Name Clericalism Properly, or the Cure Will Do the Damage
A response to Jean D’Cunha, “Making Synodality work: The laity’s role in daily practice“
Dr D’Cunha is right that clericalism is a wound, that it has cost the Church credibility it may not recover in my lifetime, and that several of her practical proposals are overdue. I want to say that plainly before I say the rest, because the rest is a serious disagreement.
My objection is not to her indignation. It is to her definition. She writes that clericalism is “the systemic reduction of the Catholic Church to an exclusive, all-male clergy.” That sentence does a great deal of quiet work. It folds three entirely different things into one bag: the sacramental structure of holy orders, the Church’s settled teaching that ordination to the priesthood is conferred on men, and the vice of clerical self-importance. Only the third of these is clericalism. The first two are the constitution of the Church, taught at Vatican II and reaffirmed since. If clericalism just is the hierarchical structure of the Church, then no amount of synodal listening will cure it, and the honest conclusion would be that we should become a different kind of Church altogether. That conclusion is available to anyone who wants it. It is not, however, what synodality means, and it should not be introduced by way of a definition rather than an argument.
Clericalism is a disposition, not an order
The strongest account of clericalism we have does not come from its critics outside the presbyterate. It came from Pope Francis, who named it more sharply than anyone, and who located it precisely where D’Cunha does not. In his 2016 letter to Cardinal Ouellet he described clericalism as a temptation that runs in both directions: priests are drawn to be clericalised, and the faithful frequently ask us to be. It is a collusion. It suits both parties. It relieves the laity of responsibility at the same time as it flatters the priest.
That account is more useful than D’Cunha’s because it is falsifiable and it is pastoral. It explains the parish where the priest is a benign administrator and the people still will not make a decision without him. It explains the pastoral council that defers to me on a matter of building compliance about which I know nothing, and the same council that will not tell me my homily last Sunday was thin. Clericalism is a habit of the heart, available to bishops, priests, sacristans, catechists and parish secretaries alike. Reduce it to a property of ordained men and you have made it something no layperson need repent of, which is the surest way to keep it alive.
Vatican II held two truths together that this article separates. Lumen Gentium teaches that the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood differ essentially and not only in degree, and it teaches with equal force that there is a true equality of dignity among all the baptised. Difference of function is not a hierarchy of worth. A Church that cannot hold both ends of that sentence will lurch between two errors: a priesthood that thinks itself a caste, and a laity that thinks the priesthood is a job title someone happens to hold.
Synodality is not parliamentarism
D’Cunha describes synodality as “shared decision-making, responsibility and accountability” and as the replacement of decrees with round tables. Half of that is right. But Francis said repeatedly, and the International Theological Commission’s 2018 study on synodality states carefully, that a synod is not a parliament. The synodal process is genuinely deliberative in its discernment, and it binds the pastor to listen, to consult widely, and to give an account of himself. It does not transfer apostolic authority to a majority vote. The 2024 Synod’s final document is quite explicit that co-responsibility and the ministry of the bishop are not in competition.
This matters practically, not just theoretically. If we sell synodality to parishes as ecclesial democracy, we guarantee disappointment, and the disappointed will conclude that the whole exercise was theatre. I have watched that happen already in consultations after our own Plenary Council. Overpromising is not the friend of reform.
Much of the programme is already canon law
Here is where the piece is most over-keyed. Several of the proposals are presented as insurgent when they are simply the law of the Church, widely ignored and rarely enforced. Every parish is required to have a finance council. Diocesan administrators are obliged to render an account of the goods of the Church to the faithful. Lay people who are qualified are capable of ecclesiastical offices and functions. Financial governance by lay experts is not a synodal aspiration; it is a canonical obligation that many of us are simply failing at.
Framing existing law as revolution has a cost. It lets the negligent parish off the hook, since it converts a plain breach of duty into a contested theological question about which reasonable people are still arguing. The sharper accusation, and the one I would rather see in print, is that we already have the rules and we do not keep them.
Culture is not the same thing as servility
The section on titles and gestures is where I part company most strongly, and where I think the article’s frame is imported rather than earned.
I serve in Blacktown, in one of the most culturally diverse local churches in the country. In the Nigerian, Filipino, Indian, Tongan and Sudanese and other cultural and linguistically diversified communities I work among, kneeling to receive a blessing, taking an elder’s hand, standing when a priest enters a room, and insisting that the guest eats first are not artefacts of European clerical privilege. They are how respect is expressed across those cultures, to grandmothers and chiefs and teachers as much as to priests. To describe those gestures as “titles of servitude” and “performative deference” is to take a specific critique of Roman court culture, which deserves it, and apply it to the ordinary manners of the global South, which does not.
There is a genuine test that distinguishes the two, and it is not the gesture. It is whether the deference survives disagreement. A community that kisses my hand on Sunday and tells me frankly on Tuesday that I have got something wrong is not clericalised. A parish where nobody bows to anybody and nobody dares question the pastor is clericalised to the bone. Reform the second. Leave the first alone.
The same caution applies to the treatment of religious sisters. That women religious have been used as unpaid domestic staff for clergy is true, it is indefensible, and it should end. But describing consecrated life through the single lens of “institutionalised unpaid care work” flattens a vowed life into an employment relationship. The abuse is real. The category does not quite fit, and sisters themselves are usually the first to say so.
What I would put in its place
The metaphor of “structural cleansing” of “decay in the farthest and deepest crevices” should worry us. Purity language, applied to a Church of sinners, has a long record of producing new elites rather than fewer. The Church does not belong to the clergy. It also does not belong to the laity, and I would not accept D’Cunha’s counter-formula that baptism grants “full ownership.” Nobody here is an owner. We are all stewards of something we were given.
So, keep the parts of her programme that bite. Enforce safeguarding without exception or delay, with survivors accompanied rather than managed, which is exactly what the Safeguarding Sunday asks of us. Publish the parish accounts. Staff the finance councils properly and let them govern. Pay people who work for the Church, including in presbyteries. Relieve priests of what they are not competent to do. And yes, tell your parish priest to his face when his homily was careless or his decision was poor, because whispered criticism really does feed the thing it complains about.
But do it while holding on to what the ministerial priesthood is. A priest who is only a functionary of the community is not less clerical than one who thinks himself a prince. He is simply clerical in a new way, and the community will discover soon enough that it has traded a father for a manager.
Fr Stephen Onyekwere is assistant Priest at Mary Queen of the Family Parish, Blacktown, and the CALD Specialist with CatholicCare Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains. He is the author of “Free to Flourish”.
