Responses to Current Issues

 

Firing of Unionized Parish Workers in Brownsville Diocese, Texas

GUEST COLUMN
The Monitor
Sunday, June 29, 2003

A PARISH DIVIDED
Church should practice what the Catholic religion preaches

ANN WILLIAMS CASS

This has been a remarkable week in the lives of Holy Spirit parishioners. We have come through so much since May of 1981. We now need to keep focused on the issue at hand.

Four parish employees were fired within the first hour of the first day the new pastor arrived " without meeting him. We were locked out of their offices and left without unemployment or health insurance, until we were reinstated Friday on paid professional leave until a court hearing. We requested " I would say begged " to stay at work to finish preparations for activities planned for the weekend and following week. The letter we received on Friday from David Garza, the diocese attorney, left us in the position of being insubordinate if we did not leave, and that would have been clear grounds for dismissal.

We left the parish grounds in tears that parishioners would not be able to send their children to Vacation Bible School, and that families who were celebrating the most important events of their lives with the church - baptisms, weddings, quinceañeras - were left in a lurch. The diocese's vicar general, the Rev. Bob Maher, last year stated that we didn't need unions in parishes because the church hierarchy had a relationship with employees that was like family. Is this the way we should model being a family?

When Bishop Raymundo Peña terminated the defined pension plan in 2000 and distributed pension payout checks, we knew we would no longer get a regular monthly check when we retired. When he had Father Esteban Hernandez fire six employees at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, we knew we had no job security. Father Hernandez admitted in front of some 60 people at a deanery meeting that he was under obedience to the bishop. That is why we began to look for a way to make our lives more secure, and sought out the United Farm Workers AFLCIO for help in this matter. In their 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, the bishops wrote: "The dignity of workers also requires ... reasonable security against arbitrary dismissal. These provisions are all essential if workers are to be treated as persons rather than simply a 'factor of production.'" The teaching of the Church affirming our right to unionize cannot be stated more clearly than in the Second Vatican Council document on the Church and the modern world, Gaudium Et Spes: "Among the basic rights of the human person must be counted the right of freely founding labor unions. These unions should be truly able to represent the workers and to contribute to the proper arrangement of economic life." There is no doubt that we were protected by Church teaching in forming our union, and we formed it to protect ourselves from exactly what has now happened to us. Five churches signed union contracts, and each of the churches has been squeezed by Bishop Peña, primarily by not giving them their subsidies.

Allegations of all sorts are coming out about why we were fired. People are missing the point. We were fired at will, with no process. Our basic rights as defined by the Church have been violated. Our basic rights as defined by our union contract have been violated. Many feel that our bishop is behind the firings, which he has denied. His spokeswoman said the pastor had the power to do this. For me, it is not an issue of whether or not canonically Father Ruben Delagado had this power. Pastors should look beyond canon law, to the teaching of the Church and the Gospel, and act justly. If he had sat down with us and told us what he wanted changed and given us a chance to change then, if we performed unsatisfactorily, he could have justly terminated us. And this is not about reorganizing. My position as pastoral associate has been filled by a paid person; the secretary's position has been filled by a paid person, and we know the director of religious education will be filled by a paid staff person as well. We have heard that these people knew of their employment at our parish weeks before Father Ruben met with Father Jerry Frank.

Pope John Paul II, who asked the workers in the Vatican to form an association when he became our Pope, stated in Centisimus Annus No. 57: "As far as the church is concerned, the social message of the Gospel must not be considered a theory, but above all a basis and a motivation for action. Today more than ever, the church is aware that her social message will gain credibility more immediately from the witness of actions than as a result of its internal logic and consistency." The U.S. bishops themselves wrote in 1971 in Justice in the World: "While the Church is bound to give witness to justice, she recognizes that anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must first be just in their eyes. Hence we must undertake an examination of the modes of acting and of the possessions and lifestyle found within the Church herself." This last week we have heard stories from all over the Valley of parish employees who were fired at will, with no process, and left out on the street without help: Hildalgo, Escobares, Alton, the Basilica, to name a few. We ask them, and their parishioners who know about these firings, to come and join us in this struggle for justice. We don,t want the words of our social teaching, or of the Gospel, to be just words on paper. We love our church; we want the hierarchy to be faithful to its own teachings. We want to be a credible witness for justice in the marketplace.
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Ann Williams Cass is a pastoral associate coordinator of ministries at Holy Spirit Catholic Parish in McAllen. She, along with three other parish workers, is on paid administrative leave from the church. Her e-mail address is annwcass@aol.com.