The well-publicized firing last year, in Wisconsin, of Catholic lay minister Ruth Kolpack, which continues deservedly to draw critical attention, reminded me of the remnants of premodern management styles that are still characteristic of many Catholic institutional contexts. One part of that story is the inordinately tight circle of control over who can speak in Catholic settings. In recent years, there has been a new attention to “dangers” posed by speakers coming into ministerial, diocesan, even academic settings. This has something to do with an interpretation on the part of some in ecclesiastical authority that the decline in what is considered normative Catholic practice and belief is largely the fault of a liberal generation of thinkers, speakers, and writers who claim Vatican II as their inspiration. I join others in a different interpretation: that were it not for the progressive, experimental, “liberal” cohort of Catholic intellectual and spiritual leaders, many more would have walked away. A great many of these “liberals” are sophisticated apologists for Catholicism, at any rate, and not bent on undermining faith.

As my Fordham colleague Professor Brad Hinze reported in his paper, “A Decade of Disciplining Theologians,” last summer at the annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, we have had a troubling decade with respect to the disciplining of Catholic theologians. Most of these happen to be religious and/or priests. But there will be an additional story told when the Catholic history of this period is written: the active and passive, overt and covert, silencing of lay theologians, and lay speakers, in many dioceses in the United States. The case of Ruth Kolpack is unfortunately only one of many such examples that can be gleaned by listening to the stories of many pastoral workers around the country. At ministry conferences, in particular, the ecclesiastical gauntlet to be run before getting approval to speak has become more centralized and narrow.

I can also give my own examples based on my recollections from the past few years.

A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak at a respected annual ministry conference for a mid-size U.S. diocese. A few months before the event came a request for a letter from “an ecclesiastical authority” testifying to my good standing in the Church. The wording was sufficiently vague. Realizing that the conference organizers were likely carrying out a policy they had not invented, I politely mentioned that although I was in “good standing” in the Church,  I would not produce such a letter for them. I named several other pastoral conferences at which I had recently spoken. They replied that they needed some kind of document to satisfy their new requirements. What I did next, you might have to be Catholic to understand. It has to do with the protocols of authority and the rhetoric of “vouching.” I asked one director of a ministry conference if she would mind being contacted by this other diocese and say that I did a good job. This person agreed, and one diocese contacted the other, and a “document” was produced (a few sentences). The letter of the law had been fulfilled.

In another case from a few years ago, another lay Catholic theologian and myself were invited to speak in at a ministry conference here in the U.S. Once the conference was announced, someone from a local parish put together a file of Internet clippings meant to impugn both of us, and submitted it to the bishop. (I relate only what I was able to learn after the fact.) Just a few months before it was to occur, the conference organizers were then instructed to disinvite us, which was done with sincere apology. I asked to see the file in question but was told it was not available. There was no other explanation. In the meantime, my co-invitee and I had turned down other events and built a work schedule around this event. It was assumed we would simply declare “fiat” and fade away. I knew that the conference people involved did not want to treat adults like this, especially adults under contract for their event. Then unexpectedly, I was re-invited, but my colleague was still disinvited. There had been a “review” of the dossier. I said I would not return without my colleague returning, short of being able to see the offending files. Moreover, if they would not reinstate both of us, or at least show us the files, then we would both withdraw our participation, but only if they would pay us some measure of what we had agreed to. (This is standard in professional speaking agreements.) They ended up letting us go and paying us. The conference went on with other speakers.

In a sense, there is nothing new about these compromised systems, except that many lay pastoral workers in the Catholic church make part of their living from such pastoral work as conference presentations. Like the majority of professors, except those in elite schools or those who teach in schools of law or business, I suspect that most lay theologians do not make enough money in their college jobs to support their families. This extra income from pastoral events helps not only bring academic theological life to the theological life of the local church, and vice versa, but it also helps lay ministers and lay theologians support their families, make the mortgage.

We do not yet have a sophisticated conversation about these realities in Catholic circles, at least in the United States. As a graduate student pointed out last semester in class after reading “Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord,” a document from the U.S. Catholic bishops on lay ministry, any real mention of issues related to compensation for lay church workers comes only toward the end of the document, and is surprisingly brief.

A related issue is the ability of Catholicism to work through the new lay realities: that the laity, in most contexts, are the majority of Catholic ministers and theologians. The U.S. church cannot be faulted for not knowing in advance how to treat lay people, as this is a genuinely new reality, and is being negotiated on the fly, created on the move. We can, however, say that we are now ready to move beyond inattention or sidelong glances, to make processes for managing lay people in ministerial contexts answer not only to ecclesiastical norms but to the norms of authentic lay needs. The old clerical procedures will not work in this changed context. Meanwhile, maintaining an opaque “review” process for lay theologians who speak in pastoral settings effectively allows the institution a measure of discipline over lay theologians that it has not otherwise yet been able to fashion.

This is a blog about rock and theology, and there is a rock connection of sorts here: lay theologians and ministers in the Catholic church typically have a substantial part of their identity and existential history bound up in “secular” practices, as official teaching on “lay identity” and pastoral work over the past century has more or less recognized. (Whether this should not also be said of ministry carried out by priests and religious is another question.) I have learned in the worlds of music and publishing and academic life some ways that people can be treated fairly and unfairly, and there are no lay Catholic ministers or theologians who do not bring their own “secular” learnings in this way. Lay Catholics who wind up in ministry often have deep knowledge of power structures and ways of proceeding from their “secular” lives, and it will be incumbent on credible policies regarding lay pastoral workers that such knowledge be integrated, critically of course, into the new Catholic policies that reflect the new Catholic realities.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, New York, United States

1 Comment »

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  Yes, in the secular world of employment, there is a process of reviews, warnings, etc. and only after an attempt to correct what is seen to be a problem, is the person fired. It is incredible that our Catholic Church which promotes justice in the world cannot be a church of justice when it comes to its own employees. I too asked for my file and was told no such file exists yet when the accusations about me were revealed to my pastor, they were read from papers. In my case, there was no review, no warnings, no dialogue. I was just told after a 10-minute meeting with the bishop, “that’s it” and I no longer had my position in the parish. At that time, it was because I would not do three things that Canon Law says I cannot be asked to do. In spite of not following Canon Law, our bishop’s actions were allowed to stand and no due process was ever afforded me. I sent documentation of my case to Rome and the response was that I should take up my concern with the bishop.
  Because this type of injustice is happening throughout our country, lay employees are working in fear of losing their jobs. What kind of church is this?

  Comment by Ruth Kolpack — January 12, 2010 @ 1:19 pm

  
  

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