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

Carew studied spirituality with D'Arcy when he was an auxiliary bishop in Boston in the 1970s and later became associate director of the archdiocesan permanent diaconate program. Although she still insists on being called "Sister," she no longer belongs to a religious community. She is now consecrated in the order of virgins, an ancient order for laywomen stipulated in Canon 604.

D'Arcy set up the evaluation team in October 1986. In February 1987, he asked Carew to come to Fort Wayne. March saw what came to be called the St. Joseph Day Massacre. About three months later, Carew became diocesan director of religious education, the position she now holds.

Although she said there has been no inordinate turnover in her department, Carew has lopped a lot of heads, Doris Parnell's among them. She has held her employees to a stern model of orthodoxy and has been known to poll them on their beliefs and practices.

"All of us who were canned were independent thinkers," Parnell said. Steve Starks was one of her colleagues who got axed. At the time of the 1987 "massacre," he was associate director of the Ft. Wayne religious education office. He was rehired, but a year later, during Holy Week 1988, the blade fell again.

Starks had been working in Indianapolis the day before. He got up at five in the morning to make it back to Fort Wayne for the meeting his boss, Carew, had called. At 9:30 he walked into the room and could tell immediately "that somebody was dead and it was probably me." Carew gave him until 11:00 to clear the building. He didn't have his key with him and he said Carew was "pitching a bitch" about that.

He asked Carew why he was being fired. "You know good and well," she said. But, said Starks in a recent interview, "I still don't have a clue." Carew said she had spoken to Starks several times about improving his work, although she refused to elaborate. "I believe that Steve was justly treated," she said.

The trauma lasts a long time, Starks said. He investigated "bringing charges" but decided that he had no resources for a lawsuit. "It's mostly the way they did it," he said, calling it "uncharitable" if not unjust.

Starks tried another diocesan ministry in another part of the state, but eventually decided that it was not his work. "I'm too apolitical to survive working for the church," he said. He now works for a religious supply company.

Eliot Kapitan was also fired during Holy Week 1988, but for him the outcome has been happier. Kapitan was the diocesan director of liturgy. Only six months before he was sacked, he had been assured that his job was secure. Then, at a Holy Week Mass, D'Arcy told him that, although he was doing a good job, the bishop wanted "to go in another direction." D'Arcy did not say which direction, but Kapitan was replaced by a priest.

Kapitan said that he does feel he was treated unfairly, but he is now liturgy director for the Springfield, Ill., diocese and he said the bishop there, Daniel Ryan, is "very fair." But he said the transition was difficult. No benefits followed him from Fort Wayne-South Bend, a problem that is at least as widespread in the church as it is in secular society.