We begin this issue with—yes—a quiz! Not to panic—if you're doing this as part of a group or class, your grade won't count for any decision made about you (at least we don't think it will). But just in case you run into your bishop and he asks something like, "Just for fun, what's the difference between an ecumenical council and an encyclical?" you'll want to have the answer handy. This quiz—and this whole issue of Youth Update—will help you prepare.

Ready for More?

Were the correct choices pretty obvious? Or did you feel about the same as if you had been handed a quiz on astrophysics? If you had to guess, don't feel bad. The organization of the Church is complex. And government, whether of the Church or the country, is not our most common topic to be naturally curious about. You probably never asked, "Gee, Mom, what's a congressional district?" even though you heard the term on the news many times.

In fact, it's common for people not to be terribly interested in their government until a decision directly affects and upsets them. In the case of civil government, a tax increase will do it. In the case of the local church, it might be a decision not to allow the use of the church hall for wedding receptions or dances.

This issue of Youth Update will look at the question, "Who runs the Church?" You're reading this Update precisely because you are a member of it. The group you're in at the moment may be small, but you together are "church" in the original meaning of the word—a group of people who have come together because of the Lord.

The phrase "Roman Catholic Church," however, suggests a community that is much bigger than the room and the group you're in right now. It's international, global. How is it organized, and who makes all the decisions?

The Church Gets Organized

The Church is not just an organization like General Motors. Yet it must be organized, at least to some degree, to carry out its mission. Even the hippies of the 60's, who went off to live in communes away from "the rat race," discovered that even a peaceful commune takes a certain amount of organization to work out. Just smiling and saying, "Peace, man," doesn't do it.

Actually the Church is a one-of-a-kind organization, just as Jesus is a one-of-a-kind person: both divine (God) and human. In fact, that's precisely it. We believe that the Church, made up of regular people, continues the presence of Jesus among us through the Holy Spirit. So as organizations go it's, well, a hybrid—both divine and human.

You have to keep both of those in mind when you think about the Church—divine and human. It means you can expect to find God there, and you can expect to find faults and failures as well. It's a package. Jesus promised to stay with his church until the end of time. But he didn't promise to make all of its members, or even all of its leaders, perfectly wise and wonderful along the way.

In somewhat playful terms, it's like this: Jesus got the ball rolling and then said, "It's your turn now. I'll still be with you and work through you—whenever you let me—but now you carry on what I did. Go for it." That assignment continued today is the Church.

Threefold Task of the Church on Earth

So what is the job of the Church? I think it comes down to three things: (1) Find out and teach what's real about God, ourselves and our lives; (2) respond to God; and (3) help each other along the way, in whatever way we need help.

There's probably a more official, intellectual job description for the Church, but I'd like to focus on those three elements.

"What's real," the first item, involves things that go by a rather dull word: "doctrine." Never ask someone, "Would you prefer doctrine or pizza?" On a hand-to-mouth basis, pizza will win every time. Nonetheless, it doesn't do much to answer questions like, "What happens when we die?" "What's God like?" "What are we supposed to do?" "What difference does Jesus make?" Doctrine represents Church teaching addressing such significant questions. Sometimes we break this down into two categories: faith (what do we believe about God?) and morals (what's really right and wrong—how should we behave?).

"Response to God," the second task, involves what we call liturgy and prayer. What do we do to tell God things like, "You're terrific" and "Thanks" and "We're sorry" and "Please help us"?

The third, "Helping each other," involves all the ways in which we reach out to people who are hurting because Jesus set an example of loving service to others.

Now that all sounds pretty simple when we put it in a few words. But when we try to make these goals happen...well, then we get into questions like these:

Doctrine: "How do we figure out what God really said, and who makes the conclusions for us to follow?"

Liturgy: "Where are we going to get together to praise God? Should we construct a huge stone building or just get together in somebody's living room?"

Service: "Several thousand people in our city are homeless—what can we do for them, and how do we go about it?"

Our reason and purpose for doing all these things is "heaven-based," but we face very concrete, earthly questions. Two of them have been at the top of the list for a long, long time: "Who is in charge?" and "How do we raise the money and everything else that it takes?" The Acts of the Apostles and some of Paul's letters show that even the first generation of Christians struggled with those same questions.

Church 'Structure'

With that as background, let's look at what we could call the structure or organization of the Church. The first official "unit" is called a parish. It's usually a definite geographical area. The size of the area depends on the number of Catholics who live there (or used to live there when the parish was begun) and the number of available priests. A parish in an urban area with a high percentage of Catholics may cover only a few city blocks. In mission territory with very few Catholics, a parish may be hundreds of square miles. The priest responsible for the parish is called the pastor. There may or may not be other priests, usually called associates, assigned to serve the parish as well.

Parishes are grouped together into a much larger geographical unit called a diocese. At the head of a diocese is the bishop. The diocese takes its name from the city where its bishop lives, usually the largest city within the diocese. The bishop often has one or more auxiliary bishops as chief assistants, so to speak. The headquarters of the diocese is called the chancery.

We move on to a still larger unit called a province, which is made up of several dioceses. In our country, a province is often a state and has several dioceses in it. In every province, one of the dioceses is called the chief or archdiocese, and its bishop is an archbishop. He serves as the chairman when those bishops meet to discuss the concerns of their area. Finally, all the bishops of a country are organized into a conference.

All Catholic bishops are directly responsible to the chief bishop of the Church, known as the pope (which comes from the Italian word for "father"), a.k.a. the Holy Father, a.k.a. the pontiff (which comes from a Latin word meaning "bridge builder"). The pope lives in the headquarters of the Church in Vatican City, a tiny city of 108 acres within the huge city of Rome. The buildings which make up the global Church headquarters are called the Vatican. The pope often exercises leadership by writing letters or documents called encyclicals, which develop and explain Church teachings.

A few bishops throughout the world are given a special status by the pope and are called cardinals. The number varies, but there are usually a little over 200 cardinals. At the death of a pope, the cardinals meet in Rome to elect a new leader.

When the entire Church faces new challenges with the changing times, all the bishops meet to hammer out solutions at a very weighty and rather rare event called an ecumenical council. Over our 2,000-year history, there has been an average of about one per century. The most recent one took place from 1963 to 1965, and is commonly called Vatican II because it was the second time the council was held in Vatican City.

The Church has a Constitution, which was put together, revised and refined, and proclaimed at Vatican II, and a set of laws called Canon law governing church affairs. Canon law was recently revised to address the changing times.

Sharing Church Leadership

So far, it may sound as though the leaders we've mentioned (pastors, bishops, etc.) operate and make decisions all by themselves. That would be impossible. Each one does have the final authority and responsibility within his area, but none of them act completely alone—although they may have done so at times in the past.

Several decades ago, the pastor of a parish did make most of the decisions pretty much on his own. In fact, he may have done almost everything, from working out the parish budget to changing the light bulbs in the church building. But life was simpler then, and—most importantly—since then, our understanding of Church has changed tremendously.

A typical United States parish today will have a parish council made up of elected parish members, and several committees or "commissions" for affairs like finances, education, liturgy, and maintenance of the property.

A bishop doesn't do it all by himself, either. Each diocese has agencies and offices that carry out the work of the church in that area. These can include anything from operating a media library to offering marriage counseling.

Leadership styles are different from one person to another. That's true of business executives, store managers, even parents. It shouldn't surprise us that it's likewise true of Church leaders like pastors and bishops.

Some consult as many people as they possibly can and, wherever possible, base their decisions on the feeling of the majority. They will try to work out compromises that seem to serve everyone best, even if they don't please everyone completely.

Other leaders, both in and out of the Church, operate with a fewer number of trusted advisers. They have a strong feeling of duty and of knowing what is best in the long run even if it isn't popular at the moment. They may seem less approachable and open to new ideas.

As long as we have real, live human beings as Church leaders, we're going to have different leadership styles. Pastors and bishops are not clones, all operating the exact same way, any more than coaches do. Any leader has to avoid the extremes of being a dictator with no respect for people's feelings, or being a wimp who is afraid to make a decision because some people may not like it.

It's a very tough job. All leaders, and certainly all Church leaders, should be competent and sensitive to the needs of the people they lead. We have a right to expect good things from them.

At the same time, we sometimes expect more of our Church leaders than they can possibly deliver. Since they represent God, so to speak, we expect them to be nearly as perfect as God. We're sometimes almost horrified to find that they can make wrong decisions, or have faults and weaknesses. That's neither realistic nor fair.

Putting Yourself in the Church Picture

As we hinted at before, the trend is to consult and involve more and more people in the decisionmaking and "running" of the Church, whether in a parish, a diocese or even at a higher level.

This comes from a broader and better understanding of what kind of community the Church is—a community of people who have different but equally important roles. It's also becoming necessary because of the increasing shortage of priests. Some small parishes already have pastors who are not priests; a priest comes to the parish church for the celebration of the sacraments.

This broader involvement of more people—including you—is a welcome change to many Catholics. It's also not so simple. It's not just a matter of saying, "Father Smith doesn't make all the decisions around here anymore? That's wonderful!" If he doesn't, who does? How do we arrive at them?

We get together. We pray and talk and listen to each other, make a decision, form a plan and then go make it happen. And what's the real, nitty-gritty bottom line to all that?

It requires time, meetings, volunteering, willingness to be a part of what we want our church to be. That's where it is. If Father Smith no longer does all the decisionmaking and "church-running," a special platoon of angels doesn't come down and make things turn out the way everybody wants.

If you're willing to be a part of it, get involved—make your voice heard. It may take a little time to see the results. But many things that bring about good, needed results take some time.

At the foundation of it all is your realization that when Jesus began his community of followers—the Church—almost 2,000 years ago, he had you in mind, too—not just those original apostles, and not just adults who exercise Church leadership.

Jim Auer is a veteran teacher, Church member, husband, and parent to two not-so-long-ago teenagers. He is a frequent contributor to Youth Update and is author of the Leader's Guide which accompanies this publication every month.

This edition of Youth Update has been critiqued by Angie Shaefer, 16; Sarah Schaefer, 15; Dan Strasser, 15; and Tamara Vickery, 16. All are members of the Church at St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Bridgetown, a Cincinnati suburb. While all four aced the quiz, they found it helpful to have this summary of Church organization available for review and reference.