will continue to have dire effects on a church that annually hemorrhages members, Deville said.

 "If you are not being taken seriously by bishops and clergy when you are raising the most serious issue of our time — sex abuse — then why would you expect bishops and priests to care about your views on lesser matters?” DeVille asked. “People vote with their feet when they cannot vote with their voices and desires.” 

In a Feb. 27 article posted on the website RealClear Religion, “The Catholic Church Needs a Radically Traditional Revolution,” DeVille discussed how the ideological split among U.S. Catholics has framed reaction to the crisis.

“Instead of actually examining the structural problems of governance, we have had a concerted campaign — from two otherwise ideologically opposed camps in the church who agree on little else — to keep the focus off the problem of powerful offices embedded in structures demanding obedience,” he wrote. “Thus we hear from one side — that around Pope Francis — that the problem is some vague and ill-defined attitude of ‘clericalism.’ We hear from the other so-called conservative side that the problem is a ‘lavender mafia’ living in a ‘gay subculture’ within the church — a claim gaining great notoriety currently with the release of Frederic Martel’s new book.

“What neither side is willing to examine is the fact that priests in parishes, bishops in dioceses, and the pope in the universal church all have a monopoly on power, and that this monopoly has allowed them to hide from any serious accountability to the people in the pews,” DeVille continued. “All three, under current structures, have a right to demand obedience from those under them. None of them has to consult, much less listen to, anyone under them.”




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