Challenges Of Working For The Church

By Phil Lawler / 05/8/25

Two articles appearing on the internet today tell a disheartening story about what it means to work for the Catholic Church in America today.

Writing for The Catholic Thing, Randall Smith looks at the abrupt firing of three respected professors from Sacred Heart seminary in Detroit, and measures their dismissal against the standards of social justice (not to mention academic freedom) formally proclaimed by the Catholic Church. Smith concludes:

Archbishop Edward Weisenburger’s actions tell everyone that you work for the Catholic Church the way you swim on a dangerous beach without a lifeguard—at your own risk.

Of course that conclusion is not a new discovery. Ralph Martin, Eduardo Echeverria, and Edward Peters are only the latest in a fairly long line of loyal Catholics who have been dismissed from their posts not because of any misconduct or incompetence, but because their views, while fully in keeping with orthodox Catholic thought, were uncongenial to their ecclesiastical superiors. Anyone who works for the Church—as seminary instructor or religious-education director or newspaper editor or music director—could face the same fate. There are no union stewards to protect their job security; there will be no testimonial dinners to escort them gracefully into retirement.

In what seems at first an unrelated piece, the Lepanto Institute posts a report by Louis Knuffke on the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Archbishop John Wester reinstated a priest who had abandoned his ministry, spent ten years in a homosexual partnership, and actively promoted the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. If the priest, Father Steve Rosera, had repented of his past choices and returned to ministry with the humble perspective of the Prodigal Son, we might applaud the archbishop for welcoming him back and finding a quiet place where he could regain his spiritual bearings.

However, according to the Lepanto report, Father Rosera remains active in the gay-rights movement. More to the point, Archbishop Wester has not given him a quiet post, but made him a pastor and head of an archdiocesan deanery. Still more remarkable, the archbishop has made this priest—who worked for same-sex marriage and was himself registered in a domestic partnership, the Defender of the Bond on the archdiocesan marriage tribunal!

This is not an isolated case. I recall the case of another priest who walked away from his ministry, set up housekeeping with a male partner, and spent months working in an entirely secular job. When he eventually decided to return to the priesthood, he was promptly assigned to teach seminarians how to celebrate Mass. If he had been asked to teach English or Latin or even Bible history—some subject in which he had a special competence—his presence on a seminary faculty might have been easier to understand. But why would a bishop want his future priests to receive their training in the celebration of the sacred mysteries from a man who had so recently decided that he had better things to do?

Or take the more recent case in Toulouse, France, where Archbishop Guy Andre Marie de Kerimel has appointed a convicted rapist as his chancellor. Yes, the priest had served out his prison sentence, and No, he was not serving in a parish. But how could any prelate fail to understand the horrible signal he was sending when he gave a disgraced priest such a prominent assignment?

At this point the reader might be tempted to ask: What do the stories of these prodigal priests have in common with those of the cashiered seminary teachers? Only this: They remind us that those who work for the Church—whether as lay employees or in sacred ministry—serve at the whim of their ecclesiastical superiors. They may be dismissed or reinstated, silenced or promoted, irrespective of past performance.

And why is that? Why would an acclaimed theologian suddenly become persona non grata at a seminary? Why would a priest who had deserted his flock be welcomed back—not as a penitent but as a policy-maker? The answer to those questions is simple, albeit alarming. We live in an unhappy age of the Church, when we cannot assume that our bishops and our pastors agree on the fundamental truths of the faith. So the dangers of working for the Church—and the prospect of suffering from the Church—will remain until we recover the shared conviction that the truths of the faith do not change, that the Church of Christ is the same: yesterday, today, and forever.