very insightful article - sent (with comments below) by Peter Borre - Boston champion against church closings..
(to download the full pdf file:
http://www.clevelandmagyar.org/images/uploads/CafardireParishAssets.pdf)
Hello All:
Many of you have struggled mightily to protect yr parishes from being destroyed by diocesan bishops. The article below speaks to this issue, in complex and authoritative canonical language.
The good news: as you knew intuitively, under the Church's own law what the bishops have been doing is illegal.
The bad news, no one in Rome seems to care.
My own brief comments are below; the entire article is attached. For those of you with high blood pressure, read this in small doses.
Regards,
Peter Borré
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Article by Dean Cafardi: The Availability of Parish Assets for Diocesan Debts
Published in Seton Hall Journal, 2004-2005
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This learned article, attached, might lead unwary parishioners to think that all is well, and that their parishes suppressed unlawfully under canon law will be restored, per the cogent and scholarly comments of Cafardi, perhaps the leading Catholic canonist in the U.S. … not so, the context of Cafardi’s article was his advocacy for bishops who had placed their dioceses in bankruptcy (or close to it), and were trying to shield the bulk of “their” assets (parishes) from claims of creditors, including tort claimants.
There is a dismal familiarity to Cafardi’s well-reasoned points:
The parish as a juridical person; its ownership under canon law of property and revenue;
Constraints on the bishop’s apparent control over these;
The abuse of the suppression canon as a mechanism to destroy a parish; and
An interesting sidebar on the limited consultative role of the Presbyteral Council.
in giving an opinion of proposed parish suppressions, i.e. canon 127,
“a bishop is not to act against the majority [of the Council] without ‘overriding reason’” … which explains Boston's Cardinal O’Malley’s Stalinist way of force-marching the diocesan Presbyteral Council through extremely hurried “deliberations,” to forestall the possibility of an embarrassing Council majority contra his schemes.
It hurts to notice a respected canonist reiterate learnedly the points made in hundreds of dense-Latin pages submitted on behalf of ten RCAB parishioner groups to the highest organs of the Vatican, the Congregation for the Clergy and the Signatura, when one keeps in mind that all of this has been willfully and unlawfully disregarded in Rome.
“Parishes are not plums for the diocesan bishop” (p. 368);
“But when a subject still remains, for example a viable, if small, group of parishioners, the property [the parish] remains” (p. 370);
“…for a bishop to call such actions a suppression is a fraud on the [canon] law” (p. 370)
And there is another poignant phrase, worth special mention, which speaks to Cardinal O’Malley’s sleazy ploy to have receiving parishes ‘voluntarily’ give the assets of suppressed parishes to the archdiocese:
Cafardi writes, p. 370, “It is a principle of natural justice that what a ruler [bishop] cannot do directly, he cannot do indirectly”
So where has Cafardi been over the past four years regarding parish suppressions? Has he gone beyond his advocacy work for bankrupt bishops, and has he raised this in Rome as a point of principle? Or has he merely done a job of work for his episcopal clients, and then put the issue aside.
You figure it out.
After all, as they say in Washington,
where you stand is a function of where you sit.
