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Divisions at St. Stanislaus Follow a Predictable Pattern
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Monday, March 17, 2008

ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Publication Date: March 13, 2008

There was a strong helping of irony surrounding the proceedings at St. Stanislaus Kostka church last week when a group of parishioners called for the ouster of the renegade priest they had recruited just three years ago to lead their defiant flock.

Given Rev. Marek Bozek's rocky history -- his dismissal from a Polish seminary on charges of sexual impropriety, his decision to skip out on his assignment in another diocese to join the media circus as pastor of St. Stanislaus and his participation in the faux ordination of two Catholic priestesses -- it is not surprising that Bozek has generated controversy, even at the rebel Polish church.

What is noteworthy about the movement to oust Bozek is that its leaders seem genuinely shocked by his dissident streak. Did they really think that a priest drawn to a breakaway church, a man who had flouted the authority of two bishops by accepting a job offer from excommunicated Catholics to shepherd a parish that had been officially suppressed, would respect the Catholic Church's authority to decide doctrine? Did they think that a parish defined by its refusal to remain united to its larger church body would itself remain uncontaminated by the virus of division?

Despite breathless media coverage, this controversy is, after all, merely another chapter in a very old story. At its heart is a centuries-old clash between Catholicism's hierarchical structure and America's democratic impulses. Generations of anti-Catholics and more than a few Catholics have scorned the Catholic hierarchy for its refusal to remake itself in the image of American democracy and for clinging to the millennia-old belief that the pope and bishops are successors to the apostles with authority that derives from God, not from the consent of the governed.

Disputes over parishes such as St. Stanislaus also are not new. They are the last gasp of the controversy over trusteeism, a short-lived system that found American laymen controlling Catholic parishes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although initially seen as a way to smooth tensions between Catholic and American sensibilities in an anti-Catholic climate, trustee-controlled parishes became breeding grounds for infighting, factions, rebellion, scandal and schism -- problems familiar to St. Stanislaus parishioners today.

After Pope Pius VII denied in 1822 the right of America's lay trustees to appoint and remove pastors and declared that church properties are subject to a bishop's control, America's trustee-controlled parishes gradually shifted to the universal Catholic model that gives bishops authority over parishes.

But St. Stanislaus, built in 1880, has remained an anomaly. Beginning with Cardinal John Glennon, St. Louis bishops have labored for six decades to bring the parish into full compliance with the laws of the Catholic Church. Efforts by St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke to make St. Stanislaus conform to the same legal and financial structure as all other parishes in St. Louis merely mark a new phase in a long-simmering dispute.

As they rebuff Burke's attempts and bask in the media attention, the St. Stanislaus rebels imagine that their grassroots revolt is breaking new ground. Yet schism is nothing new -- as the scores of Christian denominations that trace their lineage to a break with Catholicism can attest. Nor is there anything new about a church that calls itself Catholic, even though its doctrine, sacraments and structure deviate from official Catholicism. Websites of such sects crowd the Internet, where pseudo-popes and breakaway groups spawned from other breakaway groups abound.

The domino effect of church division is a well-established historical pattern. If the members of St. Stanislaus want to address the root cause of division in their ranks and make church history, they should drop the rebellion against authority and try something truly radical: reconciliation.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host, and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is ww.colleen-campbell.com.