The Church’s lay workforce: Employment in the French Catholic Church

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Sociologie du travail 50S (2008) e66–e82

The Church’s lay workforce: Employment in the French Catholic Church Céline Béraud CNRS–Ehess, centre d’études interdisciplinaires des faits religieux, 10, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 75006 Paris, France

Abstract Faced with an ongoing shortage of priests, bishops have assigned permanent religious duties to several thousand laypersons, most of them women. Many have employment contracts. Employment arrangements for this new type of permanent personnel tend to be unfavorable: limited-time assignments (limited to a few years), despite the fact that they have permanent open-ended contracts; part-time work; a wage near the minimum. Various factors account for this vulnerability: the dire financial straits of French dioceses; ecclesiastic authorities’ determination to present the clergy as the Church’s only fully legitimate permanent personnel; the attitude of the laypersons themselves, who seem satisfied with their situation. Efforts to institutionalize their employment situation run into difficulties with respect to both the French labor code and the unexpected effects produced internally by promotion of a culture of temporary commitment. © 2008 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. Keywords: Clergy; Lay church worker; Vocation; Commitment; Employment contract; Atypical; Catholic Church; France

“Their boss is the Church” goes the title of an article that appeared in a denominational newspaper1 , and while the title is somewhat provocateur it nonetheless purported to draw attention to a then virtually unknown phenomenon that is not much better known now: an increasing number of laypersons are in charge of performing religious functions as permanent employees, many with job contracts. These persons are trained by the Church and assigned “missions” by their bishop. There is no stable name for this composite group, which encompasses both regular employees and

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E-mail address: [email protected]. “Ils ont l’Église pour patron,” La Croix, June 13, 1992.

0038-0296/$ – see front matter © 2008 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. doi:10.1016/j.soctra.2008.09.022

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volunteers2 . And we have only rough estimates of their numbers3 . What we can say is that with the overall shortage of priests, several thousand laypersons, most of them women, are seconding and in some cases filling in for priests in the work of caring for souls. These lay workers first invested catechism activities. Increasingly, they became chaplains in public institutions; they are also increasingly likely to collaborate directly with the bishops. At the parish level they organize baptisms and funerals and prepare couples for marriage in the Church4 . Because the Catholic Church maintains its traditional barriers to ordination—i.e., the celibacy and gender requirements—it can only be said to operate a closed job market. But to continue to respond to the demands made of it, it has had to diversify its personnel5 . The ecclesiastic institution thus offers an example of dual-structure organization: at the center are the clergy, who advance along an officially unobstructed career path;6 to this are added other categories of more or less peripheral personnel, called upon to act either continuously or sporadically and situated on the boundary between employment and volunteer work. The division of religious labor in the French Catholic Church is thus being reconfigured in a way that segregates personnel of distinct statuses in accordance with unchanged canon law. This article examines the particularly vulnerable employment status of this new type of permanent worker, specifically with respect to the French labor code. While the Church has been able to refuse regulation salary arrangements for priests, it has had no choice but to adopt them for its permanent lay workforce. Still, by offering those employees jobs that last only a few years and are renewable only once or twice maximum, it has run afoul of the labor code, despite the fact that the courts, ever respectful of the sacrosanct principle of separation of church and state, generally refuse to require application of the labor code in this case. This means that de facto the Church is using “modern” types of employment. 1. The Church’s “intermittent” workers It may seem paradoxical to refer to permanent lay workers as intermittent ones. But the term can be justified with at least two arguments. First, as we shall see, Vatican documents work to present these workers’ occupational activity as temporary support or filling in. Second, intermittency here

2 One term sometimes heard is “permanent lay workers,” previously known as “activity leaders” or, more precisely, “animateurs laïcs en pastoral” (lay pastoral activity leaders), generally abbreviated ALP. The terms “laypersons with responsibilities” and “lay project leaders” have also had some success. Less frequently used terms include “agent pastoral” and “travailleur pastoral” (pastoral worker). 3 The statistical invisibility of permanent lay church workers contrasts strikingly with how widespread their activity is. Diocese figures (armed services excepted) only count priests and deacons. As a Church budget line, the number of full-time positions was estimated at around 5000 in 2004. To this must be added hundreds of permanent volunteer workers. These figures should be related to the declining number of priests in the service of the dioceses, today around 13,000 and likely to fall by two-thirds in the next decade. 4 A 2002 study done in connection with the annual gathering of lay pastoral activity leaders in a provincial French diocese showed that 37% of permanent lay workers practice in public service chaplaincies (hospitals, prisons, middle schools or high schools), 27% in parishes and 23% in diocese offices (Béraud, 2004). 5 Public demand for formal ceremonies marking major life moments (rites of passage) has undeniably fallen in recent decades, but not as sharply as the number of priests. To the activity of ceremony leader must be added the work of accompanying the faithful in chaplaincies within public institutions. 6 By canon law, ordination, if judged valid, is considered irreversible. Still, Church law does allow priests to retire at the age of 75 if they wish to, though up against the shortage of priests there is a strong temptation to keep even elderly clergymen in service as long as possible.

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refers to a structural means of managing the nonordained workforce: while their official job is of the unstable variety, their activity is undeniably continuous. 1.1. An unfavorable employment situation Church authorities always present the job assignments of these nonclergy Church workers as temporary. Lay workers are not there to “make a career” in the Church (the episcopate abhors that expression), but to succeed each other in the jobs offered. They are hired for a limited period of three years, renewable twice maximum. These time limits are not in synch with French labor law for employees, which stipulates that nonpermanent contracts must be for at least 18 months and may not exceed 24 months. Moreover, pursuant to Article L. 122-1 of the French labor code, nonpermanent employment may not be a means of lastingly filling a job tied to the company’s normal, permanent activity7 . If employment is used that way, the job can be requalified as a permanent open-ended contract job. Similarly, the contract often specifies that the job is part-time when in fact some people work full time: “Pastoral work is known as being beyond time limits” (van der Helm, 1993: 141). Moreover, when French law required employers to apply a 35-hour work week, permanent lay workers in certain dioceses were categorized as workers without a schedule, on the model of executive managers. In this case professionalizing the job has opened up the possibility of working “disinterestedly” and without pay—highly valued characteristics in the religious field. Wage rates are also consistent with the “donation” theme: they are extremely low. The financial effects of this are particularly sharp for part-time workers. “We’re the ones with the lowest pay here at the hospital. S.T., one of the first people hired in the chaplaincy, did nine years at M; then she went to Saint-V. In changing establishments, she lost the seniority she’d accumulated, and she retired with barely enough to live on. Even the ladies who do the cleaning are better paid than we are. But we’re not in it for the money” (Female lay hospital chaplain). Questioned on the point, a bishop retorted that lay workers were not there to “make money at the expense of the Church.” Employees in the Catholic Church thus exhibit characteristics of the working poor, but in reality they seldom fit that category because many of them have working spouses and some of them have their own part-time secular job8 . This phenomenon helps explain why women are overrepresented among permanent lay church workers and why laywomen from privileged socio-occupational classes are likewise overrepresented9 . According to official Church discourse, whether a worker is paid a wage or not depends on an external reality—namely, whether that person needs to be paid to live decently, as stipulated by canon law—and not with the intrinsic matter of work done (hours, level of training, responsibilities). This means that single men and women are usually paid better than married women. When questioned, episcopate members are likely to justify that situation in the following terms.

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This regulation applied until the recent creation of the Contrat Nouvel Embauche. Teachers and health workers are often multiactive. 9 A survey conducted in a provincial diocese shows that more than a third of permanent lay workers have a spouse in the “manager or higher intellectual professions” socio-occupational category. Fewer than 2% of persons interviewed live with a manual worker. In relation to the overall structure of the occupied population in France, managers are clearly overrepresented and manual workers underrepresented (Béraud, 2004). 8

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“A women whose husband has just left her will get paid regardless of her duties” (Bishop of a diocese on the outskirts of Paris). “Some lay activity leaders and even some priests and believers are scandalized when they find out that a person married to someone with a really good situation is asking to get paid. This kind of thing is complex. I was seriously questioned about a case of this type. I played on the fact that the job was a chaplaincy funded by the administration: the Church diocese wasn’t the one paying [. . .] When you’ve got a shortage of funds, it’s important to give employment priority to people who don’t have any other resources. Overall, everyone agrees on that point” (Head vicar of a provincial diocese). A reality principle does seem to apply, however, for jobs requiring specialized skills; here the Church has no choice but to “pay the market price,” as one bishop put it, referring to jobs on the border between secular and religious work. Interviewees also often mention the increasing difficulty of recruiting volonteers. The scale of wages paid to lay workers is tight and so reflects little in the way of skill or responsibility differences. The stipend paid to diocese priests, including bishops, is close to minimum wage. Here we perceive the influence of the clerical model on how lay human resources are managed. 1.2. Fitting together canon law and the national labor code: the difficulties created by a dual allegiance system Consistent with decisions made at the 1983 French Bishops’ Conference following several years of bargaining with professional catechism associations, permanent lay Church employees are now given a standard work contract, to which is attached the bishop’s “mission” letter. The question of how to fit together the two legal orders that define this category of workers and their employment situation is a vexed one: “We are dealing here with two different types of logic, canon law and the labor code. Where canon law speaks of entrusting someone with a ‘mission’, the labor code speaks of ‘hiring.’ By canon law, the bishop’s mission letter is a unilateral act. . . The work contract is by nature contractual10 .” Moreover, the Church statute “also applies in the framework of volunteer work, where there is no work contract”; it is therefore not dependent on “the necessities involved in applying civil law” (Swerry, 1991: 544). This clearly shows the autonomy of the two legal orders. The mission letter that the bishop gives lay workers, i.e., their assignment to do work of a religious nature, is thought to overtop the work contract. Here canon law is understood to be stronger than secular labor law. According to texts from the episcopate national office, the work contract is subordinate to the mission letter. In French law, meanwhile, the mission letter has no legal value. The fact that in this arrangement there is both a work contract and a mission letter manifests the dual allegiance system that permanent lay Church employees are caught up in. The letter from the bishop “defines the collaborator’s Church role and remit; it constitutes the cause of the work contract, meaning that if this mandate is withdrawn, the contract has been terminated for both parties” (Dole, 2003: 1031). The contract can thus be broken unilaterally by the diocese authority—during the mission but especially at the end of it. When the mandate specified in the mission letter comes to an end,

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La Croix, june 13, 1992.

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events can move in one of three possible directions. One, the permanent lay worker resigns (I was told that this was fairly frequent). “People resign more often than you might expect, because the working conditions are really demanding and the pay is very low. People don’t want to do this all their lives” (legal advisor to the Bishops’ Conference). In this case the contract is terminated on the employee’s initiative. He or she receives no severance pay and cannot claim unemployment insurance, which is only available to employees who have lost their job through no will of their own. The second possibility is an out-of-court settlement: the dissatisfied employee is granted some severance pay, which is understood to enable the parties to “separate in a suitable manner.” The third and last possibility is a lawsuit, a solution which, up to now, has proved unfavorable to permanent lay workers. When the Church is brought before the French labor relations board on the grounds that it laid a worker off without a good reason for doing so, the court has consistently refused to examine the reasons cited by the Church-employer or to assess how “real or serious” they are, citing the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state (the latter established by what is known as the “Loi de 1905”) (Dole, 2003: 1031). “How the permanent open-ended work contract fits with the mission, which is not openended, is a complex situation. This is not a case of a limited-time work contract. In cases where the mission letter is withdrawn, the courts have always ruled there was a real, serious reason to lay the person off. The judge has always recognized it to be a matter covered by the bishop’s pastoral role. It is considered very prosaically like the end of a construction job. Depending on the case, you see ‘end of the mission’ or ‘end of the job.’ [. . .] You’ve got decisions like that for chaplaincies. Withdrawing the mission letter is a matter of internal Church organization. It ought not be contested, either by the court or the hospital-employer” (Legal specialist). Both the expiration of the mission letter and its withdrawal are thought of by judges as “real and serious” reasons for laying off a worker. Obedience to the principle of religious freedom thus creates an exceptional regime in the matter. The act of laying-off as a means of terminating a contract is strictly regulated in France today by both legislation and the courts. The ease with which permanent lay Church employees’ contracts can be broken—i.e., by the Church authority’s withdrawal of the mission letter—seems exorbitant given the conditions stipulated by common law. However, there are some legal restraints on the possibly arbitrary action of a bishop. When the duties performed by the layperson are more technical than religious (translating or teaching, for example), the court may refuse to approve a lay-off due to withdrawal of the bishop’s mission letter (Dole, 2003). Moreover, the judge can intervene if it has been demonstrated that the mission letter and subsequently the work contract were terminated because of the layperson’s behavior in his or her private life rather than in the religious activity. Lastly, the court can rule that even though there is no legal precedent in the matter, “oversight [of the Church] in connection with material inexactitudes and legal abuses should not be excluded” (Dole, 2003: 1032). In reality, lawsuits have been circumvented in many dioceses. The woman in charge of public education chaplaincies in a large diocese employing approximately 50 persons told me she had had to manage 10 lay-offs in five years and that only one case ended up before the labor relations board, though another one barely escaped litigation. France is not alone in having to handle the delicate matter of fitting together secular and Church law in employment of lay church workers. The issue often comes up among legal specialists in their

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regular meetings at the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE). Still, given the shortage of priests, and despite official discourse on the matter, highly qualified lay workers (particularly those graduated from a Catholic university), the most experienced and the most highly motivated, are very likely to obtain another church mission. They are a precious workforce that the institution could hardly do without. It is therefore possible to find laypersons in French dioceses who have received missions and salaries for 15 and even 20 years—clearly these are people who have spent a major part of their working life in the Catholic sphere. While the individual missions they receive are officially of limited duration, these lay church workers actually move through a series of different types of jobs. Their career (in the interactionist sense of that term)—especially in the case of women—generally begins with volunteer catechism teaching at the time catechism becomes relevant for their own children. They are then hired in various ways to work in the chaplaincy of a middle school, high school, hospital or other public institution, possibly moving back and forth between these sectors. Those with the highest educational degrees sometimes remain in the same area of activity for years, taking on mounting responsibilities, first at the level of the diocese, then the region, only exceptionally at the national level. 1.3. A “counterexample” of unstable employment with several unintended consequences The difficulties implied in this dual allegiance system mean that Church authorities actually run afoul of secular labor law requirements. In this connection it is relevant to ask what internal use the Church makes of the social doctrine it has been developing for over a century, and to inquire into the episcopate’s declared good intentions. “If you want to be perfect, exemplary; if you want to have the fewest possible lawsuits, you try to have the strongest, most secure legal position possible. You don’t want to let yourself in for any criticism that might stand as a counterexample.” Since 1891, when Pope Leo XIII wrote his renowned encyclical Rerum novarum, the Church’s social doctrine has advocated improved rights for all—in the area of labor regulations as well as social protection. The fact is that the situation of Church employees seems not to be governed by this imperative, in the name of the singularity of their mission (Bramberg and Schlick, 1986: 21): “At a time of labor flexibility, deregulation and the requirement that some managers sign compulsory trust clauses, some have noted the modern character of the Church’s solutions,” writes a legal specialist with some irony (Messner, 1986: 69). Moreover, the instability of lay church workers’ jobs has at least one considerable perverse effect: it reduces the likelihood that those workers will acquire training, and raises the delicate question of what kind of ongoing occupational training is made available to laypersons who give up a job on the secular labor market to work for the Church. “My [female] colleague is going back to work for the Ministry of Education [as a teacher] this school year. Since I’ve been here, two or three diocese workers have gone back to their original occupations. One was a nurse in a hospital and she became a school nurse. I can’t tell you whether during the period she had diocese responsibilities she was given permission to take a training program, to keep up her level in her profession. A former diocese worker, an architect by profession, says she’ll never go back to that. She says herself that she didn’t keep up with it. Young people who want to commit themselves, they have to be allowed to train alongside, to get training that qualifies them for a job. Older people should be given a

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skills assessment test that will allow them to reintegrate professionally, enable them to go back to work in civil society” (Woman lay worker with national-level responsibilities). Some priests also deem this situation unsatisfactory: “The Church hires many employees on open-ended contracts; it has a responsibility to those people, and it must assume that responsibility. Are they going to stay permanent employees of the Church all their lives, with the risk one day of having old priests and old permanents? Will they be able to make something out of the experience they’ve acquired over those years and find a job outside the Church after the time spent in it? To do so, it is important to set up ongoing training modules” (Gourrier, 2003: 64). The priests in question call for setting up dioceses human resource departments that will take charge of both lay activity leaders and priests: “These men and women are the Church’s most precious ‘capital’ [. . .] The Church is not a company like others, but it still has a duty to manage its human resources strictly and openly. This is one of its major tasks” (Magnin, 2003: 128). Some dioceses have made an effort to establish transparency in recent years. “I received my first mission letter in 1989 and my first work contract. At the time I didn’t realize the limited duration aspect. That made me very careful later, when I myself had to hire activities leaders. In my case, I’m lucky enough to have a husband with a good profession who can cover when it comes to income. But at the time I don’t think they emphasized enough the fact that it might only be for a certain amount of time. Without using the word vocation, I was ready to give the end of my professional career to the Church. And that’s what’s happening, in fact! They didn’t tell me that that was impossible, or maybe I didn’t hear them. What’s more, they were giving me an open-ended contract! In 1989 they weren’t strict the way the Church is now about stipulating in both the work contract and the mission letter that it’s only for three years. I just saw the word ‘renewable.’ That’s why in my diocese we’ve been working on the [employment] status of lay workers. Little by little I came to realize that it could end. There are lay workers who choose to work in the Church, and at 40, you can think you’re going to stay there until retirement, holding different types of jobs. What’s more, the Church makes a monetary investment in our training! When I was at the Institut pastoral d’études religieuses [Iper], the bishop agreed not to put me in charge right away; we divided up the work as a team. The Church invested, made an effort. I said to myself, ‘This training must not be lost!’ Private companies tend to get rid of ageing employees and put in young people. My comparison may be off the mark. But all those people who got experience, acquired skills, if you remove them, you’ve got to do it over again each time. It’s a little like that in the Church. I know there are financial problems, which is why the Church can’t be an employer like other employers. When I was recruiting people as part of my job as diocese official, I was responsible for hiring them even though I was not technically the employer. I was careful to explain to people, to tell them it was only temporary” (Former [female] lay official of the diocese, currently working at the national level). It is worth mentioning here the original program devised by Monseigneur Soubrier for permanent lay employees in his Nantes diocese. In 2006, he set up a unique structure, the Association nantaise for animateurs pastoraux (Anap), to manage the diocese’ 127 employees. Representative bodies for the personnel are being created, and there is a policy for providing valid occupational training in such fields as activity leading and computers. Particular attention will be given to mission conclusion and renewal; among other things there will be procedures for validating acquired skills. Odile Fraslin, who heads the association, clearly states the goal they are pursuing: “The

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Anap was created as a means of establishing honesty with regard to labor law and with regard to the Church11 .” 2. Why this vulnerable employment status? Three explicative factors may be identified. 2.1. Material and organizational difficulties Economic problems must be taken into account. Contrary to the situation in other European countries—namely Germany, which has a tithing system12 , and the Netherlands, where the faithful are known for their generous donations—the Church in France is poor. It has to pay wages to a great number of permanent lay workers and finance their training as well as that of volunteers. Bertrand de Feydaux, head of the Paris diocese, points out: “When you replace a priest by a layperson, social taxes increase threefold13 .” As an economic analysis this seems somewhat cursory; the two situations are actually hard to compare. A priest’s salary, ranging from 740 to 1100 D a month for a full-time job, is of course below that of lay pastoral agents, who are paid from half minimum wage to 1333.93 D a month for a job that many cases is only part-time. But it is important to include the priest’s perquisites, specifically housing and heating, which for the diocese represent respectively a monetary loss (rent they could collect on real estate) and direct expenses. While the cost of training permanent lay workers may be high, the cost of educating seminarians is extremely high, and is paid out over several years. Lay personnel account for only 10% of diocese outlay today, as opposed to 45% for the clergy. But in all cases, the Church is managing scant resources. “I can’t pay the lay pastoral workers in my diocese any more than they’re already getting. I’m in a situation of chronic deficit. And the lay workers cost me at least twice what a priest earns” (Bishop). “Frankly, we’re condemned by the figures. Last year, we requested the creation of two halftime positions. In the end we got two quarter-time positions. But what people are actually looking for is recognition through work. We’re often told: ‘If I become an employee, things won’t be the same thing for my husband, my family.’ When I announced the two quarter-time positions, the persons concerned told me it didn’t matter, they’d keep on working anyway” (Head vicar of a provincial diocese). In September 2004, Monseigneur Roland Minnerath, the new archbishop of Dijon, had to lay off 10 workers for economic reasons. This situation, previously unheard of in the French Church, was explained by the dire financial straits of the diocese. The deficit, compounded over four years, was due to an overly ambitious investment policy but also to the number of employees

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La Croix, feb. 10, 2004. The German case should be clarified somewhat. Several dioceses, including Berlin, which was close to insolvency in 2003, have had to bring in auditing companies and have been counseled to take drastic measures to reduce their operating costs. Hiring was suspended, and in certain cases there were lay-offs. Even the Köln diocese, the richest in the world together with New York, is working on ways to save money. These difficulties, entirely new for the German Church, are related to falling tithe revenue. 13 Paris Notre-Dame, special issue entitled “Spécial argent” (2002). 12

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hired for technical and pastoral positions. Payroll had increased by 30% in three years14 . The case of Dijon may not remain isolated. Other dioceses—Montpellier, Lyon, Belley-Ars—are having serious financial difficulties. All have to cope with increased personnel expenses, which represent on average 55% of total expenses. Furthermore, the Catholic Church has a hard time conceiving of itself as an employer; that status is extremely alien to its sense of its ecclesiastic identity and purpose. It has always refused to designate its priests as employees and it remains aloof from the categories used in the world of work. Bishops—i.e., the head diocese authorities—often feel quite uneasy about exercising the role of employer: “We’re both their boss and their bishop. And we’re bad bosses, in fact, because we don’t know how to say no. When people come to see me, I’m struck by how they start by telling me about how unhappy their children are. I tell them, ‘No, we’re talking about your job.’ There’s a kind of ambiguity between boss and bishop.” The remarks of this bishop point up the pitfalls in the “offerings economy” when it comes to efficiently managing the Church institution: “In the religious enterprise, production relations work on the model of family relations: treating others like brothers implies bracketing off the economic dimension of the relation” (Bourdieu, 1994: 205). There is also the question of how qualified the Church is to assume the employer role. A certain offhand tone may be observed in the way certain matters related to human resource management of both clergy and lay workers are handled: “The reality is that the bishops have only got the people they find around them. In some dioceses there are good legal specialists; in others, there aren’t.” The situation of diocese employees is complex due to their dispersion and the frequent “dissociation that exists. . . between the authority that hires and pays permanent lay workers and the institution that benefits from their services” (Dole, 2003: 1031). This can put bishops in an embarrassing situation. External employers, such as public hospitals, prisons or the military, should be distinguished from internal Church employers, i.e., the dioceses (through the intermediary of the diocese association or ad hoc associations), parishes and cultural activities associations. 2.2. Fear of a zero-sum game that will work to the disadvantage of priests Vatican texts try to present the low number of priestly vocations in the western world as a “temporary situation” that must not give rise to institutional changes as that would crystallize the effects by institutionalizing participation by permanent lay workers in the work of curing souls. The activity of those workers is officially considered “a temporary expedient” (Perrin, 2002: 436–437). The clergy are presented as the institution’s only legitimate permanent work force. The division of religious labor among the different Church personnel categories seems like a zero-sum game when it comes to developing legitimacy for those categories. For many concerned observers, any consolidation of permanent lay workers’ employment status (in professional terms or through ministerial decree) would lead to crystallizing the current demographic situation of the priesthood—a “self-fulfilling prophecy” effect that would accelerate the priesthood’s decline. This is the kind of argument put forward by Père Humbrecht: “In 10 years there won’t be any more priests—we’re going to replace them”— you can hear that sort of thing said in the Church itself. On the one hand we bemoan the scarcity of vocations; on the other we seem to be saying

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La Croix, sep. 17 and oct. 4, 2004.

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it’s not worth it anymore. You can’t sell a product by saying that it isn’t the best and there’s no future in it—that’s catastrophic marketing15 ! A legal specialist working for the French Bishops’ Commission and questioned on the vulnerable employee status of permanent lay workers with regard to the labor code ended our interview with a plea for priestly and religious vocations, a sort of ultimate justification for the current state of affairs: “In a way, you can understand how it is that lay workers are being pulled toward employee status. But on the other hand, a lifelong vocation is really something quite special. You can’t risk having that status crumble away, or the perception that people have of ordained ministers, by accepting a sort of slippery slope toward assimilation. This may seem to you far-removed from the question of laypersons who’ve been given a mission, but as I see it there’s a connection. It’s important to see the testimony of faith represented by the commitment to celibacy, the commitment to the life of a priest or nun. I think it’s a pity that this matter of committing for life gets talked about like something obsolete that elicits giggles from people on TV shows. After all, it’s a major testimony of faith. It’s a different life state. It would be a pity to let all that fade away or get denatured, even with the best intentions in the world. Priests become destabilized if you tell them you can live as a layperson and still have a perpetual mission. They feel a bit wronged. It hurts them”. Likewise, a bishop affirmed his strong preference for treating lay workers and priests differently. As he sees it, the Church authorities have to grant special recognition to the sacrifices priests make for the vocation: “Laypersons and deacons can’t be moved around. They’ve got their job, their house, their family. But there are fewer and fewer priests. And we’re forced to pay them less. And they’re the only ones who get asked to move around. If you don’t show you value them, you can be sure you’ll end up doing the opposite of what you’re trying to do. Laypersons doing pastoral duties work 35 h a week. They’re involved by definition in a different kind of relationship. If I don’t show I value people who work 80 h a week for lower pay and who have to move around all the time. . .” “Are you saying that overvaluing laypersons means devaluing priests?” “Overvaluing laypersons is not really the point. You’ve got priests who’ve been in the Church for a long time who are sometimes paid much less. People don’t hesitate to bother them at 11 at night. And they’re asked to be generous and to take it with a smile. You know, doctors and gendarmes these days—it really makes me think. There comes a time when it breaks down. . .” Clearly the point is to maintain distance between these two categories of workers for fear that the corps of priests will be contaminated by the secular workers and thereby lose its specificity. Writing from a strongly Durkheimian point of view, Roger Caillois opined: “Less gets paid for the qualities of things. The fact is that if things are too close together and are thereby allowed to react with each other, they get reversed and combined—they get corrupted” (Caillois, 1994: 33). In The elementary forms of religious life, Durkheim defined the sacred and the profane as two “opposite genera” that “cannot, at the same time, both come close to one another and remain what they were.” Any drawing together of the two causes unease because it is an affront to collective representations: “The mind experiences deep repugnance about mingling, even simple contact, 15

La Croix, apr. 30, 2004.

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between the corresponding things, because the notion of the sacred is always and everywhere separate from the notion of the profane in man’s mind” (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 34–38). 2.3. The active acquiescence of permanent lay workers: disqualification of the conflict and “distanced involvement” What enables this system to function is the strong loyalism of the permanent lay workers. We could reasonably expect to find anti-establishment protest in the field, along the lines of the virulent collective clerical and lay actions of the 1960s and 1970s in France—what is referred to as “the Catholic crisis” (Pelletier, 2001). The fact is that the people I spoke with, while wishing to attain greater legitimacy, are generally not at all perturbed by the problem. Regardless of their level of responsibilities, they speak above all of “happiness,” “enrichment” or “gratifying development,” and they put forward very little in the way of demands. It is therefore necessary to decipher the attitude that goes with the actively acquiescent behavior of these people, women primarily—behavior that may well be considered extraordinary in light of the situation in other countries (particularly Germany, the Netherlands and the United States) and the recent history of the Catholic Church in France. Loyalism in the French context has to be seen in conjunction with how fragile Catholicism there appears today. The religion is now experienced subjectively by the faithful and their permanent lay workers as a minority religion. In a situation of religious pluralism and—more to the point— of general indifference to the great religious traditions, there seems to be a wish to avoid any kind of sweeping, potentially damaging protest. There is no desire to add an internal protest to the current external cultural “discrediting” of Catholicism (Hervieu-Léger, 2003). Here we find one reason that lay workers marginalize the conflict and disqualify any kind of demand-making stance within French Catholicism. To understand this behavior on the part of permanent lay workers, we have to take their statements seriously. Most of them readily accept and even express approval of the limited duration of their missions. “Our missions have to be for a determined length of time because young people change and we get worn out. Some of the people who’ve been here for 10 years are exhausted. Some have had enough, because it’s something that takes everything in you as a person.” (Woman permanent lay church worker, 55, with responsibilities in France’s public education chaplaincies; married to a private-sector manager). “When you get to the end of a mission, you can reinterpret what you’ve experienced and tell yourself that it would be better if you stopped. You haven’t committed yourself unto death. For me, I tell myself that in three years I’ll go cultivate my garden, because I love nature. My garden is my source of balance. I think I’ll go visit my grandchildren, too” (Woman heading the diocese office, 56, married to a secondary school teacher). Lay church workers have thus developed a kind of “distanced involvement” (Ion, 1997)—reversible, controllable. These characteristics go against the total, self-sacrificial commitment particular to the traditional priesthood. The totalizing notion of vocation, closely associated with a sharp sense of abnegation that can go as far as self-forgetfulness and near total self-sacrifice, contradicts the values of “reflexivity, professionalism and self-control that are taking over everywhere today” (Dubet, 2002). The priesthood is not what most permanent lay workers aspire to. On the contrary, temporary, renewable commitment seems a perfect way of satisfying the demands

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of psychic modernity: “The refusal to close oneself off is characteristic of how modern societies function. Connections must not be fixed ties; they should be reassuring by their very existence. They should also be flexible and reversible, thereby allowing for assertion of an autonomous, independent self” (Singly, 2003: 47). For individuals, the freedom to disengage when one wants to is essential. They refuse to be defined once and for all by commitments undertaken in accordance with community-tie logic particular to traditional societies. Metaphorically, the idea is that we have moved from “a renewable stamp that you stick on the card” to a “detachable, mobile post-it: one makes oneself available, but that availability can be withdrawn or cancelled at any moment” (Ion, 1997: 81). Here we find the move from “activist commitment” to “distanced involvement” understood to characterize the process of “transforming relational practice” in such occupational practices as volunteer work. This can be readily observed in laypersons’ involvement in the division of religious labor in the French Catholic Church. The intensity of the subject’s commitment is especially great when it is presented as limited in time. The subject’s experience “remains something controllable” (Ion, 1997: 83). In the following testimony from a young woman permanently employed in a hospital chaplaincy, we perceive an investment that is that much stronger for being only occasional: “I think three-year renewable missions are a good thing. Altogether that can come to nine years, which is already not too bad! What we do here is exhausting, you know. I don’t know how things are going to evolve. In three or six years, I might not want to continue. What’s more, if I had committed myself for an indeterminate length of time, I’m not sure I would be so careful about performing well. When you know that something is limited, you can’t postpone things, you’ve got to do them as well as possible right now. Surely that way we are more effective, more present.” This does not mean that people behave as if they were flitting from flower to flower or from one TV station to another. What counts psychologically is not so much any real break from the commitment as the fact that choosing to disaffiliate oneself is both possible and legitimate. It is important to mention that only persons with ready financial means (spouse’s income) can enjoy the luxury of such flexibility, flexibility that lay church workers not only accept but in some cases actually demand. This explains why well-to-do socio-occupational categories are overrepresented. 3. Is this intermittent employment situation in the process of being institutionalized? 3.1. A will to institutionalize the situation Both Church authorities and the French state seem in favor of giving institutional status to this atypical type of employment. The number of permanent salaried lay workers has increased exponentially in the last 10 years, from 840 (van der Helm, 1993) to nearly 5000 (Conférence des évêques de France 2004). It can only increase further as the priesthood continues to shrink. Statistically, exposure to lawsuits in the case of unilateral contract termination is now a greater risk for the Church, a state of affairs that must worry the episcopate. Moreover, we can reasonably hypothesize that the state administrative authorities, particularly the Interior Ministry’s Religions Department—keeping in mind that it has no right to oversee the Catholic Church’s internal organization—would not be averse to having the employment situation of permanent Catholic lay workers acquire exemplary value, namely in connection with the imam issue and the question of their legal status with regard to French labor law. Three main avenues seem to be under exploration to “normalize” the status of permanent lay church workers with regard to secular law.

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3.1.1. Assimilating their situation to other codified atypical jobs? Some representatives of the Church in France would like to see the specificity of their institution reduced when it comes to how they pay lay employees who partake in the division of religious labor. Some would even like to see their legal status clarified using secular “special cases” that involve some degree of exemption from the labor code. Bishops sometimes mention the situation of elected officials, designated company representatives, professional construction workers, and even casino personnel—particularly revealing about this kind of strategy: “There are things that seem enviable to us, things we’d like to transpose. It’s readily allowed as how an elected official can quit his job and figure out for himself how to reintegrate into the labor market. That’s a problem for elected politicians and company representatives, who can be dismissed ad notum, and no one thinks to criticize that. . . The situation of lay workers with a mission who’ve been laid off is similar to casino personnel. They can’t be hired without permission from the prefecture. If that permission is withdrawn, the person can no longer practice in the casino—they’re laid off. The courts say that the reason the permission was withdrawn does not concern them. In ruling that the reason for the lay-off was real and serious, they cite the prefect’s decision. . . There are other special status areas that interest us. For example, construction jobs16 . When the contract is over, the personnel are laid off and receive their own particular type of unemployment compensation. Intermittent performing arts workers raise a somewhat similar problem”. 3.1.2. Voluntary association-worker status? The idea studied at the Labor Ministry, and more recently at the Ministry for Youth and Sports17 , concerning regulations for a new “voluntary association-worker” status—an intermediary position between unpaid volunteer work and paid employment18 —is rooted explicitly in French Catholicism and is of definite interest to Church authorities. Abbé Pierre’s Communauté Emmaüs was the first group to appeal to the Ministry to clarify and legally distinguish the status of the community’s “companions” from that of ordinary employees. The legal precedents available in the labor section of the Cour de cassation were not very clear about the status of persons who had committed themselves to working in associations like Emmaüs, the Red Cross and Médecins du Monde (Robilliard-Laste, 2002). Because working in the Communauté Emmaüs involves a tie of subordination as well as a wage, there was a real threat that the courts could redefine this work as a job requiring a work contract and that it could therefore sanction the Communauté for concealing wage-paying employment under cover of volunteer work. The main characteristics of voluntary association work were formalized in a draft bill that was passed after its first reading in the French Senate on May 12, 2005. The bill may be summarized as follows. 16 In the Interior Ministry’s Religions Department, the “construction work” contract is also being presented as an interesting legal solution for the case of lay workers employed by the Catholic Church. This type of job contract (Article L. 321-12 of the labor code) combines features of the time-limited and the open-ended contract. It permits hiring for a limited duration under special conditions that make it a special case with respect to classic “unstable” job regulations; i.e., missions can last over 18 months and are part of “the company’s normal, permanent activity”. Employees sign an open-ended contract but can be laid off for a “real and serious” (noneconomic) motive at the end of the particular job they were assigned (“construction job”), on condition that they have been informed of the temporary nature of the job and the fact that they will be doing work corresponding to what is constantly done in that activity sector. This practice, initially limited to the construction industry and public works, has been extended to include different types of engineering (service companies specialized in cutting-edge technologies such as multimedia creation, for example). 17 This ministry is also in charge of “association life.” 18 There are three forms of voluntary work today: international solidarity work, created by French legislative decree on February 1, 1995; European volunteer service for young people aged 18 to 25 (in the framework of the EU); civil voluntary work.

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Voluntary association-workers work full-time and this differentiates them from volunteers; they are covered by social welfare benefits and receive an indemnity that cannot be confused with a wage since the maximum amount is 400 D a month (far below minimum wage); they work for a limited time and for moral not-for-profit persons. Here we see the state’s intention to satisfy associations’ demand for flexibility: the association is not constrained by the labor code, but it will have to accept external definition and minimum oversight of their practices. Diocese authorities may wish to request this new status. 3.1.3. Surrendering the idea of “public order”? It should be recalled that French labor law is deeply marked by the notion of “public order,” defined as “a set of principles and values whose constraining power preexists individual wills” (Bonnechère, 1997: 40). Public order aims to protect the weaker party in a job contract—the employee—even against himself or herself, namely in the case of a lay-off. Other European countries are more influenced than France by classic liberal ideas and have developed a very different understanding of the role of the individual’s free will in the work contract. Their approach is also being explored by the Church. “In France we’ve got a highly objective conception of the work contract and contract termination clauses. At the European level, personal commitment is thought of as an extremely important freedom. If someone says, “I wish to be hired this or that way,” doesn’t that commitment have to be respected?” (Legal specialist advising the episcopate). These remarks fit with the thinking of Georges Dole, who links contract parties’ free will with religious freedom: “The labor code does, of course, have a ‘public order’ character and in ordinary cases employers and employees cannot choose to accept or refuse to operate within the framework of that body of law. But in religious matters, the parties’ intentions have to be taken into account in order not to violate religious freedom. As we know, one feature of religious freedom is that religious institutions are at liberty to organize themselves, and this itself necessarily includes the possibility of handling relations between agents in a way not covered by common law” (Dole, 2003: 1045). It could reasonably be objected that this argument does not give adequate weight to the inegalitarian nature of the employment relation and the protection offered by the law in this matter, especially since it is hard to see how the individual will could be more enlightened for a job in a religious institution than a job in a secular one. 3.2. The unexpected ad intra effects of promoting a culture of committing oneself “for a time” Lastly, we can examine the ad intra effects on the model of the priestly vocation that this move to institutionalize “commitment for a time” is having. “Distanced involvement” is in flagrant contradiction with the traditional figure of the activist: “Trained within the group and therefore owing everything to that group, promoted thanks to the group, the activist worker makes a donation of his own person, sometimes even sacrificing his private life, neglecting the present so as to better ensure the future. . . His horizon is the long-term. . . The commitment cannot be from time to time. . . Nor can it be partial. The whole individual is required” (Ion and Peroni, 1997: 81). In fact, both the model of the militant activist and the priestly ideal attribute extremely high value to the conception of total commitment with a sacrificial dimension. In another texte Jacques Ion explicitly presents the activist as reproducing the figure of the priest (Ion, 1997: 31). The fierce determination of Church authorities to confine committed lay workers to the status of “intermittent

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religious workers” for fear of dealing a fatal blow to the status of what they see as the only legitimate permanent worker—the clergyman—is helping to develop a culture of temporary commitment. Meanwhile, initiatives to promote youth volunteership are thriving. Among them are the Arche experiment19 and an initiative entitled “Une Année pour Dieu à Paris20 .” In 1996, Père Jean-Marie Launay, then coordinator of the Service National des Vocations, suggested institutionalizing a type of volunteer work at the very core of diocese religious work: “In monasteries in distant times, there were frères convers [monks doing primarily manual labor]. In our dioceses we could arrange to have fraternities where young people could be close to a team of priests, living their life of prayer and community with them for one year, renewable. We could call them ‘diocese brothers’, for example. Cooperation programs are successful because they require a one or twoyear commitment. New communities are also offering limited-time stays. In the life of our dioceses we are missing a phase where we propose to young people that they give their lives to the Church for a few years21 ”. This statement may be taken to illustrate the fact that the Church is taking into account the aspiration for intense but time-limited commitment. The fact is that these arrangements are also conceived by the Catholic authorities as an occasion for inculcating the priestly or religious vocation in young people who are still celibate and relatively unintegrated into the occupational sphere, and therefore as a preliminary to total, definitive commitment. The volunteer period may, of course, prove one stage in a personal trajectory that will ultimately involve a priestly or religious vocation. But nothing is systematic. Committing for a time also seems more attractive to young Catholics than a total, definitive vocation. These different initiatives, of which I have only given a few examples, imply the wager that the two types of commitment, one distanced, the other totalizing, may exist on a continuum, whereas they present two radically different, even contradictory, types of vocational ideal22 . The wager thus seems a risky one. Could we not rather say that these two types of distanciation from traditional forms of totalizing involvement, ways that are in harmony with characteristics of psychic modernity that Church authorities are going to have to come to terms with, seem to work more effectively than any type of conflictual demand to undermine the foundations of the classic priestly ideal, when in fact one of them was devised to protect that ideal and the other to promote it? 4. Conclusion The development that the Catholic Church is undergoing as it adopts a composite structure bringing together a protective internal labor market and an external labor market characterized by flexibility and varied employment statuses (temporary missions, multiactivity) deserves attention from sociologists of work. Contrary to a number of preconceived notions (notions strongly 19 The Arche community has been recruiting young volunteers for the last 40 years. Volunteers share the lives of handicapped persons full time for one or two years. This type of commitment is particularly intensive because all the persons involved live under the same roof. It is nonetheless of limited duration (one to two years). 20 Since 2003, in the framework of its pastoral service for young people entitled “Initiative jeunes,” the diocese of Paris has been offering men and women aged 20 to 30 the opportunity to “take a break to get a better second start” in student or religious life by spending “a year for God in Paris,” i.e., committing to living a community life and take religious training. 21 SNOP (newsletter of the Conférence des évêques de France) 990 (June 28, 1996). 22 These operations have been more successful in terms of the accelerated secondary socialization they offer such young people (some of whom are not clearly integrated into Catholicism; they are referred to in Church vocabulary as “rebeginners” and they therefore manifest the failure of primary Catholic socialization), than for any inculcation of priestly vocation habitus, on which point their effectiveness is much less certain.

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bolstered by the discourse of the Church itself, which presents its activity as incomparable to any other type), permanent lay church workers are hardly an exotic study topic. And this study, like that of other categories generally presumed marginal, such as artists (Paradeise, 1997; Menger, 2003), allows for identifying more general trends related to overall changes in types of employment. A comparative perspective would be of great heuristic interest here. The main features of atypical employment arrangements brought to light in the case of artists (Menger, 2003) are clearly also present in the situation of permanent lay workers paid by the Catholic Church. One of the most obvious points the two groups have in common lies in the intense degree of commitment required from the individual. The “flexibility that lay church workers not only accept but in some cases actually demand,” the flexibility implied, for example, in having limited-time missions, is also common to the two fields. Another relevant point is how actors counterbalance monetary gains and non-material gratifications. The idea that earning losses are compensated by such things as “psychological and social gratification, attractive working conditions, nonroutine tasks, etc.” (Menger, 2003: 52) is also relevant for these lay church workers. In the Church framework, this type of counterbalancing pertains as well to devotion and the gift of the self—which are strongly valued attitudes and behavior in the religious context. To this should be added the frequency of multiactivity, whether voluntary or required. Multiactivity may be internal—a worker may have two part-time jobs in the Church—or external: the worker combines church work with a secular subsistence job that allows for attaining a decent standard of living. With regard to the Catholic context, we can reasonably hypothesize that a new vocational ideal is emerging—a hypothesis bolstered by current attempts to institutionalize the status of these lay workers. Because of the intermittent, distanced character of the work, however, this new ideal stands in strong contrast to the classic sacerdotal model23 . References Béraud, C., 2004. Nouvelles formes de division du travail religieux dans le catholicisme franc¸ais. Entre idéal sacerdotal, processus de professionnalisation et accomplissement de soi. Doctoral thesis. École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Bonnechère, M., 1997. Droit du travail. In: La découverte. Coll. « Repères », Paris. Bourdieu, P., 1994. Le rire des évêques. In: Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Seuil, Paris, pp. 202–213. Bramberg, A., Schlick, J., 1986. Droit canonique et droit du travail. In: Schlick, J., Zimmerman, M. (Eds.), Le droit du travail dans les Églises. Éditions Cerdic, Strasbourg, pp. 9–23. Caillois, R., 2004. L’homme et le sacré. Gallimard, Paris (1re édition en 1950). Conférence des Évêques de France, Guide 2005 de l’Église catholique en France. Bayard–Cerf–Fleurus, Paris. Dole, G., 2003. Le droit commun: la question de l’application du droit du travail. In: Messner, F., Prélot, P.H., Woehrling, J.M. (Eds.), Traité de droit franc¸ais des religions. Litec, Paris, pp. 1017–1046. Dubet, F., 2002. Le déclin de l’institution. Seuil, Paris. Durkheim, É., 1995. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le Livre de Poche, Paris (1re édition en 1912). Published in English as The elementary forms of religious life. Trans. Karen Fields, 1991. Free Press, New York. Gourrier, P., 2003. J’ai choisi d’être prêtre. Un autre regard sur le monde. Entretiens avec Jacques Rigaud. Flammarion–Desclée de Brouwer, Paris. Hervieu-Léger, D., 2003. Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde. Bayard, Paris. Ion, J., 1997. La fin des militants. Éditions de l’Atelier, Paris. Ion, J., Peroni, M. (Eds.), 1997. Engagement public et exposition de la personne. Éditions de l’Aube, La Tour d’Aiguës. Magnin, T., 2003. Prêtre diocésain, une vocation et un métier d’avenir. Nouvelle cité, Paris. Menger, P.M., 2003. Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme. Seuil, Paris.

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Translation Amy Jacobs.

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Messner, F., 1986. Les religions et le droit du travail en France. In: Schlick, J., Zimmerman, M. (Eds.), Le droit du travail dans les Églises. Éditions Cerdic, Strasbourg, pp. 25–74. Paradeise, C., 1997. Les comédiens. Professions et marché du travail. Puf, Paris. Pelletier, D., 2001. La crise catholique. Religion, société, politique. Payot, Paris. Perrin, L, 2002. Face au reflux : questions d’aujourd’hui. In: Lemaitre, N. (Ed.), Histoire des curés. Fayard, Paris, pp. 425–444. Robilliard-Laste, B., 2002. Bénévolat et volontariat. Les cahiers sociaux du barreau de Paris, no 141, p. 279. de Singly, F., 2003. Les uns avec les autres. Quand l’individualisme crée du lien. Armand Colin, Paris. Swerry, J.M., 1991. Les aumôneries catholiques de l’enseignement secondaire public. Statut en droit franc¸ais et en droit canonique. Thèse de l’université Paris XI. van der Helm, A., 1993. Un clergé parallèle ? Étude sociojuridique de l’activité des laïcs dans l’Église catholique en France et aux Pays-Bas. Éditions Cerdic, Strasbourg.