James Carroll was wrong about change in the Catholic Church

‘Everybody Wants a Revolution, but Nobody Wants to Do the Dishes’

the Atlantic

Critics of the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church should understand how institutional change actually takes place.

May 23, 2019

Susan Bigelow Reynolds

Assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Emory’s Candler School of Theology

Photoprofi30 / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

Almost a decade ago, as a young graduate student in theology, I lived for a year in the rectory of a Catholic parish.

Like many other parishes in Boston faced with an ever-worsening clergy shortage, St. Mary of the Angels did not have a priest in residence. Rather than allowing the creaky 19th-century Victorian estate house that doubled as the church’s gathering space to stand empty, the parish made the decision to open the doors to laypeople.

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