Kuzmochka, who is co-ordinator of Adult Faith Development and Leadership Formation for the Ottawa Archdiocese, told the audience of about 250 people about her first experience working as an assistant chaplain to a priest-chaplain on a university campus.
"The great obstacle was the priest didn't want to work with a woman," she said, despite her having the full support of the diocesan bishop. "The priest believed he should be on a pedestal," she said, recalling the relationship as troubled and turbulent.
"I realize as I look back that I moved naturally into a leadership position. I am joined by so many women and some men who are breaking new ground in parish pastoral leadership," she said.
Kuzmochka advocated a collaborative relationship among lay and ordained ministers rather than a hierarchical one, and said forgiveness was fundamental. She also said that many of the breakthroughs in lay ministry have happened as a result of priest shortages, instead of through the new life Vatican II breathed into the church.
"Lay ministry has its own identity and needs to be developed in its own right," she said.
Kuzmochka also pointed out that honouring Vatican II is not possible from a position of polarity.
"I worry about the polarization we always seem to see," she said. "Do you think we can learn to disagree without turning on each other?"
She also said that professional lay ministries must be careful "not to create new hierarchies. Parishes are not clubs and the baptized are not volunteers in them," she said.
Bishop Martin Veillette of Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, in his keynote address, told the audience about the Quebec experience of lay ministry, and pointed out that as a pastor in 1974-80, he was "one of the first priests to call upon a lay woman."
He asked a woman who was barely 20 to accept a position as a pastoral worker in a primary school.
"It was the beginning of a wonderful adventure for her," said Veillette, who is President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishop's (CCCB) Commission for Social Communications French Sector. Veillette noted that 1975 was the tenth anniversary of the end of Vatican II and in those ten years the most visible change came in the liturgy.
"Not everything was renovated and not everything happened easily," he said, but noted that it became possible to "dare to make changes" and to "risk doing things never done before."
Those ten years also encompassed the Quiet Revolution.
"From a social perspective, not only the church was undergoing change, the entire society was in an upheaval," he said, describing those years as a "time of trial" and a "dark period," where the church was seriously challenged. Many once-committed priests and nuns left.
"It was very difficult for us to go through that time," he said. "We had to open the door to the arrival of the laity taking on tasks that had been done by priests and vicars and religious," he said. "In our baptism we are invited to take our responsibility," he said, and while the diminishing number of priests led to an increase in lay ministers, "we had been called by the Council to do this."
Since those years, the Church has been seeking to set a foundation for this new phenomenon of lay ministry.
"Co-responsibility became a focal point," he said.
Veillette said that lay ministries developed from service-to-leadership positions with remuneration to major responsibilities as permanent staff.
The third Celebrate the Call Conference also featured a panel with Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber, who is co-treasurer of the CCCB; Jocelyne Hudon, pastoral agent in Chicoutimi, Que.; Blake Sittler, parish life director and ministry developer in Saskatoon, Sask.; and St. Jean Goulet, Congregation of the Holy Cross.
The Conference was jointly sponsored by the Centre for Ministry Formation at St. Paul University and the Celebrate the Call Project.
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