The Law and Justice

How the Catholic Church has changed since I was an altar boy! And I’m not talking about the sex scandals. NPR reported today that the Archbishop of St. Louis, Archbishop Burke, has issued an interdict to the board of St. Stanislaus parish, the leading Polish parish in the archdiocese. The next step after an interdict is excommunication; an interdict prevents one from receiving the sacraments.

From this distance it’s impossible to figure out where truth and justice lie. The web site of the archdiocese devotes a fair amount of space to making its case. Their basic argument seems to be that the church directors illegally changed the bylaws to remove the archbishop from having ultimate control. And, they’ve assembled a raft of documents, from the original agreements of 1891 to the archbishop’s letters of 2005. Frankly, they make a good case.

But then you read that the archdiocese of St. Louis, like so many others, is in the church closing mode at the same time that they are paying off the victims of the clergy sex scandal. While the archbishop says he will not sell the church property, he does want to be the only vote in controlling the church assets. The archdiocese refers to the denial by the Vatican of the church board’s petition in November as another indication of the stubbornness of the board; yet the newspapers report that the Vatican overrode the opposition of Polish bishops who supported the board.

There seems to be some legal merit on the archdiocese’s side, but the law and justice are not always the same. To me, this looks like another case of the people revolting against the centuries-old domination of the clergy. At the parish meeting the vote was 299 – 5 in favor of opposing the archdiocese.