Seminary Professor: Clergy Governance in Church Serves Lay Vocation

By Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Catholic San Francisco
April 1, 2019

https://catholic-sf.org/news/seminary-professor-clergy-governance-in-church-serves-lay-vocation

Dominican Father Pius Pietrzyk, an assistant professor at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University and a canon lawyer, discussed governance in the church with Catholic San Francisco in a March 29 interview at the seminary in Menlo Park. (Photo by Nicholas Wolfram Smith/Catholic San Francisco)

While the abuse crisis has shaken trust in the church, Dominican Father Pius Pietrzyk, an assistant professor of pastoral studies and chair of the Pastoral Studies Department at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University, told Catholic San Francisco that the church’s governance structure is fundamentally sound.

“Canon law reserves governance in the church to clergy, while permitting laity to cooperate in that governance,” said Father Pietrzyk, who is also a canon and civil lawyer.

Governance in the church involves “the authority to issue binding decisions on a community,” whether in a legislative, executive or judicial form, Father Pietrzyk said.

Father Pietrzyk shared his views at a time when governance is a growing topic of discussion in the U.S. church. In a Feb. 25 talk to law students at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Haselberger, a former chancellor for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said changing canon law to allow lay people “authentic and honest participation” could encourage renewal in a wounded church. Nationally, the Leadership Roundtable has called for “a new culture of collaboration between clergy and laity” to address the twin crises of clergy abuse and leadership failure.

For Father Pietrzyk, whatever form the exercise of governance takes in the church, it depends on the authority of the bishops, who are the successors of the Apostles. The authority exercised by clergy is in the name of and for the entire church, he said, while lay people exercise it for a personal good.

The distinct functions of laity and clergy also affect governance in the church. The Second Vatican Council’s vision of the laity, he said, is to “act as a leaven for the world, to bring the kingdom of God to the world. The primary function of clerics is within the church itself, to assist the lay people in carrying out their function in the world.”

Duties for governance, public worship and teaching authority belong to clerics, but outside the church “lay people are meant to be empowered,” he said.

“The idea that lay people come properly into their own by doing essentially what are clerical things,” whether in governance, worship, or teaching “is certainly not the vision of the council,” Father Pietrzyk said. Instead, the council’s vision is the laity form and sanctify themselves through the church and bring that out into the world.

Father Pius said laity do have an effect on governance in the church.

With finance councils, “there are decisions the bishop is required by law to consult and sometimes get the approval of the finance council on,” he said. The Code of Canon Law also recommends the use of pastoral committees largely consisting of lay people, both at the diocese and parochial level.

“You have outlets for lay people to cooperate in governance, as they should,” he said. “And certainly if you go to a chancery, the vast majority of people are not clerics. A lot of that kind of leadership in terms of pastoral functions, is in the hands of lay people.”

While the hierarchy in the U.S. has come under criticism for how bishops handled abuse cases, clerics did not act completely on their own, he said.

“There was misgovernance on the part of the bishops, but part of that was based on what we now recognize as terrible advice coming from professional lay advisers,” he said.

Lay psychologists during the 1970s advised that pedophilia was curable, and that the long term damage of child sexual abuse was insignificant, while civil lawyers advised that confidentiality agreements were standard in settlements.

“This doesn’t mean to excuse bishops, but to think bishops were doing this on their own is crazy,” he said.

On the other hand, the infrastructure in the church set up to address and prevent sex abuse has been a good model of the co-responsibility of laity and clergy for the church. Review boards, abuse prevention training, and the day-to-day work of handling these issues has been done by lay people, he said.

Father Pietrzyk said lay people could not exercise authority in the appointment or removal of particular priests or bishops on their own, but could be more involved in selecting a bishop. Diocesan bishops keep on hand a short list of candidates who could make good bishops, which laity could be involved in through the diocesan pastoral council.

Changes to the church penal code could also be made to make sure “that the things most of us think are crimes are so, or reflect local civil laws,” Father Pietrzyk said.

Minnesota and Texas have laws which consider sexual relations between a minister and someone under their spiritual care rape, regardless of apparent consent. “The Code of Canon Law does not have any similar delict,” Father Pietrzyk said. “That’s something we might think about updating.”