Friday, December 30, 2005
Playing It Both Ways
Zenit is off this week, so I comb through CNS for my Catholic news fix. After my favorite blogs, of course. I read of the Tucson solution for bankruptcy, and thought, didn't something like this get the St Louis archbishop and those Polish folks in trouble?
The plan calls for each parish to be run by a five-member board of directors composed of the pastor as board head, the bishop, the diocesan moderator of the curia, a lay treasurer and a lay secretary.
Doing the math (I couldn't resist) and the clergy have a 3-2 majority on every board. Plus, the bishop and his moderator now have seventy-four more committees on which to sit. I don't recall anything like this when I read the Vatican II documents on clergy and laity this year. Might be legal, but it has a curious whiff of the convenience of modernism.
That said, I really don't think parishioners should lose their parish property because of the clumsy or immoral practices of present or historical bishops.
