In a face-off with authority, Polish priest stands to be defrocked

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Two years ago, when Fr. Marek Bozek left his diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., to follow his heart and conscience to a Polish parish in St. Louis, he says he didn't expect his kindly Springfield bishop, John Leibrecht, to suspend him. Nor did he expect that he would soon be cast by Catholic hopefuls as David to Archbishop Raymond Burke's Goliath on a national stage. All he wanted, he says, was to provide the sacraments for a group of proud Catholic Poles, whose parish he believed had been unjustly suppressed.

In an unusual arrangement dating back 200 years, St. Stanislaus Kostka, a large inner-city church near St. Louis' downtown, controlled its own property and assets, estimated when Bozek arrived in December 2005 at about $9 million. Burke, St. Louis archbishop, said the parish's governance structure as a nonprofit group run by a lay board was outside church law, which calls for a bishop to have ultimate authority over parishes. When St. Stanislaus refused to comply, Burke pulled out the parish's priests. By the time Bozek arrived, St. Stanislaus had been without a priest for two years.

Bozek, then 29 and a native of Poland, hoped to remain in St. Louis just long enough to effect a compromise, perhaps a year or two. Leibrecht urged Bozek not to go. Bozek went anyway, in violation of his priestly vow of obedience to his bishop, and was immediately suspended. Leibrecht says Bozek was warned. Bozek felt he had to go. He found it outrageous that, as he saw it, people would be denied sacraments in a worldly struggle over money.

Burke, who says the issue is obedience, not money, acted swiftly. Calling the parish's decision to hire a suspended priest "an act of schism," he declared Bozek and six lay members of the St. Stanislaus board excommunicated, and threatened Bozek with laicization--meaning, Burke warned, that unless Bozek repented his disobedience, he could be defrocked, stripped of all priestly faculties and returned to the lay state.

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Bozek was concerned, then consoled by a canon lawyer who assured him that priests in the United States had been laicized only if they had asked to be, in order to marry, or--as happened to scores of priests in the recent sex abuse crisis--if they had committed serious sexual crimes against children.

In late 2005, Bozek considered the prospect of defrocking remote. He stayed the course. The conflict over St. Stanislaus now a subject of national news, he celebrated a midnight Mass in a tightly packed church while an overflow crowd watched on closed-circuit TV in the parish hall or stood outside in the cold, craning to listen.

The parish soon grew from 260 member households to 550--many coming from miles away, attracted by the welcoming young pastor with a droll sense of humor and a knack for delivering intelligent homilies. A parish once regionally noted for little more than polka Masses and Polish dinners was fast becoming for his supporters a national symbol of a progressive vision of church--one in which, among other things, the laity controls the assets and keeps the books.

This past November, Bozek carried that vision to a new level, provoking Burke again, by donning vestments and laying hands of blessing on two women being ordained by Roman Catholic WomenPriests, putting him once again outside the church's canon law. Burke, an uncompromising defender of official church teaching, has been swift to levy penalties against religious leaders who took part in that Nov. 11 event(NCR, Nov. 9 and Dec. 7). Fortified with evidence of Bozek's role, Burke summoned him under a "canonical admonition" to a Feb. 5 hearing, setting the stage for the defrocking. Outwardly calm, Bozek admits that his blood pressure has shot through the roof. "I am panicked many times," he admits. "But regret? No."

What's hardest is feeling so alone, he says. "Where are the ether priests? For God's sake, how much longer will they compromise themselves?"

What keeps him going, he adds, is the solid support of his parishioners, who gave him an overwhelming vote of confidence the weekend before the hearing. Uncounted numbers of laypeople-from St. Louis, from Springfield, from around the United States and from Poland--support him too, some describing him as a hero. But, warns Burke, who has made several public statements on the matter, those who receive sacraments from the disobedient priest are risking their immortal souls.

People who know the defiant priest only by reputation, largely from news reports, have wondered: Who is this guy? Is he a professional pot stirrer? Does he flout authority for sport? Does he relish the idea of falling on his sword in a grand masochistic gesture? Is he too naive to understand the consequences of the wrath he is bringing on himself?

Pivotal call

Bozek was born "in the middle of nowhere, in the woods outside Kazan." Poland was still a satellite communist country of the Soviet Union, and the Red Army had a base in the woods not far from the Bozeks' small house. He accompanied his grandfather, a forest ranger, to fill feeders for wild animals, and he learned to pick wild mushrooms and berries, because the family was almost entirely self-sufficient.