The general perception that "they" (clerics) do not need "us" (women) seems to be fading. Or is it?

The great diversity of the "church workers" on which the Catholic Church depends fall into two main categories: paid and unpaid.

The great majority of paid professional positions are held by clerics. The great majority of volunteer, unpaid positions, whether professional or not, are filled by women.

Of course, there is cross-over, but the exploitation of women in what is loosely referred to as "church work" is a scandal that Francis seems ready to repair. For sure, restoring women to the ordained diaconate may be part of the answer, but it is not the only one.

Let us look at three points:

1. Francis' emphasis on lay involvement in the Church;
2. the problem of clericalism;
3. the possibilities for women deacons.

Francis' emphasis on lay involvement in the Church

The Synod of Bishops' special assembly on the Amazon in 2019 held great promise for women.

Its twelve language groups spoke forcefully: lay persons should be more involved in governance; the Church should allow women to be formally installed as lectors and acolytes, and the Church must continue to consider ordaining women as deacons.

Reportedly, nine of the twelve language groups asked for women deacons, but the language softened as it travelled through drafts of the Final Document.

Francis' responses came fairly quickly. Yes, he said to the Synod assembly, he would pick up the gauntlet thrown down over women deacons.

But Querida Amazonia, his response to the Synod's Final document, struck a different chord. In that post-synodal apostolic exhortation, the pope emphasized the fact that parishes could indeed be led by lay people, and that in fact many already were.

So, instead of mentioning installed lay ministries or women deacons in his response to the Final Document, he emphasized Parish Life Coordinators, as described in Code of Canon Law (can. 517§2).

Recalling Francis asked that the Final Document and Querida Amazonia be read in tandem, we can see his emphasis on laity is really emphasis on women. After all, two-thirds of parishes in the Amazon region are led and managed by women, mostly women religious.

In Querida Amazonia, Francis asks that they be recognized as Parish Life Coordinators (can. 517§2).

He asked that they have set terms of office. He asks that they be professionalized. He implies they should be paid.

Why? Recall the other major request of the Amazon Synod: ordaining viri probati (married men of proven virtue) to the priesthood, most probably those already permanent deacons.

Now imagine the Amazon parish led by a woman, which includes a married deacon. If the married deacon becomes a priest, would not the current way of thinking about Church automatically see him as pastor?

With Querida Amazonia, Francis deflected the question of married deacons becoming priests while emphasizing the point of the community. And, in emphasizing the point of community he specifically called for Parish Life Coordinators (can. 517§2).

That is, he called for an expansion of that office, which can be filled by lay men and women, religious or secular, as well as deacons. In so doing, he cut the tie between parish leadership and clericalism. Or at least he cut that tie in theory.

The problem of clericalism

The problem of clericalism is real.

Of its many facets, what points to our concern today is the connection between clericalism and law. That is, the Code of Canon Law places ordained clerics, predominantly priests and bishops, above the laity and, it seems, above the law.

There is virtually no way, at least no legal way, for any lay person, to have governance and jurisdiction in the church at the parish or diocesan level.

Even the newly reworked Book VI of the Code of Canon Law, while heavy on penalties, is equally heavy on secrecy and clerical (read episcopal) self-policing.

Five-hundred years ago, Martin Luther called clericalism a destroyer of Christianity. Luther wrote:

Yea, the priests and the monks are deadly enemies, wrangling about their self-conceived ways and methods like fools and madmen, not only to the hindrance, but to the very destruction of Christian love and unity.

Each one clings to his sect and despises the others; and they regard the laymen as though they were not Christians. This lamentable condition is only a result of the laws.(Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, Philadelphia: A.J. Holman, 1915, p. 295)

How does clericalism affect women and church work?

Women, and anyone else not ordained a priest, are automatically lower-ranked members of the Catholic Church. Lower-ranked members — be they secular or religious, male or female — are not the first to find professional respect or support in Catholic parishes and chanceries.

Think back to the proposition from the Synod assembly on the Amazon regarding the priestly ordination of married deacons. Is it not the way of the Church to call the ordained priest the pastor, no matter his qualifications?

And, if the former deacon is now the pastor, would the current way of thinking about Church automatically grant him a salary, housing, vacation, retreat, a housekeeper, a cook, transportation and food? Would he not merit a sacristan, a secretary and one or two days "off" per week?

Of course, that scenario paints clericalism in the broadest strokes, and we can assume the parishes and parish groupings in the Amazon region cannot afford well-paid clericalism.

But if we transfer that scenario to other parishes in other countries, is this not the case? In some parishes, the bulk of parish donations go to support the pastor and his personal needs and staff.

Women, where they appear at all, are volunteer catechists and sacristans, and perhaps part-time cooks and secretaries.

I am not even discussing the question of what amount of parish donations goes to the poor. If there is parish support of the poor, at least in the United States, a substantial amount of the funding comes from government sources and in-kind donations.

And parish ministries to the poor are staffed predominantly by women. And by and large, those women are volunteers, or at best part-time workers without benefits.

The possibilities for women deacons

So, what is the problem with volunteerism?

Many years ago, when I began serious work on restoring the tradition of ordained women deacons, a friendly monsignor in my archdiocese said, "Oh, so you want to be a volunteer?"

In fact, the larger portion of deacons in the US Church are volunteers, now retired from their "day jobs," who volunteer in the very ministries we think of when we think of "Church."

They visit the sick, they bury the dead, they manage soup kitchens and food banks, they teach catechism, they hold marriage classes. But in many places, the bishop or pastor prefers to hire a deacon (full- or part-time) for positions from the coordinator of religious instruction to the chancellor of a diocese.

So, women are effectively shut out of jobs for which they are eminently qualified, except for their gender, which restricts their ability to be ordained as deacons.

Then there is the fact that, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord this year, Pope Francis changed canon law to allow both men and women to be installed as acolytes and lectors, which in 1972 effectively replaced the suppressed minor orders of lector, porter, exorcist and acolyte, and the major order of subdeacon.

Experience in each installed office is required for ordination as deacon.

Until now only the most conservative of bishops have installed men as lectors and/or acolytes, principally — it would seem — to eliminate the possibility of women's altar service and women reading during Mass.

More recently, the pope also established the installed permanent ministry of catechist. This would seem, in part at least, to professionalize catechetical ministry.

These events can both help and hurt the prospects of women achieving paid parish employment, professional or otherwise. These roles have traditionally been filled by lay volunteers, so nothing seems added here except the requirement for training leading up to the installed ministry.

The "but," and it is a large but, is that each of these three installed ministries is connected to diaconal ordination.

The installation as acolyte and lector is, as I said, required prior to diaconal ordination. The ministry of catechist has an even more direct relation to the diaconate.

One reason, or justification, for the restoration of the diaconate as a permanent vocation stemming from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was to strengthen the ministry of catechists with the charism of order.

That was because catechists in developing nations were often serving as today's Parish Life Coordinators (can. 517§2) and performing other diaconal ministries.

The recent trajectory of events seems to bring women closer to the diaconate, and therefore closer to preferential treatment for employment.

The deacon can be the single judge in an ecclesiastical trial. The deacon can witness marriages. The deacon can solemnly baptize.

Do the changes to canon law and the creation of the installed ministry of acolyte mean Pope Francis is about to ordain women as deacons? Probably not.

While he changed canon law regarding lectors and acolytes with a simple motu proprio and did the same in creating the newly installed ministry of catechist, he also recently promulgated a new Book VI of the Code of Canon Law.

The new book repeats language first presented in 2007 by Cardinal William Levada, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Repeated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, it imposes latae sententiae excommunication on anyone who "attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman" as well as on the woman ordained (can. 1379§3).

While the pope could change that canon—indeed the bishop presenting the new book to the press said as much—there is not likely to be much movement before the Synod of Bishops' assembly on synodality, which has been postponed until October 2023.

This brings us back to women and work.

What difference does it make if a woman is installed as lector, acolyte, or catechist, or appointed as a Parish Life Coordinator?

What difference, indeed, if a woman is ordained a deacon?

In the United States, the Church depends principally on female "church workers" - in pastoral, service, and support positions - in its mission of proclaiming and living the Gospel.

Yet female workers are exploited.

They are assumed to be volunteers, no matter their professional training for pastoral or service ministries. Where they do find church employment, often part-time and without benefits, it is service or support work that supports clericalism.

The ethical challenges to the ways "church work" is organized are real and laid bare when the institutional exploitation of such workers - especially women - is examined.

One response, some might say a Gospel-driven response, causes both religious and secular laity to work outside or at least around the traditional structures to provide ministry.

These trained professionals serve as spiritual directors, remunerated by retreat centres and directly by their directees.

They gain employment as chaplains in prisons, hospitals and other secular institutions.

More indirectly, they work in community organizations and advocacy groups, or they write and speak and teach outside any Church-affiliated structure and strictures.

That they carry the Gospel to the people is to be applauded.

That this is so hard to do within Church structures is sad.

• Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University (New York). This article also appeared in La-Croix International and is reproduced with permission.

Priests, lay experts and canon lawyers alike say the Vatican needs to revisit how the church protects its seminarians, nuns and even rank-and-file parishioners from problem bishops and cardinals, who for centuries have wielded power and authority with few — if any — checks or accountability.

McCarrick was only investigated and defrocked by Pope Francis because a former altar boy came forward in 2017 to report the prelate had groped him when he was a teenager in the 1970s. It was the first time someone had claimed to be abused by McCarrick while a minor, a serious crime in the Vatican's in-house legal system.

And yet the bulk of the Vatican's 449-page forensic study into the McCarrick scandal released Tuesday dealt with the cardinal's behaviour with young men: the seminarians whose priestly careers he controlled and who felt powerless to say no when he arranged for them to sleep in his bed.

The report found that three decades of bishops, cardinals and popes dismissed or downplayed reports of McCarrick's misconduct with the young men.

Confidential correspondence showed they repeatedly rejected the information outright as rumour, excused it as an "imprudence" or explained it away as the result of McCarrick having no living relatives.

McCarrick's friends and superiors went to enormous lengths to find ways to claim his behaviour wasn't necessarily sexual, couldn't be proven and would cause a scandal if it ever went public.

Their decades-long reflex to turn a blind eye was evidence of the church's old boys culture of silence, clerical privilege and protection of reputations at all cost.

No one ever thought about the effect of his behaviour on the young men.

The report faulted in particular St. John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington and later made him a cardinal despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he bedded his seminarians. The report recommended he not be promoted.

But John Paul gave McCarrick the most influential position in the U.S. church, which, coupled with his role as a major U.S. fundraiser, meant the cardinal wielded enormous power as he hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and three popes.

"The reason we had a McCarrick was because he pulled so much power to himself, relatively quickly," said the Rev. Desmond Rossi, a former seminarian under McCarrick who was interviewed for the report.

"I think the church has to look at the authority and power that people are given: How do we guarantee that it's used in a healthy way?"

The question for the church is also a legal one, just as it is in the secular sphere. Vatican and U.S. Catholic leaders had known since the 1990s that McCarrick slept with his seminarians. But that wasn't a firing offence under the church's canon law — then or now.

Since McCarrick's seminary victims weren't minors, they weren't considered victims at all, and in those years even priests who repeatedly raped children had their crimes covered up.

McCarrick rose to the heights of the Catholic hierarchy merely bothered by occasional "rumours" that he had been "imprudent" with the young men.

"It does get down to this idea that somehow when someone turns 18, a) they're no longer vulnerable, and b) that they have the ability to protect themselves," said David Pooler, a professor of social work at Baylor University and an expert in clergy sexual abuse of adults.

"And what I have learned from my research is that that's simply not true: that there's nothing magical about becoming an adult and being able to then protect oneself in a vulnerable place," he said.

Pooler said a seminarian is really in no position to offer meaningful, free consent to any sexual activity with his bishop, since his bishop has all the power in the relationship. A bishop or seminary rector determines whether the seminarian can continue in his studies, is ordained a priest, or is assigned to a good parish.

"Only when there is sort of equal freedom and kind of equal power in the relationship could there ever possibly be consent," Pooler said. "And that's just impossible between a priest and someone who's in seminary, or a priest and someone who's just in their congregation or parish."

The Vatican has long sought to portray any sexual relations between priests and adults as sinful but consensual, focusing in recent years only on protecting minors and "vulnerable adults" from predator priests. The Vatican's legal norms have defined "vulnerable" people as those who are disabled or consistently lack the use of reason.

Only in the past year or so, amid the #MeToo reckoning, has the Vatican even admitted publicly that religious sisters can be sexually abused by priests, bishops or even their own mother superiors. The McCarrick scandal now stands as a case study of how seminarians can be exploited and abused by the men who hold power over them.

"People have the tendency to believe the one who is in power, and not the one who is powerless," said Karlijn Demasure, director of the Centre for Safeguarding Minors and Vulnerable Persons at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. "

And that's the whole change in culture that has to happen: that one has to listen to the vulnerable and not to the ones who are in power." Continue reading

Taking the name Francis, he won the admiration and respect of Catholics and non-Catholics alike with his simplicity and concern for the poor and marginalized.

With each passing year, however, criticism of the pope has become more vocal, especially from the Catholic right, who think he is breaking with traditional church teaching, and the political right, who don't like his views on global warming, immigration and social justice.

Francis has also been unable to satisfy those who say the Catholic hierarchy's response to the clergy sex abuse crisis has been inadequate.

I am a big fan of Pope Francis, in part because I think that any evaluation of his first six years as pope shows that his accomplishments outweigh his failings.

First, his accomplishments

Pope Francis has successfully rebranded the Catholic Church, which had come to be regarded as a clerical institution that stressed rules and uniformity.

If you wanted to be a good Catholic, you were given the catechism to memorize and told to follow the rules.

Francis hates clericalism.

He is constantly telling bishops and priests not to act like princes but rather like servants to the people of God.

While he is kind and compassionate to the wider world, he can be very critical when speaking to bishops and priests.

He warns against the temptation to manipulate or infantilize the laity.

He urges clerics to empower the laity "to continue discerning, in a way befitting their growth as disciples, the mission which the Lord has entrusted to them."

For Francis, the church is not a country club for the good and beautiful. Rather, it is a "poor church for the poor," a "field hospital" for the wounded. That is why he stresses compassion and mercy.

In contrast to the last two popes, who taught using complex theological concepts, Francis appeals to the heart.

He complains that "we have reduced our way of speaking about mystery to rational explanations, but for ordinary people the mystery enters through the heart."

He believes that "we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and impart an intellectualism foreign to our people."

This is not a pope who will worry, as we did in the previous papacy, about whether the translation of the Nicene Creed should say that Jesus is "one in being" or "consubstantial" with the Father.

Francis' focus on the simple message of the gospel is quite threatening to those Catholics who confuse theology with the faith.

Theology is how we explain the faith to ourselves and others. Augustine used Neoplatonism to explain the faith to a generation whose intellectuals were all Neoplatonists.

Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelianism, the avant-garde thinking of the 13th century, to explain the faith in his day.

The mistake today's conservatives make is to simply quote these great thinkers, rather than imitate them in developing new ways to explain Christianity to people of the 21st century.

With few Neoplatonists or Aristotelians around today, theolog

ians must have the freedom to discover new ways of explaining Christianity, even if this leads to new ways of understanding of human rights, justice, sexuality, marriage and the role of women.

Unlike his predecessors, Francis is not afraid of encouraging discussion in the church. Continue reading

• Thomas Reese SJ is is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America.
• Image: GCN

Catholics of all stripes—conservatives and liberals and in-betweens—are declaring a pox on clericalism.

From Pope Francis to the back pew widow, from seminary rectors to lay ecclesial ministers, it's agreed that clericalism is crippling the pastoral mission of the church.

At the same time it is strengthening the secularists' claim that Catholic clergy are nothing more than papal agents bent on enforcing rigid moral controls which smother our human instinct for pleasure and freedom. So let's end clericalism in the church.

Yes, of course, let's end clericalism. It's just plain right to heed the growing consensus that clericalism must go.

But something tells me, "not so fast."

This cancer crippling the Catholic world—from local communities to Vatican offices—is so deeply embedded in our past and present church fabric that a careful pre-surgery examination is called for.

So, pull on your surgical gloves and join me in the pre-op room.

We know clericalism when we encounter it, whether on the parish level or in the media's caricaturist portrayal of priests and bishops.

No smell of the sheep

But although we know clericalism when we see it, it's not so easy to define it.

Here's how I see it: Clericalism is an attitude found in many (but not all) clergy who have put their status as priests and bishops above their status as baptized disciples of Jesus Christ.

In doing so, a sense of privilege and entitlement emerges in their individual and collective psyches.

This, in turn, breeds a corps of ecclesiastical elites who think they're not like other men.

Clergy caught up in this kind of purple-hewed seduction are incapable of seeing that it freezes their humanity—their ability to simply connect on a human level with the various sorts of God's holy people.

Of all the sour fruits of clericalism, this inability to connect with others might be the most damaging.

When the ordained come across as somehow superior to their parishioners and people they encounter, the playing field is tilted. This kind of disconnect can be fatal to a priest's efforts to build a sense of community in his parish.

It's often difficult for parishioners to feel comfortable with a clerical priest.

They simple don't find "Father" approachable.

The same can be said of bishops who are all too comfortable thinking of themselves as princes by divine selection.

They connect neither with their priests nor with the people they're meant to shepherd.

And you won't find the smell of the sheep on them.

Professional distance, but...

Often that's exactly what clergy caught up in clericalism want: They believe a certain distance from the non-ordained is fitting and right.

Of course, priests need not be chummy with their parishioners, and the pastor-parishioner relationship requires maturity and prudence on the part of the ordained.

Most pastors are all too aware of the smothering demands of some of their flock.

Without question, they need to safeguard their privacy and find time when they are, so to speak, "off the clock."

But clericalism by its nature exaggerates this need.

Without fail, it breeds artificiality and superficiality between pastors and parishioners.

Though often unnamed, something real is missing.

Clerical priests and bishops (and yes, clerical deacons) come to see their power to confer sacraments, to preach, and to teach and administer as the bedrock of their identity.

When this happens, they lose sight of the truth that the church's power is ultimately the power of the Holy Spirit. Without words, they seem to say "We are clergy... and you're not."

A kind of lay clericalism!

Years ago, when I served as my diocese's vicar for priests, I spoke with a highly placed lay diocesan official who related his fear that he was being co-opted by the system—that he was becoming "clerical."

I told him not to worry.

The very fact that he sensed the danger was his deliverance.

We agreed that a number of his lay colleagues apparently didn't see the danger.

These lay chancery workers thought of themselves as insiders. And in a real sense they were.

And like many of their ordained colleagues, their first loyalty was now to the church as institution rather than to the gospel and to the faithful they served.

So the cancer of clericalism, in its broadest sense, is not restricted to deacons, priests, and bishops. Continue reading

- Father Donald Cozzens is a writer in residence at John Carroll University, where he teaches in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.

Image: St John's Atonement Seminary