A Conspiracy of the Faithful

When Archbishop Edward Weisenburger announced in November 2025 that every parish in the Archdiocese of Detroit would be restructured, the Archdiocese’s own newspaper reported his promise of a process “transparent, inclusive and open to all Catholics.” The pressures are real. Fewer priests, fewer people in the pews, buildings built for a larger Church. The draft plans would end weekend Mass at as many as 90 parishes.

But notice which way the conversation runs. Parishioners speak at a listening session or into an online survey. The chancery reads and sorts. The Archbishop discerns in private. On the weekend of April 17, 2027, the faithful learn what he decided.

Speak, wait, be told. However many rooms it fills, a process that runs one way is a suggestion box. Not a conversation.

On October 27, 2026, more than 600 parishioners from more than 120 parishes did something the process had not made room for. They met across parish lines, on their own initiative, in a rented hall in suburban Detroit, to hear a canon lawyer explain the rights the Church herself gives them. The Parish Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit formed by parishioners from across the Archdiocese, had announced the meeting publicly, and I serve as its spokesman.

Restrained before a word was spoken

The Archdiocese answered first. On the morning of Monday, October 26, the day before the meeting, a canonical directive from the Archbishop arrived at my door by FedEx. Dated October 22, it named the meeting by date and place. It forbids me to offer “canonical advice or guidance” to any Catholic in the Archdiocese, to raise money for any canonical cause, or to work with any canon lawyer the Archbishop has not approved. That evening, his vicar wrote that by attending, I “will knowingly be in violation” of it.

Lawyers call that a prior restraint. The First Amendment does not bind a bishop, and I do not claim it does. But the Supreme Court calls prior restraints “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement” on free speech for a reason that holds anywhere: they punish nothing that was said. They decide in advance what may not be heard. A restraint on the speaker is a restraint on every listener. The directive was addressed to me. Its real audience was the 600.

Why go to all this trouble to keep one layman out of one room? Not because he was a stranger. This Archdiocese once seated me in the Archbishop’s cabinet. I have worked beside canonists in Detroit, Denver, and Philadelphia, helped draft dubia that the Archbishop of Denver submitted to the Holy See, and taught a graduate course on canonical issues in Catholic education. Many of Detroit’s priests know me. The directive now finds that I lack “even the most general level of expertise” in canon law. No one asked me a single question first.

I went anyway. Because I am contesting the directive through the Church’s own procedures, I will not argue its canonical merits here.

The Church wants the faithful talking to each other

The Archbishop decides. St. John Henry Newman called “consult” a word “expressive of trust and deference, but not of submission.” Vatican II asks the laity to obey their shepherds’ decisions, and the parishioners I know will.

But the same paragraph of Lumen Gentium says the laity are “permitted and sometimes even obliged” to give their opinion on the good of the Church, and the Catechism adds that they may make it known not only to their pastors but to one another. Archbishop Charles Chaput has called it one of the aims of his episcopate to teach Catholics that “the laity and the clergy are co-responsible for the church.” Is a right to speak that may be used only through channels the chancery designs, staffs, and summarizes really a right at all?

Pius IX knew where most of his bishops stood before defining the Immaculate Conception. He wrote to every one of them anyway, asking about their people’s devotion. His 1854 definition named among its witnesses the conspiratio of bishops and faithful, literally a breathing together. Newman seized on the word. The Church teaching and the Church taught, he wrote, are one testimony, “never to be divided,” and there is something in their breathing together “which is not in the pastors alone.”

If the faithful are consulted even before a dogma is defined, Newman wrote, surely bishops will want to hear them on “great practical questions,” before taking “any step which perhaps they could not recall.” His question was about Catholic schools. Ours is whether our churches stay open. The Archdiocese treats a hall full of parishioners as something close to a conspiracy. Newman, I suspect, would agree—in the original sense of the word.

A priest shortage is a reason to share a pastor, not to close a parish

The Archdiocese’s central argument is the shortage. It projects about 130 active priests by 2034, down from 224. Its director of parish renewal has said it “simply can’t continue to serve the 209 parishes” with the priests it will have.

Rome answered that argument years ago. A 2020 Vatican instruction written for dioceses doing exactly what Detroit is doing says a shortage of priests is a reason to entrust several neighboring parishes to one pastor, which is what Detroit’s new pastorates do. It is not, by itself, a reason to merge a parish out of existence, and it is ordinarily not a reason to close a church. The shortage is relevant. It is not sufficient.

Nor does the promise that those churches will not close automatically settle anything. A church without a Sunday Mass does not need a closing decree. It closes itself, for reasons Rome has said are not enough.

Then there are the priests. Nearly every parish priest in the Archdiocese will be reassigned in the summer of 2027. Only nine are exempt. The Archbishop may move his priests, but the same instruction asks for stability for pastors and real weight on a parish’s bond with a priest who served it well. It also quotes Pope Francis warning against every attempt to “supplant, silence, look down on, ignore or reduce into small elites” the faithful. Notice which verb made the list.

In September 2026, Pope Leo XIV told the world’s newest bishops: “Learn their names, listen to their stories.” Detroit is about to ask nearly every pastor to start over on both.

Straw men and poisoned wells

The Archdiocese’s October 28 statement, on a web page first titled “Regarding the Parish Preservation Alliance,” warns the faithful against “outside organizations and individuals” who take donations while claiming canon law can stop or control the restructuring. No one in that hall made that claim. The Alliance charges nothing and pays me nothing. Warning against an argument no one made is a straw man. Warning the faithful away from the messenger instead of answering the message is poisoning the well. Bishop Robert Barron, back from Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality, wrote that if there are “armies of Catholics who feel excluded or condescended to,” the Church has a serious pastoral problem and owes them humility and candor.

Buffalo already tried this. In 2024 its bishop barred parishioners from using parish property to organize appeals against his restructuring. After meeting with the Dicastery for the Clergy, he repealed the ban as “too restrictive of the rights of the faithful,” and Rome soon reversed several of his closures. Buffalo’s rule reached parish property. Detroit’s reached a rented hall.

What the faithful are owed

The faithful of Detroit are not asking to run the Archdiocese. They ask only for what the Church already says they are owed: reasons specific to their parish, shown to them before the decision is final, and the freedom to meet, to learn, to talk with one another, and to choose who will help them speak.

I served as superintendent of Catholic schools for this Archdiocese, and I learned that people accept hard decisions they were allowed to help shape. Newman’s plea to be heard on the schools got him reported to Rome for heresy. The Church’s final answer? To make him a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of Catholic education.

On the night of his election, Pope Leo borrowed St. Augustine’s words: Vobis enim sum episcopus, vobiscum sum christianus. For you I am a bishop; with you I am a Christian. Detroit’s faithful have heard the first half. They are waiting for the second.

I call on the Archdiocese to keep its promise: a process open to all Catholics, including the ones who talk to each other.