It’s Déjà Vu all Over Again: Lay Trusteeism Rides Again

* School of Canon Law, Catholic University of America 1 Editor’s note: this text was prepared for the recent festschrift honoring Dr. John E. Lynch, C.S.P. The other essays appeared in The Jurist 67 (2007) and 68:1 ( 2008). 2 For the official documentation on the most recent stage of this dispute, see http://www.archstl.org/parishes/documents/st_stanislaus.html. 497 The Jurist 68 (2008) 497–568 IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN: LAY TRUSTEEISM RIDES AGAIN1 John P. Beal* Although it is Yogi Berra who is credited with coining the malapropism , “It’s déjà vu all over again,” Father John Lynch often expressed the same sentiment, albeit more elegantly, during his many years of leading his students through the tangled thickets of the history of canon law toward the contentious issues of the present day. Father Lynch frequently reminded us that, while history does not repeat itself, contemporary problems usually have their roots deep in the long forgotten past, and that the challenges of the present can only be adequately addressed by untangling these historical roots. He also reminded us that, since people are prone to remember the past only selectively, those who would understand the historical roots of contemporary problems cannot avoid the demanding task of going back to the sources themselves. I. Introduction Those familiar with the history of the Catholic Church in the United Stated during the nineteenth century and canon lawyers particularly had a “déjà vu all over again” experience in late 2005 when a long simmering dispute between the Archbishop of Saint Louis and the trustees of Saint Stanislaus Polish Catholic Church in that city boiled over. The Archbishop declared the trustees and the priest they had recruited and hired as pastor excommunicated as schismatics; and, when these sanctions did not bring the trustees to heel, he canonically suppressed the parish.2 Most observers knew “lay trusteeism,” if they knew it at all, only as a hoary historical memory and had assumed that it had been completely eradicated by the bishops of the United States and theVatican by the end of the nineteenth century. It was a surprise, therefore, to discover that parishes whose property was controlled by lay trustees still existed and that this lay control of parish property was occasioning the same acrimonious disputes between trustees and bishops that it often had in the nineteenth cen- 3 Patrick Carey has observed: “The issues of trusteeism, therefore, were submerged under rigorous episcopal legislation which covered up the possibilities within the Catholic tradition itself of greater lay and clerical involvement in ecclesiastical administration. Thus, the episcopal resolution of the conflict could not prevent what one social scientist has called ‘a recurrent gathering of clouds, i.e., a new accumulation of tension.’Indeed, in the subsequent history of Catholicism the unresolved conflicts of the antebellum period continued to reappear in a variety of new forms. Clerics and laymen periodically raised issues that were a continuation of some of the complaints and claims of the age of trusteeism.” Patrick W. Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987) 284. tury. In Saint Louis, the trustees and their supporters claimed that they were only protecting the parish and its assets, including the cultural patrimony of their Polish forebears, from confiscation and dissipation by a tyrannical archbishop; the Archbishop claimed that he was only safeguarding the Catholic identity of the parish by bringing its governance arrangements into conformity with canon law. It really was “déjà vu all over again.” Canon law was invoked during the dispute between the trustees of Saint Stanislaus Church and theArchbishop of Saint Louis in the twentyfirst century, as it had been invoked during lay trustee conflicts in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century disputes, canon law was as likely to be invoked by parishioners and their trustees as by bishops; in the recent dispute in Saint Louis, however, invocations of canon law came mostly from the Archbishop and his supporters. It seems to have been taken for granted by both sides that canon law was unequivocally on the side of the...