Lecture on ‘Lay Power & Influence in the Church’ to be given at the College of the Holy Cross

A historian and author is to speak about “Lay Power & Influence in the Church: Historical Myths vs. Realities” at the College of the Holy Cross next week.

The lecture, free and open to the public, about lay involvement in Church governance and discipline, is being given by Bronwen C. McShea at 7 p.m. March 11 in the Rehm Library of Smith Hall.  

She is a scholar of early modern European history and the history of Catholicism from late medieval to modern times, says the website bronwenmcshea.com. Based in New York City, she has held research and teaching positions at several institutions and was the invited Spring 2025 Teilhard de Chardin SJ Fellow in Catholic Studies at Loyola University Chicago.

“We’re very excited to have Dr. McShea coming,” said Jesuit Father John Gavin, who teaches in the Holy Cross Religious Studies Department and directs the Society of Saints Peter and Paul, the Catholic student organization sponsoring the lecture. He said the organization seeks to promote Catholic intellectual and spiritual life on campus.  

Father Gavin called McShea an “excellent speaker” and a “very well qualified historian who will help us put into perspective the contributions of the laity to the Church,” especially in light of debates about issues such as synodality and church governance. Undergraduates, academics and people from the diocese can all enjoy the talk, he said.

McShea told The Catholic Free Press the following in reference to her lecture.

History itself does not provide answers to some important questions facing the Church. But, as a historian, she tries to help those engaging in important conversations – whether about the role of the laity or the role of women in Church governance – to be more grounded in facts, not myths about the past or caricatures of it.  

The lecture will not push for particular positions or practices, but instead will provide data about roles members of the laity have played in past times.

The average Catholic, may often assume that the Second Vatican Council inaugurated lay participation in high levels of decision-making in the Church.  

But members of the laity were involved in almost all of the Church’s ecumenical councils before the First Vatican Council; Constantine and other Roman emperors even made the decision to hold some of the earlier councils.  

There was also lay involvement in the selection of many of the bishops and even some popes over the centuries. Lay elites, like monarchs, also were behind many of the Church’s missionary efforts in the early modern period.

The United States was different, where missionaries were concerned, because it didn’t have a monarchy and was largely Protestant, though with no established religion. The pope directly appointed its Catholic bishops from the beginning, as was true in other mission lands that were not colonies of Catholic monarchical states.

In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, political revolutions brought about the secularization and even overthrow of most traditional Catholic monarchies, and popes began to choose a lot more of the Church’s bishops, as had been less true in the past, rather than let secular and atheistic government officials do so.  

It is important to move past the idea that lay involvement in higher-level Church affairs was always negative in impact, that lay participation in Church governance and discipline was always abusive interference, she says.

In the past, the Church and state were more intertwined with each other, at least in Europe. That has not been the norm only in the last 150 years.

McShea got into writing and talking about lay participation in Church governance and discipline, in ways that connect to present-day debates in the Church, when people were frustrated about the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sex abuse scandal. She saw that today’s laity did not have avenues open to them within the Church to discipline bishops and other clergymen who had engaged in sexual abuse or failed to report it. This was very different from what she had seen in her historical work, that was possible in the Church of more distant centuries. In the early modern period, there were a number of ways members of the laity could discipline such clergymen.  

She connected the history she was studying to contemporary problems, and in 2019 wrote an article in this vein called “Bishops Unbound” for First Things magazine.  

“Our conception of the Church and the roles that the laity can play within it has really narrowed,” she says.

People think about lay participation primarily in terms of involvement in the Mass and other liturgical matters directly connected to the clergy’s ministries. This is one reason there has been a push for women’s ordination in recent decades, because our understanding of what the Church is, and the range of roles the laity can play within it, has become very clericalized.

– McShea authored three books: “La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot – Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France,” “Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France,” and “Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know.”