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What Do You Do If Someone Is Treated Badly by His Parish?

Fr. Bjorn Lundberg explains why some apparent injustices in parish proceedings may be more complex than they appear, and offers advice on what courses of action we can take to rectify the truly unjust cases.

Transcript:

Host: We go now to Mike in Newport Beach, California, listening on the mighty 930 AM. Mike, your question for Father Lundberg.

Caller: Yes, Father, earlier you mentioned people, in my opinion, who wrongly leave the Church because they’ve been badly treated. Right. What do you do when you feel that—I mean I won’t mention names or anything like that, but there’s a case right now where the parish’s sacristan was badly treated, terribly, and on no notice they were fired after years of sacristan service. No warning given, no reason given, and no compensation. Four days’ pay, out you go. And the diocese doesn’t seem to be too interested and looking at it. It’s not myself, it’s someone else.

Fr. Bjorn: Well, I have to say, as a priest, a lot of the opinions that I had about the way things are handled in the Church or the way decisions are made have sort of—at least been nuanced, if not changed, by my experience in the priesthood; because I’ve learned, you know, whether it’s counseling a couple, or working in a parish, or working in an apostolate, you find out that there’s often, you know, two sides to a story—I don’t mean to say that there’s a justification in this case, I don’t know, for bad treatment—but I have often seen that sometimes decisions are made and there’s more that I don’t know. You know, if a decision’s made about how to handle a given situation, sometimes the only thing that I know is, you know, what I see; but I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.

So when there is an injustice in the Church, when someone is treated poorly, they have a right to pursue justice. Canon Law talks about that; there are structures within the Church Law about pursuing justice. I don’t know if that can be resolved at the parish level or higher up within the diocesan structure, but I also know, sometimes too, a pastor or a leader in a parish has to make a difficult decision that’s not, like, win-win. For whatever reason, they may have a reason why they have to make a decision about something, and it’s not gonna be well-received, and people may never know why they made the decision. I mean, if this person, broadly speaking, tries to be just and prudent, then I’d say, “Well, maybe there is a reason, we don’t know.” But it doesn’t mean they can’t pursue it.

And sometimes God, in His Providence, will allow painful things like this to happen, maybe to move someone into a new situation, a new parish, a new whatever. But again, I would turn to Our Lady, especially Our Lady of Sorrows, asking her to help this person try to find clarity, but also too to realize, you know, in God’s Providence, sometimes these things happen mysteriously, but there are reasons we don’t know.

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