Governance in the Roman Catholic Church: Issues and challenges
Brian Lucas
What the paper says
This article will consider some issues and challenges involving governance within the Roman Catholic Church. This is partly prompted by references from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (the Royal Commission) to failures in governance. The prevailing common narrative from the Royal Commission involved failures by church leadership to recognise and deal adequately with complaints, failures to understand the risk of reappointing offenders, failures to appreciate the harm to victims, and failures to put other interests before the protection of the church's reputation. In a certain sense, all of this has been reduced to a general failure in ecclesial governance. Accordingly, it is not surprising that among the recommendations of the Royal Commission was the recommendation for a review of governance: The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference should conduct a national review of the governance and management structure s of dioceses and parishes, including in relation to issues of transparency, accountability, consultation and the participation of lay men and women. This review should draw from the approaches to governance of Catholic health, community services and education agencies (Royal Commission 2017: 51, recommendation 16.7). One might read into this the suggestion that 'approaches to governance of Catholic health, community services and education agencies' are good and to be drawn on to fix defects in 'the governance and management structures of dioceses and parishes'. This article will critically examine this suggestion. For 274 VOLUME 25 NUMBER 2 (2019) the purposes of understanding governance within the Roman Catholic Church, there will be some preliminary comments on governance within faith-based organisations more generally, followed by a brief outline of the principles and practice of governance within the Roman Catholic Church. A hypothetical case study will provide a platform for drawing on the author's experience of 30 years working within church administration, particularly an involvement in assisting in the resolution of situations of dysfunctionality within diocesan structures. It is intended to illustrate some of the complexities involved in both the way governance is structured and how it is implemented.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00 |
| M · momentum | 0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.