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

But Dolan said it is also part of a current trend away from the people-of-God model of church. "It's kind of scary," he said.

Striking a more secular but surprisingly similar note, Philadelphia attorney Bruce Endy said in a June 1992 letter to John Reilly, president of the National Association of Catholic School Teachers, that "those church fathers who believe that teachers will obtain real social justice without representative bargaining are kidding themselves and the rest of their parishioners."

"The church does not operate in a vacuum," Endy wrote. "The employment relationship with its lay teachers is essentially a civil legal relationship. It is a contract for personal services that is enforceable in the civil courts.

"Bishop D'Arcy is lost in his notion that the church is a feudal institution which has the right to live apart from the rest of the community of which it is a part," Endy continued. "If he wants to close his eyes to the world in which his lay teachers live, let him hire only religious to teach in his schools."

Endy castigated D'Arcy's new teachers council, saying it would be "his creature as opposed to an independent, indomitable association, freely elected by the majority of those teachers who wish to be represented by CATCH."

Sally Vance-Trembath was the first chairperson of D'Arcy's council. In an interview on the Notre Dame campus, while her twin sons played around the fountain, she described the council meetings as "a joke." No one wanted to serve, Vance-Trembath said. "People were ready to throw eggs or something."

A part-time teacher at St. Joseph's High School at the time, she was a fairly new member of CATCH, joining in the spring of 1991 after coming to South Bend from the far more progressive Seattle archdiocese. With the union's permission, she ran for the council and was elected.

Msgr. William Lester, diocesan vicar for education and one of D'Arcy's two vicar generals, attended the quarterly meetings to set the agenda, Vance-Trembath said. But D'Arcy had control. (Vance-Trembath said that when she offered a 90-second opening prayer, D'Arcy was looking at his watch. In Seattle, opening prayers could last 30 minutes.)

When a "massive" teacher morale problem loomed as an agenda item, for example, Lester seemed to agree, but D'Arcy refused to approve the agenda. "A person with a low morale is a person with a disquieted spirit and we don't want them in our school system," D'Arcy said.

Another teacher from St. Joseph's, Michael Mazza, a D'Arcy appointee on the council, challenged the bishop. Mazza was to the ecclesial right of D'Arcy, a religion teacher who gave students extra credit for saying the rosary, but he knew church documents on labor relations. D'Arcy simply took over the meeting and torpedoed the agenda, Vance-Trembath said. (After implying that an NCR interview with D'Arcy could be arranged, the diocesan communications office made no further response to the request.)

D'Arcy later ostracized Mazza for his association with E. Michael Jones, editor of Fidelity Magazine, an ultraconservative who views churchpeople like D'Arcy and Jane Carew as too loose and liberal. Mazza left the diocese and published a scathing attack on it in Fidelity.