Reflections on One of My Favorite Dramas: St. Stan’s

I don’t mean that title facetiously. It is one of my favorite dramas because, like any good theater, it reveals so much.
The pastor of St. Stanislaus parish, my friend Marek Bozek, tells us in an email that a new offer from the archdiocese now includes a willingness to have the lay board control the assets of the parish. But guess what? The board under this arrangement would be appointed by the archbishop. This is very instructive. The real issue in this latest 21st Century rendition of a 19th Century church drama is this: Should the Church be structured more like a democracy or more like an empire?
The latest scene in the St. Stanislaus drama drove me to re-read The American Catholic Church: Assessing The Past, Discerning The Future, a paper presented by Anthony T. Padovano in 2003 to the Call to Action Conference. You can access it at the ECC website http://www.ecumenical-catholic-communion.org/eccpdf/the_american_catholic.pdf. Padovano breaks open the history of the first dioceses of the young United States—in all their American-ness, especially their democracy.
In endeavoring to bring St. Stan’s in line, the archdiocese is attempting to eradicate one of the last vestiges of democracy in American Catholic life, the trustee system. The trustee system was borne out of an earlier era in the American Catholic experience when it was OK to embrace certain American values, e.g., the active participation of all the people. Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick, who made the agreement with St. Stanislaus parish in 1891, made choices against the wall-paper of an emergent U.S. democracy and an emergent Roman Catholic papacy. As a player at Vatican I, Kenrick was not just aware of this historical struggle; he lived on the battlefield. Eventually the 19th Century Vatican condemned the American, more democratic view of church structures; at the same time the Vatican took steps to assert the power of the papacy as never before: the pope was given “universal jurisdiction” and pronounced “infallible” at Vatican I in 1870.
When Archbishop Burke asserted his power over the St. Stan’s board in the first place, before Marek arrived, it was happening against the wall-paper of the Vatican once again suppressing the “American ideas” of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy during the reign (that is the word that is used) of the last pope while the Vatican put in place bishops who agreed with them. Some dramas have a theme which keeps recurring. In this case it is this: the struggle between democratic models and imperial concerns about control.
Marek Bozek, who grew up under Communist rule in Poland, makes choices against the wall-paper of Lech Walensa at the Gdansk shipyards. So he brings with him a particular edge to this drama. Perhaps, as Padovano would say, St. Stan’s history and its pastor and parishioners’ experiences have led them to “choose to be Catholics but not serfs.1”
I am observing the drama (it is fairly visible), and what I see seems enlightening. Some people understand the Church to be structured like an imperial form of government where the pope rules the bishops; the bishops rule the priests; the priests rule the people; and the people have no authority at all. There is another, wholly different Christian view of how the church ought to be structured.
You’ll see it among the Orthodox sometimes. You’ll see it among Protestants quite often. You’ll see it in many, maybe most, Roman Catholic religious orders; and you’ll see it in other branches of Catholicism (see http://www.utrechter-union.org for the best example internationally, and www.ecumenical-catholic-communion.org for, in my biased opinion, the best example in the US.) Here there is no Roman Empire-type hierarchical chain of command with its determined emphasis on obedience. Instead one will find a structure where local churches function as collaborative units and those units relate to other units in a collaborative way, forming a kind of spiritual network of solidarity and communion (The word in Greek for this New Testament ideal is koinonia.). Democracy is far more at home in this environment than empire.
The global Church functioned differently for centuries before it came under the influence of the Roman Empire and took on its culture in the Fourth Century. There is a structure that precedes that era of the Emperor Constantine: more of a communal structure, with leadership to be sure, but a structure where everyone counts and all are valued. 21st Century adults relate to this. The notion of forcing one’s will on “the people” goes against some very deep value that ordinary people in the last three centuries understand more and more.
John Carroll, the first American Roman Catholic bishop, introduced elements of democracy into his diocese shortly after the Declaration of Independence and before the U.S. Constitution was even written. Padovano quotes Carroll writing in 1783, “…in the United States our religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one.”2 [Emphasis mine--fk] Perhaps the infectious truths of the American founders helped John Carroll see possibilities for the freedom and unity of the children of God in a new way.
I wonder how the drama will end. Don’t you?
Frank Krebs, Pastor
The Community of Sts. Clare & Francis
A member of the Ecumenical Catholic Communion
frank.krebs@stsclareandfrancis.org 
www.stsclareandfrancis.org