People, Priests, and Prelates:
Swidler, Arlene
WHEN THE LAITY CAST THEIR VOTE PEOPLE, PRIESTS, AMD PRELATES Ecclesiastical Democracy and The Tensions of Trusteeism Patrick W. Carey University of Notre Dame, $26.95, 392 pp. Arlene...
...Not surprisingly, the trustee boards which held title to the church property often considered the priests their employees and expected to hire (or at least approve) and fire their own pastors...
...In some other countries, including Canada, a form of the trustee system continues even today.The trustee system in our country persisted so long and was so widespread -Carey points out that probably most early parishes used it simply because state law demanded it-that it is surprising how little we hear about it...
...Whether the laity is willing to take on the burden of fiscal responsibility is debatable...
...As early Catholics came to this country and moved westward they formed congregations, built churches and incorporated legally to protect their property, organized prayer services and educated their children in the faith, and hoped to find a priest to minister to them...
...The trustees and their backers advanced a variety of arguments in favor of the system...
...The trustees voted to stop Whelan's salary and asked John Carroll, later to be our first bishop but at that time the superior of the American Mission, to remove Whelan...
...An epilogue points out that the basic questions of ecclesiology and roles remain unanswered...
...The Vatican does not emerge as a villain in this book...
...ARLENE SWIDLER teaches religious studies at Villanova University...
...Ironically, in Europe women occasionally functioned as patrons, the aristocratic equivalent to the trustee board...
...Senario College in Lady smith, Wisconsin...
...In his own cathedral there were no problems...
...Though not a history but an analysis, the book does present the story of the first trustee battle in 1786 at St...
...He writes frequently on the Third Reich and psychohistory...
...In Philadelphia, one of the hotter spots in the history of trusteeism, clergy are still known to fret over the possibilities of another "Hogan schism...
...What has been available to the average reader has for the most part disparaged the' 'evils of trusteeism" and "lay interference...
...Church leaders in the beginning were supportive...
...Carroll, who himself insisted on election by his fellow priests before becoming our first bishop, found the trustee system workable despite the headaches...
...Abbesses, for example, might function as patrons of parishes and nominate and install or dismiss priests as part of their temporal jurisdiction...
...Protestants who paid their wives' pew rents were eligible to vote...
...Others, enthusiastically American, saw trustees as an accommodation to what they perceived as a better order, even arguing in good Enlightenment fashion that the European hierarchical model of church was rooted in history but the American republican model was based on nature...
...Sometimes, of course, the system malfunctioned...
...Systems of checks and balances can be perfected...
...Priests themselves complained about the drunken itinerant clergy: there were accusations of clergy making off with congregational property...
...even when the laity had a voice in the choice of pastors, they were, after all, limited to men ordained by the bishops...
...thesis on the worker-priests for Hunter College...
...In many ways the case was typical...
...The trustees wanted talented preachers who could draw large congregations, including non-Catholics, to help support the churches...
...So what are we to make of all the facts and examples Carey has presented in this volume...
...THOMAS T. LEWIS is professor of history and political science at Mt...
...to call "generous souls...
...Though bishops were less concerned about oratorical talents, the laity resented priests who embarrassed them either by their ignorance or by their poor English: the French priests and bishops were especially resented by their English-speaking congregations...
...Almost always its involvement was simply a response to appeals from one side or the other, with all sides recognizing the pope's spiritual jurisdiction...
...Still, when the American bishops decreed in 1829 that the laity had absolutely no right of patronage, the Vatican suggested the wording be changed to admit the possibility of lay patronage sometime in the future...
...As less-educated immigrants swelled the congregation, the trustees came to be more representative of the general populace...
...My hunch is that there was a time, right after the Council, when we would have been eager, but that our enthusiasm has waned...
...He often approved clergy brought over to this country by the laity, and consulted parishioners before appointing a priest...
...There were horror stories on the clerical side as well...
...Peter's Seminary in London, Canada, since 1972...
...The passage from the Acts of the Apostles (1:15-16) in which the entire Christian community elects a bishop was often appealed to, as were canon law and the Council of Trent...
...What was permitted women by church law, in other words, was forbidden here by civil law...
...Enter another Irish Capuchin, Andrew Nugent...
...Peter's, the sole Catholic church in New York City...
...The occasional power struggles between these lay trustees and the episcopacy eventually resulted in a united front of bishops at their First Provincial Council in 1829, where they ruled that all property be vested in the bishop whenever legally possible...
...Bad sermons, financial differences, and ethnic tensions were common and interrelated...
...Clerical accountability downwards as well as upwards would be healthy...
...sometimes bishops replaced duly elected trustees with their own men, even when the act clearly broke the civil law...
...Carroll revoked Nugent's faculties, but his followers seized the church, and the lay trustees, with Carroll's approval, turned to the civil court, which removed Nugent...
...Whelan eventually left of his own volition, but Nugent turned out not to be such a bargain: he asked that his salary be raised from three to four hundred dollars a year, and it was discovered he had been suspended in Dublin for "incontinence...
...Yet the setting for Carey's study is 1785-1860...
...What happened in this country was primarily a lay-clergy struggle with the bishops grabbing the spoils, power...
...Carey, an associate professor of theology at Mar-quette University, is in fact not only the first scholar to produce a full study of the system but also one of the few--here as well as in earlier essays-to attempt an objective study and present the several points of view...
...There are certainly enough historical precedents and theological arguments to warrant a return to some sort of role-sharing...
...Both trustees and anti-trustees resorted to violence, locking church doors, breaking their way in, smashing pews...
...Parishioners were dissatisfied with their pastor, Charles Whelan, because of his bad preaching, his demands for money (John Carroll had to warn him not to collect money for hearing confessions), and his closeness to his first benefactor, a Portuguese merchant...
...in at least some states civil law excluded them from trustee elections...
...Still, the trustees were elected each year, and many had long tenures, so although there was often a vocal anti-trustee faction, the trustees certainly repREVIEWERS RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., associate pro-fessor of communications at Loyola University in New Orleans, is author of Books for Believers: 35 Books Every Catholic Should Read (Paulist Press...
...Arlene Swidler The agenda sounds contemporary: democracy in the church, separation of the spiritual and temporal with lay control over the latter, a lay voice in the appointment of pastors, due process for the clergy, and some sort of constitution that would spell out all of these...
...On the other hand, the growth of the permanent diaconate suggests a pool of what we used to call "generous souls...
...And all sides-parishioners, trustees, priests, and prelates-could at times be despotic...
...resented a significant portion of the parish...
...Women apparently did not serve on trustee boards...
...JOAN LENARDON wrote her MA...
...Many, especially from German backgrounds, simply wanted to transplant the traditional and familiar patronage system to the New World...
...The trustees, especially in the beginning, were drawn from the few educated and well-to-do members and elected only by the pew-holders, themselves an economic elite...
...She has been lecturing on church history at St...
...Like the American republic itself, the system only gradually lost its elitism...
...By the 1820s, though, the American bishops had been able to bring Rome over to their side...
...Perhaps some day the preaching might finally improve...
Vol. 115 • April 1988 • No. 7
