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In future Church governance, hierarchy meets partnership

 

I have been given the opportunity over the past three years to have privileged insights into the leadership of Catholic secondary schools. Most recently this experience included Mary Aikenhead Education’s 2024 leadership symposium. I have previously described Catholic secondary education as a ‘parallel church’, a provocative image which I have been told does not please episcopal leaders who hold education closer to their hearts than any other ministry. Education does, after all, represent Catholicism to the wider community more than anything else. While the image appeals to many in schools, it may not please some others who view the church as a whole rather than in isolated parts.

The image captures useful aspects, though it needs refinement and overstates the parallelism at play.   What I sought to capture was the contrast between the flourishing Catholic education sector and the diminishing episcopal/diocesan/parish sector. The former is now largely lay, while the latter, by definition, is still clerical. More than that I sought to highlight the contrast between the type of church found in the two sectors.

One, the clerical, is increasingly at war with contemporary society in many dioceses, while the other, the schools, are embracing it. The latter, despite some pushback from many senior diocesan bishops, is a much more inclusive church open to contemporary values, especially in the areas of gender and sexuality. Women’s empowerment and the inclusion of diverse sexualities are non-negotiable in schools, but this is not yet the case in many parishes and dioceses.

Dioceses and schools are not strictly on parallel paths, because there is some contact and overlap. They can come together on matters like the environment and Indigenous peoples. Some parents, teachers, and students live in both worlds. But for the vast majority the ‘parallel’ image stands because there is a gulf between the two.

The education sector is also the home to the newly emerging canonical form, Ministerial Public Juridic Persons (MPJPs), a church term for an entity established by Canon Law ‘to perform a specific function’. Ministerial is the key word which distinguishes them from dioceses, parishes and religious institutes, which are also Public Juridic Persons.

The current fourteen MPJPs are still not well-known by this name in the wider Catholic community, although their activities (schools, hospitals, and aged care) may be. They have grown out of the religious institutes (Sisters of Charity in the case of Mary Aikenhead Ministries), which played such a large part in Catholic education, health and other ministries but are now in decline. Others include Edmund Rice Education Australia (Christian Brothers) and Kildare Ministries (Brigidine and Presentation Sisters). It is a passing of the flame from one religious institute generation to a new lay-led generation, inspired by Vatican II and utilising the new structures now available. The new entities are led by canonical stewards or trustees, of which there were about 80 in all in 2023.

The MPJPs are one of the rising forces in the church, coming together in the Association of Ministerial Public Juridic Persons (AMPJP). They carry forward in a new, evolving way the charisms or particular spiritual gifts, of the religious institutes and have high aspirations. After its recent AMPJP AGM, Dinner and Forum 2024, its executive officer, Martin Teulan, reported in its newsletter that the new strategic plan ‘seeks to help MPJPs emerge from an essential period of initial development and settling in, to a new stage of life, where they also take their place as key leadership bodies in the wider Church’.

 

'Each of the MPJPs also brings expertise, experience and special charisms. They are now flourishing oases in church life. Serious doubts exist, however, about the ‘tripod’ image. It remains just an aspiration if it is meant to imply equality within the Church.'

 

In terms of wider church governance, this is already happening. The MPJPs have been officially named as the third tripod in the structure of a newly emerging, synodal church alongside the bishops (represented by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference) and the religious institutes (represented by Catholic Religious Australia). This was the case at the Plenary Council (PC) assemblies in 2021-22. When the PC concluded, the three-legged tripod was accorded pride of place within its implementation arrangements. This hasn’t happened yet, because the Decrees have not yet been approved by the Vatican, but the intention remains.

My co-presenter at the Mary Aikenhead Education Symposium 2024 and keynote speaker at the AMPJP event, Susan Pascoe, has joined with the Australian Catholic University and other researchers to launch a new world-wide church governance initiative. It is known as ‘Inclusive Governance in a Synodal Church’. This project ties together the idea of synodality and the MPJPs as the future of church governance. Pascoe, who holds various positions with the Synod on Synodality in Rome, is well-placed to do this given her leading roles in both developments. She has extensive experience in the church governance world.

The MPJPs in Australia bring a fresh perspective to the table. Teulan claims that ‘the size of MPJP ministries, led mostly by lay people, is now perhaps 50 times greater than that of the remaining religious order ministries.’

Each of the MPJPs also brings expertise, experience and special charisms. They are now flourishing oases in church life. Serious doubts exist, however, about the ‘tripod’ image. It remains just an aspiration if it is meant to imply equality within the Church.

The first query is whether the three legs of this church governance image are anywhere near as equal as the simple image implies. A cursory look shows that they are not, and the authority structure and culture of the church does not allow them to be. The ‘old’ power structure, represented within the hierarchical church by the ACBC, remains dominant, not just because of tradition, but because of its size and resources. CRA has never been accorded the respect it deserves by the ACBC and remains in a subservient position despite the autonomy and independence of religious institutes. The MPJPs (not a user-friendly term), have still got a lot of growth and relationship building within the wider church to undertake. They remain the weakest leg of the tripod.

The second query is whether the tripod fully represents the diversity of the Church in Australia or whether the tripod squeezes out other elements, including most laity. If most lay Catholics are excluded it contradicts the aspirations of a synodal church for the People of God. The tripod needs a fourth leg to represent those lay Catholics who have no ties to the AMPJP. The fourth leg, perhaps a new National Council of the Laity, would represent lay individuals and independent lay groups, like Vinnies. Only then will the future governance of the Church in Australia be fully inclusive and synodal in the spirit of the synodality championed by Pope Francis.

 

 


John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

Topic tags: John Warhurst, Church, Lay, Governance, MPJPs, Pope, Synodality

 

 

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Existing comments

Crikey! We've had pyramids, circles and now tripods in increasingly tedious discussions of revised Catholic ecclesial structures and governance. It seems more like a geometry class than ecclesiology: a bizarre one at that, now that the possibility of a tripod with four legs is being mooted.

A geometry without symmetry. . . How postmodern. On the one hand we're informed MPJPs are "flourishing oases in church life." And, on the other, that they're "the weakest legs in the tripod." To my mind, this newspeak is taking us to a remove far from the richly theological an spiritual metaphors of the Church as "the mystical body of Christ" and "the People of God."

Little wonder, as John Warhurst notes, that the MPJPs are "not well known . . . in the wider Catholic community." The same might be said of the AMPJPs.

Are we not burdened enough with inflation without adding to it a further bureaucratic form engineered specifically for members of the Catholic Church?


John RD | 11 September 2024  

Catholic education for both adults and children has to be one of the great catastrophes fuelled by the serious misinterpretations of the 'Spirit of Vatican II'. In the second sentence of its introduction, the Vatican II document, Gravissium Educationis (Declaration on Christian Education, Pope Paul VI, 28 October, 1965) states "Indeed, the circumstances of our time have made it easier and at once more urgent to educate young people and, what is more, to continue the education of adults." Further, this document states, "This sacred synod recalls to pastors of souls their most serious obligation to see to it that all the faithful but especially the youth who are the hope of the church enjoy this Christian education" (10) and further, "But let teachers recognise that the Catholic school depends on them almost entirely for the accomplishment of its goals and programs" (27). Rather challenges the "parents are the prime educators of their children" in matters of formal Christian education but not as examples of how to live a Christian/Catholic life. Please explain, Prof Warhurst and the proponents of self-appointed and professed ministries such as MPJPs why over 90% of children educated in Catholic schools know very little of what the Catholic Church teaches and do not practise their alleged religious adherence. Clearly, they have no cognition of the sacramentality that defines Catholicism, the concept of the risen Christ living amongst his people in enactment of the sacraments. It is a matter of some doubt that many children or indeed adults in today's Australian Catholic Church could even name the sacraments. Outrageous and in no small measure due to the efforts of the many who believe they are superior to the magisterium and choose to take no notice of Christ's commissioning of his church and pursue their own, often ignorant, preferences.


John Frawley | 13 September 2024  
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The critical state of the transmission and nourishing of Catholic faith in schools that prompts John Frawley's important question has in my experience as a parent and teacher been strongly influenced by a notion of and emphasis on a social justice disconnected from sacraments - a development that effectively renders the latter, at best, an optional extra lacking intrinsic connection with the life offered by Christ and mediated sacramentally in the ecclesial community of faith.
"You don't have to go to Mass to be a Christian" is a dictum widely in circulation and accepted in recent years, even among teachers of Religious Education.
Nor is the current situation addressed, let alone ameliorated, by an effective transforming of schools into branches of the Social Welfare Department, along with several decades of the lowering of tertiary admission scores for teaching, and, more recently, the over-reliance on digital technologies (laptops, AI) in the classroom with the non-educational 'rationale' advanced almost uncontested: "It's the way of the future."


John RD | 14 September 2024  

The Australian Catholic Church seems to me to be at a crossroads. I think John Warhurst summed up what the Catholic Church and its educational system here was like once very well. Where it is going is debatable. Catholic education is not just of the classroom, but should occur at all stages of life and is best taught by example. There was much merit IMHO in learning the old Catechism by heart. Then you knew where you stood. The saintly Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who was Catholic Chaplain at Cambridge University for 30 years last century, from the 1930s to the 1960s, was very insistent that traditional Catholic truth be taught. He was utterly orthodox in a delightfully eccentric English recusant manner whilst being utterly charming, considerate and tremendously insightful. University is a place where you encounter all sorts of temptations and can quite easily lose your faith. That can have disastrous consequences. Fisher House (the Cambridge Catholic chaplaincy) was then and is now a tremendous source of comfort and strength to its members. The Church should be a real bulwark to those who need it. I am not sure all this talk of synodality and 'being involved' is doing much good.


Edward Fido | 13 September 2024  
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I think Ann Rennie's article 'I am pilgrim' (ES, 13/9) provides, among other things, rich illumination on the value of the 'old Catechism' in the context of pilgrimage. I also think in this hyper-sceptical 'post-truth' age that exposure to the catechism could provide a solid foundation not only to catechumens and the baptized, but also to sceptics themselves by means of engaging them directly with basic truths of faith worthy of constructive intellectual expenditure.


John RD | 16 September 2024  

"Crikey again’! From geometry to geology/cosmology, from the secular thrust of the State in Catholic Schools as NGOs to the novel tectonic plate of school as parallel church! Or even a bit of biology: beware the crypto Lamarckism of that tripod image: looking for the fourth leg! - which is suggestive of the spurious construction of the giraffe on its proppy legs in one generation of neck stretching. 

I’d be happy enough with institutional school being compatible with church if the latter is imaged as the pinch of leaven in the mass of dough. From another angle (back to geometry), that mass of laity waiting to be recognised as the prospective fourth arm/leg of church has already manifested something of a faith exculturation - many have taken their faith and live in something of a diaspora characterised by good social commitments in keeping with James’ letter in the NT: true religion is promoting the wellbeing of others by coming to their aid in the spirit of Jesus of N."


Noel McMaster | 14 September 2024  

My experience is in Catholic Healthcare, where, like in Catholic Education, there are a number of PJPs. At a conference a year or two ago, I stood at the back of a room full of senior staff, board and trustees, all committed lay people responsible for running our extensive contribution to health and aged care in this country. We were listening to the Chair of the ACBC at the time, and it occurred to me that we are the ones leading the Church in this space, not the bishops! The religious orders will all be gone soon and I see a group of committed lay people ably taking us forward


Margaret | 16 September 2024  
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As they are not simply secular corporate entities, how can Catholic ministries and institutions be totally independent of episcopal leadership and accountability?


John RD | 19 September 2024  

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