Church accused of workplace injustices - unfair labor practices sometimes stem from authoritarian structures - includes related articles

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 21, 1994 by Tim McCarthy

EDITOR'S NOTE - Ministry involves a wide variety of Christian actions done in the name of Jesus. Education, preaching, teaching, hospital work, administration all ca7z be church ministry. Throughout the United States, tens of thousands of Catholic laity work directly for the church, earning their livelihood through the institution, ministering and living out their faiths. Many thousands work in harmonious settings and receive just wages. Some, however, work in climates of fear and see their employers, ultimately their bishops, engaging in arbitrary and unjust labor practices that go contrary to church social justice teachings. These practices often stem from models of church that stress the singular authority of the bishop.

What follows is a ministry story of a different stripe. This one addresses abuses often suffered by church ministers, church employees. It is our hope that bringing these abuses to light may begin to clear the air and eventually lead to more just and harmonious conditions for all Catholic ministers.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Sixteen months after she was fired from the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese in 1992, Doris Parnell was still shivering with emotion as she recalled the way she had been treated. For all those months she had been struggling to get her "emotions and personal life under control,' she,said, an ordeal so painful that it has driven her from the Catholic church.

Parnell, 58, was a religious education coordinator working with handicapped and disabled people. She joined the diocesan staff in 1987 and has about 20 years' experience in her field. All around her, colleagues were being summarily sentenced to the purgatory of the unemployed. She objected to her supervisors. "If that's the way you're going to be, you can go, too," she was told. Her job was subsequently eliminated, ostensibly because of a budget cut.

She was given a month's salary as severance pay, but no unemployment compensation. She applied for food stamps, nearly lost her house and car (HUD took over the mortgage on her house to prevent a foreclosure).

Ifs a very sad situation, all of it,' she said during an interview in a South Bend diner. A lot of harm has been done.'

In the Fort Wayne-south Bend diocese and in other dioceses across the country, church workers are routinely fired with little or no notice or explanation and with no recourse. Often these are church workers with modest salaries, people approaching retirement who are suddenly forced to kiss their retirement benefits goodbye.

Such injustice in a church that preaches justice and social concern,has begun to gather wider national attention in recent month&

Notre Dame's Fr. Richard McBrien, for example, speaking at last fall's Call to Action conference in Chicago, said victims of such abuses have little recourse but to take their cases to the courts. He said that "until there are dramatically successful lawsuits against priests, bishops, parishes, dioceses, schools and hospitals, and some costly out-of-court settlements, as there have been to date in the tragic cases of sexual abuse by priests, church employees - the great majority of whom are women - will continue to be abused, intimidated, calumniated and fired without cause or recourse."

The Call to Action organization has formed a special committee to examine the problem and gather information about church employees seemingly arbitrarily dismissed by their employers.

Examples abound. Few, however, like to speak publicly about their cases, sometimes hoping settlements can be worked out. Still others fear talking about the problem lest they be branded as troublemakers and lose any further chance of ministering in the church.

In interviews from Florida to California, North Dakota to Texas during the last two months, NCR found at least 40 cases of aggrieved diocesan workers, many of whom are still out of work.

Carol Ann Giannini, for example, had been director of the Springfield-cape Girardeau, Mo., diocese's family life ministry for six years and was terminated effective Dec. 31. "A chancery is 40,000 square feet surrounded by reality," Giannini said only days after she left the diocesan chancery for the last time. Giannini, 52, a single mother (and grandmother), had seen herself as a bridge between that institutional never-never land and the everyday day reality of a spiritually starved laity. The trouble with being a bridge, she said, is that you get walked on.

The family life ministry was popular in the largely rural diocese, virtually a one-woman show, and Giannini was hoping to expand and improve it. To enhance the many retreats she gave, she was doing graduate work in preaching at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis. She also wrote a twice monthly column for the diocesan newspaper, where she analyzed issues such as reclaiming the image of Mary as a down-to-earth example for today's woman.

This was a laywoman preaching and teaching Marian theology. It came down to a matter of clerical turf, she said. If you are a woman working for the church, "you're supposed to stay in the diocesan kitchen." The bishop advised her to stick to writing about how parents could help their kids with their homework and she was told to drop the Aquinas course.