Theological and Canonical Challenges Posed by Appointing Lay Persons to Positions of Governance in the Church

At no point in the history of the Church were laymen and women put in a role of governance over ordained men until Francis and his Prædficate Evangelium! 

From Rorate Cæli

By The Canon of Shaftesbury

The following article was written for the fourth anniversary of Praedicate Evangelium by the Canon of Shaftesbury, a judicial vicar in a major archdiocese.

The appointment of lay persons, and particularly laywomen, to positions of governance within the Catholic Church traditionally associated with the Sacrament of Holy Orders presents one of the most significant and unresolved theological and canonical tensions of the post-conciliar period. This study examines the classical teaching that the power of governance (potestas regiminis) is intrinsically linked to sacred orders, the canonical framework encoded in the 1983 Code, and the structural rupture introduced by the 2022 Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium of Pope Francis.

I. The Classical Doctrine: Orders and Governance as an Integral Unity

The Catholic theological and canonical tradition, as it was formulated in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, held that the power of governance, the potestas regiminis, was intrinsically linked to the Sacrament of Holy Orders. This was not merely a matter of ecclesiastical convenience or administrative tidiness. The argument rested on a theological claim about the nature of ecclesial authority itself.

Governance in the Church, on this account, is not analogous to political or civil authority. It participates in the munus regendi of Christ, the office of ruling, which Christ exercises as Head of His Body, the Church. This authority is communicated, not by election or administrative appointment, but by sacramental ordination. The bishop and the priest act in persona Christi capitis: in the person of Christ the Head. The three dimensions of Christ’s office; priest, prophet, and king (the tria munera of sanctifying, teaching, and governing) form a unified whole, communicated in and through the sacramental character of orders. To govern in the properly jurisdictional sense is, therefore, to exercise an authority that is sacramentally grounded.

This theological consensus was embedded in the structure of the 1917 Code in which the power of jurisdiction was understood as flowing from or accompanying the power of orders. While the two powers were formally distinguished: the potestas ordinis being the sacramental power, and potestas iurisdictionis being the power to govern the faithful, in practice, canonical tradition reserved the potestas iurisdictionis to those who had received the potestas ordinis; in other words it reserved governace to those ordained. Lay persons occupied a separate, subordinate sphere: they were the subjects of governance, not its agents.

The theological reason for this position was reinforced, rather than weakened, by the Second Vatican Council’s treatment of the episcopate. Lumen Gentium (no. 21) taught that episcopal consecration confers the fullness of the sacrament of orders, and that with it comes not only the office of sanctifying but also the offices of teaching and governing. In other words, the Council’s theology of episcopal collegiality explicitly integrated governance with ordination at the episcopal level. The munus regendi is given in and with the sacrament, not added to it from without. This teaching of the Council was in its own way reinterpretation of the Scholastic view that episcopal consecration, now referred to as ordination, was an added jurisdiction to the sacrament of ordination. The scholastic opinion had been that the Sacrament of Holy Orders is oriented towards the Holy Eucharist and that the Eucharist received from a bishop or a priest is the same, that the bishops or priests have the same jurisdiction over the Eucharistic Body, but that what the episcopacy conferred was an added jurisdiction over the Mystical Body.

II. The Canonical Background: Canon 129 and Its Ambiguities

The 1983 Code of Canon Law preserved the classical principle while introducing a terminological flexibility that would prove problematic. Canon 129 §1 states: “Those who have received sacred orders are qualified, according to the norm of the prescripts of the law, for the power of governance, which exists in the Church by divine institution and is also called the power of jurisdiction.” Paragraph § 2 adds that “lay members of the Christian faithful can cooperate in the exercise of this same power according to the norm of law.”

The canonical challenge of this formulation lies precisely in what it does and does not say. Paragraph §1 ties the qualification for governance to sacred orders; a strong affirmation of the classical position. Paragraph §2, however, introduces the notion of lay ‘cooperation’ in the exercise of governance power without defining its limits or parameters. The term cooperari is not usus or possidere: to cooperate is not to hold the power oneself but to assist its exercise by one who does. In other words, the canon does not say that lay people exercise or possess the potestas on their own, but collaborate with those who do: the ordained. It seems that this formulation created a limited concession; permitting lay people to serve in administrative roles of an ancillary character while the properly jurisdictional acts remained reserved to the ordained.

However, the canonical concept of ‘cooperation’ was sufficiently vague to allow, over the following decades, a gradual expansion of lay participation in governance structures. This expansion proceeded partly through administrative practice, the diminishing number of clerics and partly through the development of particular norms in curial documents and synodal structures. The limits of paragraph §2 were never canonically defined with precision, creating a space in which practice could overtake principle.

The sharpest instance of this problem arises in the appointment of lay persons to roles that involve genuine jurisdictional acts: issuing normative documents, rendering binding decisions, confirming or overturning the decisions of subordinate bodies, and, most importantly, exercising authority over ordained persons. It is noteworthy that Canon 129 §2 does not authorize these functions for lay persons; it speaks only of cooperation in governance, not its possession or primary exercise.

III. Praedicate Evangelium and the Structural Rupture of 2022

The Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium, promulgated by Pope Francis on March 19th, 2022 on the governing structure of the Roman Curia, introduced something without formal precedent in the Church’s constitutional law. Article 5 of that document states that “any member of the faithful can preside over a dicastery or organism” of the Roman Curia, provided they have the appropriate qualities. This provision explicitly separates the headship of a curial dicastery from the requirement of sacred orders, and leaves without defining what are the ‘appropriate qualities.’

The significance of this provision is not merely administrative. Curial dicasteries are not advisory bodies or consultative committees; they exercise genuinely jurisdictional authority over the universal Church. They issue administrative documents (including those that bind clerics and even diocesan bishops), oversee ecclesiastical trials, issue binding doctrinal and liturgical determinations, supervise seminaries and schools, manage the affairs of religious institutes, and, when acting with papal authority, can bind the whole Church by their decisions. The head of a dicastery acts, in formal canonical terms, with ordinary vicariate power delegated from the Roman Pontiff. However, it is worth remembering that the dicasteries exercise delegated administrative authority.

The defenders of this reform have argued that the authority exercised by dicastery superiors is entirely unoriginal: in other words, it flows directly from the papal office, not from any intrinsic quality of the officeholder. On this account, the Pope may delegate his authority to any competent and faithful person, ordained or not. The power of governance, properly speaking, belongs to the Pope; the dicastery head is merely an instrument of that power. This argument draws on the doctrinal tradition, which distinguished sharply between potestas ordinis (sacramental) and potestas iurisdictionis (jurisdictional), holding that jurisdiction can be separated from the sacramental and assigned independently.

The problem with this argument, however, is precisely the one identified by Lumen Gentium. If the Second Vatican Council’s theological achievement was to integrate governance with the bishop, clarifying that the munus regendi is given through episcopal consecration, not added to it from without, then a reform that assigns genuinely jurisdictional acts to non-ordained persons cuts against the conciliar theology, not with it. However, what happened in practice is that after the council, is the contradiction of a more integrated theology of the episcopate power with an increasingly separated administrative activity.

In the end, this rupture is not merely theoretical. When a layperson heads a dicastery with authority over doctrinal matters, liturgical discipline, clerical governance, they are not merely assisting the Pope in administrative tasks. They are issuing norms, making decisions, and exercising governance in areas that have been constitutively associated with ordained ministry. The question of whether this constitutes genuine jurisdiction or only ‘cooperation’ in jurisdiction becomes practically indeterminate, and the canonical distinction begins to become moot.

IV. The Particular Problem of Women Governing Ordained Men

The theological difficulties outlined above are compounded, and in some respects brought to their sharpest expression, by the specific appointment of women to governance roles over ordained men. This is not simply the same question applied to a particular category of person; it raises a distinct and additional theological problem.

The exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood was authoritatively and definitively affirmed by Pope John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, which declared that this judgment is “to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” The accompanying response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in 1995 clarified that this teaching “requires definitive assent” and belongs to the deposit of faith. The basis for this teaching is not a matter of ecclesiastical discipline that might be altered by future legislation, but a claim about the Church’s constitution: the exclusion of women from orders belongs to the structure of the Church as willed by Christ and no one may alter it.

What this document clearly states is that women are constitutively excluded from orders because ordination configures the minister to Christ as Head of His Body in a way that is not open to women; then placing a woman in an institutional position of governance over ordained men creates a structural inversion with theological dimensions. The bishop and the priest act in persona Christi capitis. A woman placed in a position of formal hierarchical authority over them introduces a relationship in which the ordained man, who represents Christ the Head, is institutionally subordinate to one who, by the Church’s own definitive teaching, cannot represent Christ in that headship role.

This argument does not rest on assumptions about personal capacity, intellectual competence, or spiritual depth. Women may and do possess all of these in abundance. The argument is one of sacramental sign and the ecclesial constitutional structure. The Church’s teaching on the exclusion of women from orders is a claim about the logic of sacramental representation; a claim that must, if coherent, have implications for the structural relationship between ordained and non-ordained persons in governance.

Several converging arguments reinforce this concern. There is the Pauline tradition on headship and order within the Church’s hierarchical structure, which, whatever its precise exegetical explanations, has consistently been understood to bear on the question of women’s authority over ordained men. There is also the structural logic of the tria munera: if teaching, sanctifying, and governing form an integrated whole in the ordained man, then assigning the governing office to one who cannot hold the other two creates an inherent asymmetry. There is, third, the specific problem of judicial and penal processes involving ordained persons, in which a woman sitting in governance over clerical defendants raises questions about the sacramental logic of ecclesiastical discipline.

The defenders of such appointments have argued that the authority exercised is always derived and therefore does not carry the sacramental weight of orders. But this response imports exactly the separation of governance from ordination that the conciliar theology of the episcopate was intended to overcome. One cannot invoke the conciliar theology to resist women’s ordination while simultaneously invoking the pre-conciliar separation of powers to justify women’s governance over the ordained. The two arguments pull in opposite directions, and the incoherence between them has not been resolved.

V. Historical Precedents

There are some who argue that this reform by Pope Francis has historical precedents. Josemaría Escrivá in his work La Abadesa de las Huelgas published in 1944 focuses on one of the best known cases, but by no means the only one. The work of Escrivá is of rigorous canonical scholarship. The Monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, founded in 1187 by King Alfonso VIII of Castile, was for centuries the seat of an abbess who exercised an extraordinary range of canonical authority over a network of Cistercian monasteries and their chaplains.

Escrivá’s study documents in thorough detail the nature and extent of this quasi-episcopal jurisdiction. The Abbess of Las Huelgas exercised authority over the clergy serving the monastery and its dependencies, conducted canonical visitations, and exercised a range of powers that, in the normal canonical framework, would be associated only with the episcopal office. This was not a local anomaly quietly tolerated by a weak papacy or weak king; it was a complex legal reality, documented by canonists, defended in legal proceedings, and acknowledged by successive pontiffs over several centuries.

Escrivá’s analysis highlights two features of this case that are directly relevant to contemporary debates. The first is the canonical role of custom as a source of law: the Abbess’s jurisdiction rested not primarily on explicit papal grant but on the force of centuries of continuous and uncontested use, which canon law recognized as having legal weight equivalent to written legislation. The second is the structural argument that curial authority, and by extension, all delegated governance, is in principle separable from the ontological configuration of orders.

The abolition of the Abbess’s quasi-episcopal jurisdiction by papal bull in 1874 is itself significant. The suppression was not simply an administrative regularization; it was a recognition that the canonical situation had become theologically indefensible in light of a clearer understanding of the relationship between governance and orders. Seventy years after the suppression, Escrivá, writing as a canonist rather than a theologian, acknowledges the force of the case but does not claim that it resolves the principal theological question. The historical existence of such anomalous jurisdictions demonstrates the flexibility of the canonical tradition, but it does not constitute a theological justification for them.

Pope Francis’s appointments to curial positions operate, at the structural level, on an analogous logic to that of the Abbess of Las Huelgas: governance authority derived not from ordination but from legitimate canonical mission granted by the supreme authority. The parallel is interesting, and defenders of the current reforms have used it to justify their position. But the parallel also illustrates the limits of the historical argument, for the Abbess’s jurisdiction was ultimately judged indefensible and suppressed. Historical precedent cuts both ways. Canonical custom can establish legal facts; it cannot, by itself, resolve theological questions.

VI. The Diocesan Manifestations of the Problem

The difficulties surrounding curial appointments in Rome are not merely problems of universal church governance; they are replicated at the local level in a form that affects ordinary diocesan life. The appointment of lay persons, and increasingly, lay women, as diocesan chancellors presents the same structural problem in a more immediate and pastoral reality.

The chancellor of a diocese is, in canonical terms, the principal notary of the diocesan curia (Canons 482–491 CIC 1983). The office carries genuine administrative and quasi-jurisdictional functions: authenticating documents, maintaining archives, countersigning acts of governance, and, depending on the latitude of the bishop’s delegation, participating in the exercise of executive/administrative power. In many dioceses, chancellors have been granted faculties that go well beyond notarial functions, extending to the oversight of parishes, the management of personnel matters, and the coordination of judicial and administrative processes.

When a lay woman is appointed as chancellor and given such extended faculties, the local diocese encounters in smaller and local way the same tension present at the curial level: a woman exercises administrative and, in some degree, jurisdictional authority over the ordained. The priests in question may be called to report to her, to seek her authorization for certain acts, or to comply with directives issued under her authority. The sacramental reason of in persona Christi capitis is not invoked differently at the diocesan level than at the curial level: the priest who acts in the person of Christ the Head in the celebration of the sacraments is, in the administrative structure of his diocese, subject to the governance of one who, by the Church’s definitive teaching, cannot act in that representative capacity.

Moreover, the diocesan context makes concrete the pastoral dimensions of the problem. The faithful observe the institutional structure of their local church. When they see that the governance of their diocese is, in practice, exercised by a lay woman operating with broad delegated authority over the priests, they form impressions about the Church’s theology that may or may not accord with what the magisterium officially teaches. The gap between formal doctrine and institutional structure is not merely an academic concern; it shapes the lived faith of the People of God.

Furthermore, the appointment of lay chancellors also raises the specific problem of judicial processes. Canon 483 § 2 stipulates that in judicial matters, the chancellor must be a priest. This provision explicitly recognizes that judicial authority over clerics; a matter directly involving the sacramental structure of the Church requires ordination. Yet in practice, many dioceses have appointed lay persons, including women, to chancellor positions with broad mandates that shade into judicial functions, relying on the theoretical distinction between administrative and judicial acts that becomes increasingly artificial as the scope of the lay chancellor’s role expands.

VII. The Theological Unresolved Tension

The problem examined here is not a problem of administrative theology, it is not a question of optimal institutional design that might be resolved by more careful canonical drafting. It is a problem that runs into the foundations of the Church’s understanding of herself: her sacramental structure, the relationship between orders and governance, and the coherence of her teaching on the exclusion of women from ordination.

The Church simultaneously holds two positions that are not yet reconciled. The first is that the exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood is not a disciplinary matter but belongs to the Church’s constitution as willed by Christ: it concerns the sacramental logic of representing Christ as Head of the Church, a logic that is not available to women. The second is that lay persons, including women, may exercise governance roles, up to and including the headship of Roman dicasteries that are functionally jurisdictional and that place the ordained hierarchically subordinate to the non-ordained.

The tension between these positions is real and has not been dissolved by any magisterial document. The defenders of the reform typically appeal to the distinction between potestas ordinis and potestas iurisdictionis, arguing that jurisdiction is in principle separable from the ordination and may therefore be delegated to non-ordained persons by the supreme authority. But this appeal to the older canonical tradition stands in unresolved tension with the conciliar theology of Lumen Gentium, which integrated governance with ordination at the level of the episcopate.

The result is a theological challenge running deep in the Church. On one side is the belief which holds the two powers can be separated and assigned governance to jurisdictional grant rather than sacramental character. On the other is the theology of the Second Vatican Council, which holds that these powers are integrated in the bishop. It seems that what the Council does is to recover this integration after centuries of practical separation. Neither of these traditions, taken alone, provides a fully satisfactory framework for the current situation. One tradition permits lay governance but cannot explain why it is incoherent with respect to the sacramental logic of orders. The post-conciliar tradition reinforces the sacramental logic and would seem to require a more restrictive approach to lay governance than Praedicate Evangelium has taken.

What is needed, and what has not yet been provided, is a systematic theological account that either demonstrates why the exercise of jurisdictional governance by lay persons, including women, over ordained men is genuinely compatible with the sacramental logic that excludes women from orders, or a theological account that acknowledges that it is not compatible and draws the appropriate institutional consequences. The internal coherence of the Church’s self-understanding depends on this being clarified.

To resolve this there are several possible alternatives for consideration, each with its own theological and canonical implications. The first approach would recover and strengthen the classical principle of canon 129 §1, insisting that the power of governance properly speaking, including its exercise in curial and diocesan structures requires sacred orders, and that lay participation is genuinely cooperative and auxiliary rather than properly jurisdictional. This would require a more precise canonical definition of the limits of ‘cooperation’ in Canon 129 § 2, and would entail reversing or significantly reinterpreting the provisions of Praedicate Evangelium. It would also require an honest acknowledgment that the current practice of lay chancellors with broad delegated faculties has exceeded canonical propriety. This approach has the merit of consistency is honest; it maintains the coherence of the sacramental theology of orders and the theology of governance even if it is at the cost of a significant institutional reordering.

The second approach would develop a more carefully articulated theology and canonical expression of delegated jurisdiction, distinguishing more precisely between governance that is intrinsic to the ordained office (and therefore reserved to the ordained) and governance that is purely instrumental and administrative (and therefore potentially open to non-ordained persons). Such an approach would need to specify, with doctrinal precision, which acts of governance are reserved to the ordained by divine law and which may be delegated to the non-ordained by positive ecclesiastical law. It would also need to address why the exclusion of women from orders does not entail their exclusion from such delegated governance, a question that requires more than an appeal to the separation of the two powers.

VIII. Conclusion

The appointment of lay persons, and particularly laywomen, to positions of governance traditionally associated with the Sacrament of Holy Orders represents one of the significant unfinished developments and challenges of post-conciliar ecclesiology. It is not simply a capitulation to contemporary cultural pressures, nor is it, a straightforward recovery of an older canonical tradition that recognized the possible separation of the two powers. It is a theologically complex phenomenon that sits at the intersection of several unresolved questions: the relationship between orders and governance, the implications of the Church’s definitive teaching on the exclusion of women from Holy Orders, and the proper interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching of the tria munera in the person of the bishop.

The historical evidence of the Abbess of Las Huelgas, analyzed by Josemaría Escrivá, demonstrates that the canonical tradition has been more flexible in practice than any systematic theology of orders might suggest. But it also demonstrates that such anomalous jurisdictions are ultimately unstable: the Abbess’s quasi-episcopal authority, however long-standing and legally documented, was eventually judged indefensible and suppressed. The lesson is not that history justifies whatever practice has existed, but that practice and principle must eventually be brought into coherent relationship.

The present situation in which the Church officially teaches that women are constitutively excluded from ordination because of the sacramental logic of representing Christ as Head, while simultaneously placing women in institutional positions of governance over the ordained is one of significant incoherence. It is an incoherence that affects not only the universal curia in Rome but the ordinary governance of local dioceses, through the appointment of lay chancellors with extended faculties. It shapes the lived experience of the faithful and the self-understanding of ordained ministers.

Pictured (top): Francesca di Giovanni, Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs of the Roman Curia's Section for Relations with States, 15 January 2020 – 10 January 2023