Injustice Righted in Church Employment
By Eloise Rosenblatt, R.S.M., Ph.D

The pastor indicated he wasn’t going to renew her contract as parish school principal. Marie (not her real name) was about to join the ranks of experienced, qualified, successful women "bumped" from their church leadership positions by a new pastor. Marie had been in elementary education for nearly forty years. On her only real sabbatical after thirty years, she sat in university classes and earned an M.A. In Catholic School Administration. She had been principal now for eight years in a school whose population was largely Hispanic, and one of the economically poorest in the entire diocese. Yet the school was peaceful and orderly; teachers were qualified; parents were informed and involved.

Marie nurtured the spiritual life of her staff and took students on field trips. She sponsored the 75th anniversary celebration of the founding of the school which brought back hundreds of alumni. She didn’t have a bookkeeper or many financial resources. To keep cost down, she typically did the work of two women. In one year, she raised $50,000 for tuition grants, repairs and program enhancements.

In spite of all her accomplishments, her relations with a new pastor on his first assignment grew strained after three years. He began to treat her coldly. He would not acknowledge her accomplishments. He reminded her on various occasions that he was the pastor, and that he had ultimate decision-making authority in school matters. To prove so, he prohibited an annual fund-raising event sponsored by school parents because he said it would interfere with the financial interests of the parish.

National Epidemic of Firings
The handwriting was on the wall. "He’s getting ready to fire you," I told her. "If you don’t leave on your own, he’ll look for any excuse to do it." This had happened to a good number of religious women across the country already. My laywomen friends had also suffered through this experience. It was a national epidemic affecting many Catholic women. Pastors seemed to want compliant, submissive, "Yes, Father" women in parish and school administration, even though these had less experience than their predecessors who got fired. The more competent a woman was, the more likely she was to lose her job.

I saw a pattern: competent women didn’t fight back. They didn’t know what their recourse was, and no one fought for them. Where could women go if they had complaints about a pastor’s arbitrary decision-making? Did pastors really have absolute authority over persons working in parish facilities? That was the prevailing myth. Women whose complaints I heard in the past feared they’d be blackballed and never get hired anywhere if they challenged a pastor’s actions.

If they didn’t blame themselves, other women did the blaming, advising them, "Well, if you hadn’t said this or done that." The pastor was king who held the keys to the kingdom. Women believed and propagated the myth. Victims of firings "offered it up," blamed themselves for not being able to get along with emotionally or verbally abusive pastors, got depressed or physically ill, accepted the financial loss of pitiful salaries, and tried to find a job in another parish. Their faith was precious to them. Serving the church was a spiritual commitment.

Injustice of Unilateral Conditions
Alarm bells went off in my head when Marie told me the pastor had decided to impose some unilateral conditions on her contract before he would sign it for the following year. She was supposed to become fluent in the language of the local community. She was supposed to attend (his) parish events. He didn’t designate which ones or how often. He would review her "progress" several times and would decide if this woman twenty years his senior "measured up."

These conditions, I pointed out, insulted her and were not related to her duties as school principal. Such conditions had never before been part of her contract. They were not the standard for any other diocesan school. They were not required by accreditors who periodically assessed the school’s performance according to state-established criteria. Thus, to impose them on Marie was discriminatory. The pastor was behaving like a maverick, making up his own rules. He was acting according to a myth that a pastor was independent from anyone outside his parish telling him what to do, and further, that he was entitled to do as he pleased with persons working on "his property."

I told her not to sign anything and to take her concerns to her local bishop and to other diocesan officials. Above all, I emphasized that she must not be silent. The pastor needed to be held accountable to a civil standard outside his personal impulses and whims, especially when it concerned an employment issue. It was no longer true, I said, that "a man’s home is his castle," or that a parish was a pastor’s fiefdom. A woman was neither a piece of furniture in his house, nor a serf toiling on his personal estate. We had to challenge this humiliation of women.

Systemic Analysis of Employment Abuse
For my part, I decided that I would not allow this pastor to fire my friend Marie without a fight. Where would I start? I did a systemic analysis, assessing the overall dynamic of the situations involved. Priests seemed to be giving each other permission to do this. Bishops and other priests weren’t "interfering"; their non-involvement promoted the abuse. A male-dominated ecclesial culture was in effect sponsoring this "rite of passage." A new pastor proved his mettle by "off-ing" a nun or an experienced female minister, then replacing her with whomever he chose.

Was it really for "the greater good of the Church" that this pattern continue? Across the country, parishes were losing the competent leadership of women and suffering disruption so that a pastor could prove he held ultimate and unchallenged authority. Religious communities were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in needed salaries to support their retired and elder members.

I took account of statistics. Women, both lay and religious, supply over 82 percent of un-ordained ministry in the church. Unjust employment practice in the church is a woman’s issue.

Taking Action
I decided we had to shatter the myth that the pastor was not accountable for his decisions. If a priest could be prosecuted under civil law for pedophilia or embezzlement, he should be accountable for his employment practices. If a pastor were a manager at a local bank, he couldn’t get away with capricious hiring and firing of personnel. We should be measuring hiring and firing practices against civil standards.

I asked Marie to supply me with the names of persons in the regional power structure. I wrote several letters to her local bishop to complain about Marie’s treatment, reviewing all her accomplishments. I wrote to the pastor to tell him I didn’t like how he was dealing with my friend. I sent copies of the letters to the superintendent of the diocesan school office (which issues school contracts) and to the vicar for women religious.

Reasoning that men listen to other men before they listen to a woman, I asked a retired bishop friend to make a telephone call on behalf of Marie to the resident bishop. He did. I advised Marie to meet face to face with the bishop, which she did. I told her she didn’t have to face her capricious pastor alone. So she made a round of visits and telephone calls. People in authority began talking to each other to solve the problem that had come to their attention. I was not going to allow the pastor the protection of secrecy and privacy. I wanted as many people to know and become involved as possible.

Additional Recourse
If this failed, she could get help from another office at the Chancery - the tribunal. The tribunal offers services other than annulments for marriages. If the officials at the diocesan school office failed to intervene effectively, Marie had the right to protest an unjust decision by the pastor as unjust and seek arbitration. She could officially ask for a canon lawyer to act as her advocate and to be her official mediary in resolving the dispute. As a woman, she had the same rights as all the baptized in the Church, from layman to Pope. Canon law affirms her right to appeal a decision, to obtain official representation by a canon lawyer, and to seek an official ecclesial inquiry and hearing of her complaint.

A Happy Ending
The outcome? The pastor was invited to come to a meeting at the diocesan office with school officials and Marie to discuss her contract. He decided not to attend the meeting. Instead, he met with Marie personally. He withdrew all his conditions. He maintained that he had never intended to block her contract or let her go. He said he intended that she continue, as before, to serve as principal. She reported to me later that she and the pastor have now established a more collaborative basis on which to carry on their respective but interrelated ministries on behalf of the people of the parish.

Eloise Rosenblatt, the Associate Dean of Faculty at the Graduate School of Theology in Berkeley, CA, is also a law student at Santa Clara University.