On Divine Mercy Sunday of this year, Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama of the Diocese of Raleigh visited my parish, St. Anthony of Padua, in Southern Pines, N.C. That April evening, the bishop prayed the Divine Mercy chaplet with a packed church. Afterward, he gave a brief reflection and answered parishioners’ questions. It was dark by the time we left the church and headed next door into the parish hall. As if by magic, cookies, punch and matching paper napkins and plates had been arranged for us on long folding tables.
The usual suspects had worked quietly behind the scenes to bring the reception into being. The church secretary (who is also the director of religious education) asked a woman who volunteers in the parish office to assist. She in turn asked her friends to bring the refreshments.
Dottie Stalsitz was one of the women who received the call. “There is a network,” she said. She has been at the parish for 25 years and active across different ministries, including the choir, religious education and the parish women’s guild. It was while serving at a Lenten soup supper with the guild that she got to know the women in other ministries, the Welcome and Respect Life committees. “It all meshes,” she said.
Her counterparts are likely doing the same at your parish. Some are probably well known; others shun the spotlight. All are vital—often unsung—heroes of parish life.
“The ‘workforce’ of the church has always been more female than male,” said Mark Gray, director of Catholic polls at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. “First this was with sisters working in parishes and other Catholic institutions. Then we see growth in other laywomen in ministries.” In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, 80 percent of lay ecclesial ministers were women, according to CARA estimates. Mr. Gray said that keeping track is difficult, since many lay ecclesial positions are filled by volunteers.
Nonetheless, a CARA survey of Catholic adults in 2022 was able to estimate the percentage of Catholic laywomen who have been involved in parishes in certain volunteer roles. Those roles were: lay Eucharistic minister, lector, catechist, youth/campus/young adult ministry, hospitality ministry, usher, member of St. Vincent de Paul society, social outreach, visiting the homebound, catechists, altar serving and music ministry. Overall, 43 percent of adult Catholic women had been active in one of the parish ministries listed on the survey. While 51 percent of male respondents said they volunteered, three to four times as many men reported serving in the traditionally male ministries of altar serving and ushering, respectively. The trend likely is influenced by the many Catholic men born before Vatican II who grew up in an environment in which they were strongly encouraged to be altar boys but girls were prohibited from serving.
Of course, there are the little things that are not easily categorized on a survey—making sure the punch is made and the flatware is out when the bishop comes to visit, organizing the volleyball game, and handing out Popsicles to kids at the parish picnic. But the church that values doing “little things with great love,” as Mother Teresa has said, also proclaims the responsibility to treat workers fairly and to be a good steward of resources. Overworked laywomen can be an indicator that a parish is working hard, but not smart. Twenty-first-century social realities inside and outside of the church may be complicating this paradigm of mostly female labor. I spoke with women in the church who recognize this challenge not as the end of an era but rather as an invitation to renewal for the entire church—leaders and laity, men and women.
Women at Work
Tiara Hatfield is the director of human resources and risk management for the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa. Working on the administrative side in the chancery, she said she relies on outside volunteers, all but one of whom are women. She also participates in ad hoc committees within the office, organizing employee potlucks and holiday parties. While these internal, morale-boosting committees might have both men and women on them, Ms. Hatfield said that the majority of employees in the chancery are women.
In some ways, the situation is a win for diversity. Ms. Hatfield said that when she first started in 2016, none of the other directors of diocesan offices were women. Now three of them are, including herself. But on another level, she sees the preponderance of women employees in the chancery as a reflection of broader societal trends. Married women with children tend to be drawn to administrative work in the church for practical reasons, she said, noting that most of the women she works with have husbands who also work. Ms. Hatfield sees that the flexibility that often is characteristic of a church workplace makes it easier to take time off if, for instance, a child is sick. This mirrors a broader trend. The April 2024 jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor showed that nearly 80 percent of working-age women were employed, the highest since 1948, when the department began tracking that data. Many attribute this in part to the rise of flexible and remote work arrangements.
Ms. Hatfield is a former Navy mechanic, a formative experience that informs her view of women in the church today. She has found that leadership sets the tone when it comes to inaugurating a culture shift, and she hopes men and women will find more equal treatment in the church.
“I think it’s evolving,” she said, noting that “as we know, there is ‘church time,’” in which change comes gradually. Ms. Hatfield’s optimism is fueled by the diocese where she works, where she sees similarities to the military paradigm she experienced as a young mechanic: “They don’t view males different than females when they’re doing the same job.”
The Volunteer Gap
By definition, however, not everyone can be a leader. What of the women doing the day-to-day work of running a parish or diocese? For one thing, they could use some help. The CARA study on ministry participation paints a picture of American parish life where less than half of adults are active participants in lay ministry. In a church where all members are baptized as priest, prophet and king, the numbers may strike some as underwhelming.
Madeline Stockman, a military spouse in North Carolina, recently created two new archdiocesan awards for Catholic women between the ages of 18 and 39 to recognize what she considered an overlooked group of quiet workers in the vineyard. When her husband was hit with what she calls “late-stage patriotism” at the age of 29 and enlisted in the Army, the couple left their established telecommunications careers in Silicon Valley behind. In their new life as a military family, Ms. Stockman felt unmoored.
Ms. Stockman searched for a community at the unfamiliar military base in central Texas where they lived. Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and knowing her husband wanted to raise their future children Catholic, she checked out the Christian initiation program for adults and soon found herself attending the Catholic women’s group on the installation. It was, she said, “a very personal conversion to the Catholic faith,” taking place entirely within a military context, and largely the result of one-on-one mentorship by women. Those mentors took time out of their busy schedules to listen to the questions that she was nervous to ask in the class and to teach her how to pray the rosary.
“It wasn’t just the knowledge that was a witness,” she said, but also the women’s generosity with their time and attention. “And it was not like that was something that could be plugged into, like a volunteer tracker,” she said, “or planned for in a parish council meeting.”
Since converting, Ms. Stockman has thrown herself into volunteering at both the parish level and the archdiocesan level, serving as the European regional coordinator for the Military Council of Catholic Women, an organization of the Archdiocese of the Military Services. She noticed that when service awards were given to volunteers within the organization, they were usually in recognition of years or decades of work.
“Sometimes women who are younger,” she said, “they’ll serve for periods of time in the military in these volunteer capacities,” in what she describes as “an intense short burn” that doesn’t garner much attention because of its brevity. “Some people don’t do 20 years in the Army. People do eight, some people do four. And at that level, recognition was totally absent.”
In 2022, after Ms. Stockman had joined the worldwide board for the Military Council of Catholic Women, she was able to create volunteer awards to recognize the women she was thinking about when she was a regional coordinator. Those awards, the St. Joan of Arc award for volunteer service across the military and the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton award for volunteer service on a specific military installation, were issued for the first time this year.
Ms. Stockman also redefined her own role on the board, expanding her position from “director at large for seminarian support” to “director at large for vocation support.” It was, she said, “a small but very symbolic change,” meant to indicate that the organization “shouldn’t only just be supporting younger men who are discerning the priesthood, but should also be recognizing and supporting young women who are discerning religious life.”
Ms. Stockman intends these awards to send a message to the many unrecognized women who are doing the hard work of keeping their Catholic community up and running. “I want every woman in the military who is busting their butt to feel seen,” she said. “I want every woman who ran a ministry program and is tired to know that I know how tired they are.”
Anecdotally, she hears about Catholic women in active-duty service doing things that don’t always come with an official title, “like convincing their priest to have Mass at a more reasonable time” for service members’ schedules, she said, or serving as lay spiritual leaders on Navy ships without assigned Catholic chaplains. “It’s not something that gets written down,” she said, but “a lot of our priests have a lot of support from our active duty servicewomen when they are deployed.”
“I think that there are a lot of low-key Catherine of Sienas who are active duty [military],” Ms. Stockman said.
Catherine of Siena was someone who defied the gender conventions of her day to reform the church at a time of social upheaval. Today, external realities are redefining roles within the family, complicating the traditional structures and processes on which parishes have relied for decades.
Economic realities mean that families may prioritize paid work over volunteering. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center report, the middle class as a share of the total population has shrunk by 10 percentage points since the 1970s, now accounting for 51 percent of Americans. Greater growth in the proportion of upper-income Americans has contributed to this shrinkage, indicating general national economic progress. But middle-income Americans’ income growth has slowed relative to higher-earning households, despite the fact that in 67 percent of families with children under the age of 18, both parents are employed.
In Ms. Hatfield’s experience, women tend to rationalize overextending themselves, regardless of their employment status.“‘Oh, we can put this on our plate one way or another. Or, we’ll find a way to get this,’” she said.
Men to the Rescue?
In addition to her volunteer roles, Ms. Stockman trains lay evangelists for the Archdiocese of the Military Services. She said she has noticed in her work as a missionary disciple trainer that “most people don’t have real clarity on who they have actual influence over, versus who they’re just concerned about.” She said that with men in particular, she often observes that they have a large “circle of concern,” a term that comes from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, and refers to the things about which you are worried, but over which you have no control. Their circle of concern “gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said.For her part, Ms. Hatfield observed that the men she knows tend to conceive of themselves primarily as providers for their families and prioritize that responsibility over other roles. Their volunteer work tends to be more in the community than the parish, she said, performing tasks like mowing a neighbor’s lawn.
Ms. Stockman said that after about six weeks working with the kind of men she described, encouraging them to be less concerned with the big issues of the day than in making a difference where they live, “people legitimately start talking about their neighbors, which is always beautiful for me to see.”
Back in my own parish, Dottie Stalsitz observes that the Knights of Columbus are active in hosting a regular pancake breakfast to bring the parish together and frequently assist with hands-on parish work, including setting up for the annual women’s retreat. “The men come in and help set everything up,” she said. “I would say that the men work with the women.”
“What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality,” Richard V. Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has written. To Mr. Reeves’s point, there is evidence that the useful work of keeping the Catholic Church up and running means getting beyond the gender binary.
“Clergy and laypeople, everyone,” said Bishop William A. Wack of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee in a phone interview, “have to recognize these women and men who do these things” in what he calls “unsung ways, quiet ways.” Good leadership, he believes, creates an environment in which everyone wants to get involved in parish life, regardless of gender.
In many parishes in Bishop Wack’s diocese, people get involved through an initiative called Amazing Parish. Amazing Parish bills itself as a mission-oriented approach to church governance that aims to boost lay involvement, starting with a core leadership team that advises and supports the pastor. The intended result is the cultivation of a vibrant faith culture within the parish, guided by bold, strategic vision and supported by responsible stewardship of resources.
Bishop Wack said that as a young priest and pastor, he was used to the parish council model. “It was good,” he said, “but a lot of times they would look at the pastor and say, ‘Okay, what should we talk about?’” In a parish where the pastor encourages the laity to see themselves as stakeholders with a co-responsibility in the mission of the parish, Bishop Wack said, the dynamic differs from this top-down paradigm. “I also need help,” he said, speaking of himself as a pastor.
In the Amazing Parish communities in his diocese, the bishop said, he sees leadership teams meeting with their pastors. “You don’t have to ask what’s going on,” he said. Instead of a deferential pastor-centric model, Bishop Wack said, “Everyone’s kind of equal there.” The lay leadership team and the pastor deliberate together on what they are going to do, “and you leave that room hopefully united,” he said, “as a team.”
The topics pastors discuss with their leadership can be anything: updating the sewage system for church buildings, reviewing finances, catechesis for the young. But what Bishop Wack sees across his diocese is an organic movement by the laity to start their own ministries and an autonomous identification of the needs in their parishes. In this context, another type of role redefinition occurs, and the pastor’s job is less to issue directives and more to resource their flock, to encourage them—and then get out of the way.
Sometimes lay volunteers find themselves with too much on their plate due to an unwillingness to share the work or ask for help.“The leadership needs to talk with our groups and say, ‘I know you’ve had the same group here for 25 years,’” said Bishop Wack, “‘We all know that, and you’re not going anywhere. But if you don’t welcome new members today, this group is going to die.’”
There is also a possibility that some longstanding ministries have outlived their utility. The Women’s Altar Society may not be attracting younger women, but there may be something else that will. “Strategy,” according to Pat Lencioni, co-founder of Amazing Parish, “takes courage.” Within his framework, if women are voting with their feet when it comes to certain ministries in a parish, the job of the pastor, together with his leadership team, is to find out what the women of the parish actually need and feel called to do, rather than continue to prop up flagging initiatives at the expense of parishioners’ time, energy and resources.
Correspondingly, in what Mr. Lencioni calls, in an article on the Amazing Parish website, the “war on mediocrity,” he believes that pastors need to encourage the efforts of the laity when and where they are succeeding. Citing the example of a woman who ran a women’s Bible ministry that he describes as “the most popular, vibrant ministry there,” he said that when she left the parish after a decade, “none of the parish employees, including the pastor, asked why she left.” During her tenure, he writes, “parish employees took little interest in what she was doing, showed no curiosity about how they might learn from her, and limited their interaction to matters having to do with facilities and budgets.”
“I think all of us in leadership,” said Bishop Wack, “maybe especially bishops or pastors, we need to encourage” the organic growth of ministries, in order to address the needs within their areas of responsibility.
Rethinking Catholic Philanthropy
When it comes to lay involvement, the church is competing with the workplace and the demands of 21st-century family life, and, in some instances, dealing with aging volunteers. Where will its help come from? If pastors are going to follow Bishop Wack’s advice to support the laity, they will need resources. And it may help to make some of those volunteers into employees.
Tiara Hatfield says John Deere, the manufacturer of agricultural equipment, is the biggest employer in her diocese. “[The church] can’t always compete,” she said, in terms of pay and benefits. “We’re always going to lag the market.” But while many parishes are strapped for resources, not all individual Catholics are. The world of Catholic philanthropy may offer solutions to help the church pay a just wage and fill what were formerly volunteer roles. The Catholic Extension Society, a fundraising organization, and St. Joseph Financial Services, a nonprofit, represent creative solutions for dioceses and parishes with limited resources and dwindling volunteer pools.
St. Joseph Financial Services was founded in 2018 to provide accounting services and financial analysis to Catholic schools, parishes and chanceries, so that they can efficiently and responsibly steward their resources. Meg Heller is a client service specialist there, as well as a former youth minister and director of religious education. It was in her youth ministry work, she said, that administrative duties like budgeting, retreat planning and allocating additional support staff were a hindrance. She asserts that the assistance that St. Joseph Financial Services provides to parishes keeps them from overburdening women in ministry like her. It is able to scale the cost of accounting software for its clients, for example. She said that the money that parishes save by making use of that service, rather than hiring an in-house accountant, enables them to “allocate those funds elsewhere within the church, and often alleviates the responsibilities of an office manager.”
Rather than overworking volunteers and underpaying employees, help with administrative tasks—budgeting, contracts, streamlining procedures—can liberate everyone, including the pastor, to pursue the parish mission.
Another example is the fundraising organization Catholic Extension Society, which has brought religious sisters from Latin America to the United States to fill gaps in the needs for faith formation that used to be filled by volunteers. The diocese where Ms. Hatfield works may not be able to compete with John Deere, but it is still able to minister to its growing Hispanic population through a grant from Catholic Extension, made possible by a donation from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. For five years, the diocese will host three religious sisters from Guatemala. While living in a previously unoccupied rectory and serving two Catholic faith communities with majority-Hispanic populations, the sisters are simultaneously working toward degrees through St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, which will aid them in their work when they return to their home communities in Guatemala.
Joe Boland is the chief mission officer at Catholic Extension. He describes the mission of the Latin American sister exchange program as threefold. “It gives the gift of education to the sisters of the Global South who come from communities where that’s not always readily accessible to them. That’s number one,” Mr. Boland said. “Number two, it allows women to create ministries that reach people on the margins and then in turn raises new lay leaders to carry on that mission. And number three, it creates a mutually enriching network of all the people who are part of this program.”
When we spoke with Mr. Boland, the sisters had just arrived at their new posting in Davenport, Iowa, but Mr. Boland pointed to the kind of outcomes previous communities have enjoyed as a result of the program. He said that a group of sisters in Arkansas, where a large immigrant community is employed in chicken processing, have inspired lay leaders to come forward to lead the ministries they began, resolved to continue them after the sisters return to their communities in Latin America.
“The most amazing thing,” Mr. Boland said, “is to see how these women religious call forth the people with multiple gifts and talents, people who didn’t realize they had gifts and talents—and that’s usually the case when you’re working with people on the margins.” These laypeople, he said, “come to discover that they actually have something to give.”
Catholic Extension also provides continued support to these lay leaders. One convening, called Mujer Valiente, is specifically for Latina laywomen in ministry. “They’re in the choir and they’re the sacristan and they’re the ones leading catechesis, and they’re the ones doing all of this work in the community,” Mr. Boland said. “And we bring them together from across dioceses and give them an opportunity for not only formation, but also mutual affirmation. It’s one of the most powerful programs.” Catholic Extension and its partners fully fund the women’s participation.
At a time when Gen Z is emerging as wealthier at this point in their lives, on average, than previous generations at the same point, there may also be new opportunities for philanthropy among young Catholics.
In its report “The Next Generation of Catholic Philanthropists,” Fadica, a Catholic philanthropic network of foundations and donors, asserts that the newest large donors are interested in giving to causes and issues, rather than to institutions. Jon Hannah, assistant director of operations for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, observes something similar in the college students with whom he works.
“Within helping that demographic,” he said, “there is a strong desire to address food insecurity, homelessness and any creative means to break cycles of poverty.” Giving to the bishop’s annual appeal may not appeal to a generation that tends to mistrust institutions, and higher-earning philanthropists tend to look more at big-picture issues than immediate parish needs like stocking the food pantry, Mr. Hannah said. Supporting initiatives that enable woman-friendly employment policies in the church may be a sweet spot for an issues-based young Catholic donor who is motivated by social justice concerns.
“All the roles that I’m filling in can be very overwhelming,” said Ms. Hatfield of the many hats she wears in both official and unofficial capacities at work. In one sense, she finds it rewarding to put her skills and abilities to use for her church, even for less pay than they might garner in the secular world. However, she sees the Catholic Extension Latin American sisters exchange as a possible way forward for Catholic philanthropy, for what she calls “different forms” of supporting the church—helping to pay church employees a just wage, or “to help us provide better benefits, or even support a position” at a parish or chancery that could offload extra responsibilities from employees like her.
The women serving soup and making cookies in the parish, who make things happen in the parish office and do the “second shift” when they get home, are lauded in many corners as examples of what St. John Paul II called, in his famous “Letter to Women,” “the genius of women.” But these examples may also be prophetic voices calling the rest of the church to something more than simply abstract admiration: We are being called to collaborative action.
