Holy C-suite? The rise of the diocesan COO

A growing number of U.S. dioceses have appointed chief operating officers. That move raises some questions.

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If you walk into most corporate boardrooms today, you’ll probably run into a chief operating officer — an executive responsible for daily operations, overseeing staff and various departments, who is typically second in command to the CEO.

You might not expect to find people with the same title if you walk into a diocesan chancery. But even while the role of COO seems to be declining in the corporate world, as businesses embrace a more collaborative approach to leadership, it’s a role that’s gaining traction in American dioceses. 

But as the COO role becomes more commonplace in diocesan chanceries, canon lawyers say the role — usually filled by lay people with business backgrounds — raises questions about leadership, and priorities, in the life of the Church.

Credit: Golden Dayz / Shutterstock. 

Keith Parsons has been the COO of the Archdiocese of Denver since July 2019. Before that, he was the archdiocesan chief financial officer, with an extensive background in the corporate world.  

When Parsons moved into the role of COO, it was a brand-new position. He said the role was created in the archdiocese to align skill sets with necessary responsibilities — to get people in the chancery focused on the things they do best.

Canon law does not mention the role of a COO. But it does speak of an optional “moderator of the curia” for dioceses, who is charged with helping coordinate a diocese’s administrative affairs on behalf of the bishop.

If a diocese has a moderator of the curia, canon law requires that the position be filled by a priest.

But Parsons said priests are not often trained for large-scale administrative responsibilities.

“As you know, most priests don't go to school for or have a background in business matters, financial matters, accounting matters, things like that,” Parsons told The Pillar.

Because the archdiocese is an organization, it needs to have someone in charge of accounting, and finance, legal matters, information technology, human resources, real estate, marketing communications, and fundraising, he said.

Those are all operations that fall within the normal scope of a COO.

Since most priests do not have experience which aligns with these responsibilities, Parsons said he believes it makes practical sense to have a lay person with a business operations background filling the position.

In general, he said, the role of COO in a diocese is similar to that of any other company or organization.

“Whether you're in the Church or you're in a secular organization, you still have to deal with the human resource laws that exist,” he explained. “We have to create financial statements to present our financial results to our people…[and] do the regular accounting that you would do in a secular organization. We have audits of our financial statements by an external firm, which happens in secular organizations.”

“One of the largest assets of the Church is its real estate. But as a real estate holder, you have to deal with and comply with all the laws that exist for the jurisdiction…And we're constantly dealing in real estate transactions, buying and selling of properties. So you have to know how to navigate those situations,” he added.

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When the Archdiocese of Denver appointed Parsons COO in 2019, it dropped the role of moderator of the curia.

The two positions had a lot of overlap, overseeing the administration of the archdiocese for the archbishop, Parsons said, with the important distinction that the moderator of the curia had to be a priest, but the COO does not.

When Parsons was chief financial officer of the archdiocese, he reported to the priest who was then moderator of the curia.

“So I had the opportunity to train under him and understand how the organization works for a number of years, which was fantastic,” he explained.

When the transition took place, the previous moderator of the curia maintained some oversight of pastoral departments and ministries that had previously fallen under his old responsibilities, but he did so under the title of vicar general.

Parsons said he believes it is common for dioceses to drop the moderator of the curia role when the position of COO is created — largely to be clear about lines of authority and responsibility, he said.

“I think it could get muddied up,” he said. “If you had a moderator of the curia and a COO, I think it could get confusing.”

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But while Denver is not the only diocese to replace a priestly moderator of the curia with a lay COO, canon lawyers say the move raises questions — which might eventually have to be answered by the Vatican.

The role of moderator of the curia is optional, explained Msgr. Gerard Mesure, a canon lawyer, and the dean of theology and pre-theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Canon law states:

A diocesan bishop must take care that all the affairs which belong to the administration of the whole diocese are duly coordinated and are ordered to attain more suitably the good of the portion of the people of God entrusted to him.

It is for the diocesan bishop himself to coordinate the pastoral action of the vicars general or episcopal vicars. Where it is expedient, a moderator of the curia can be appointed who must be a priest and who, under the authority of the bishop, is to coordinate those things which pertain to the treatment of administrative affairs and to take care that the other members of the curia properly fulfill the office entrusted to them.

Mesure said that in his view, canon law seems to expect that if a bishop appoints anyone to exercise broad administrative authority over his chancery, it will be a priest.

“My reading of it is that the options are either the bishop does it himself, or if he's not going to do it himself, then he could appoint a moderator of the curia,” Mesure told The Pillar.  

“The Code [of Canon Law] makes it seem to sound as if those are the two options.”

Normally a bishop can delegate almost any authority that he has, Mesure noted.

But, “here it sounds as if the Code is saying, well, in this case you can't just delegate to anybody. If you're going to delegate, if you're going to have somebody else do it for you, it has to be a moderator of the curia.”

“I guess, I think it'd be questionable having somebody essentially doing the job of the moderator of the curia who's not a priest,” he said.

Still, Mesure emphasized that his opinion is not a binding interpretation. And since the phenomenon of lay COOs is a relatively new one, at least in recent history, the Vatican hasn’t weighed in. 

And the priest emphasized that when canon law is not explicitly clear, it is possible to see more than one legitimate interpretation, at least until the Vatican clarifies.

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In some cases, dioceses have managed to add a COO while still maintaining their moderator of the curia position.

The Archdiocese of Hartford introduced a COO in May of this year, shortly after Archbishop Christopher Coyne took over leadership of the archdiocese.

Richard Braam, who was working as the archdiocesan CFO, and has a background in operations, was appointed to the position.

He said priests in the archdiocese generally do not have training or education in the business aspects of running a large organization – like large-scale finances, human resources, and real estate.

But the archdiocese also opted to keep the position of moderator of the curia, which is held by Monsignor James Shanley, who is also the vicar general, and who served previously as vicar for clergy.  

Shanley is in charge of what Braam described as “more churchy” things – Catholic schools, Mission Aid Society, and pastoral planning, to name a few.

“He's dealing with the operational parts of the archdiocese that are more around true ministry, dealing with priest issues, or issues that involve more of the ministry in a parish,” Braam told The Pillar.

Dividing up the tasks that belong to each role was fairly straightforward, he said.

“If the roof is leaking in a church, that's on me. If a pastor's having a problem with his deacon, then the vicar would be dealing with issues like that.”

The one department that was not immediately intuitive was communications. But ultimately, the archdiocese decided it should fall under the oversight of the moderator. Braam said he just wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking on behalf of the Church.

Though it’s only been about four months since the archdiocese adopted this structure, Braam said it is working well so far.

He said he and the moderator work very closely together, and are in regular communication. Neither position reports to the other – both report directly to the archbishop.

“We collaborate a ton,” Braam said.

“Neither of us have really huge egos, and so we don't worry about stepping on each other's toes. We're both just committed to getting things done that need to get done. I think that's part of what makes this model work here - if he and I didn't get along, this probably wouldn't work.”

Braam sees the balance of the two positions as beneficial to the archdiocese.

Just as priests generally lack the education and experience to handle business operations, Braam said that if he were to be in charge of the more ministry-related realms, he would need to seek out advice, because he is not equipped to deal with them.

He noted that the vicar for clergy is also heavily involved in working with the moderator, as there is significant overlap with the two positions.

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Meanwhile, one diocese is bucking the trend – the Diocese of Columbus announced in May 2024 that it was dissolving the role of diocesan COO, instead appointing two priests in the role of vicar general, one of whom is also serving as moderator of the curia. The role of COO in the diocese had been held by a layman.

Diocesan officials declined to discuss the reasoning behind the leadership restructuring with The Pillar.

But the announcement included several paragraphs from canon law, including the excerpt: “In each diocese the diocesan bishop must appoint a vicar general who is provided with ordinary power according to the norm of the following canons and who is to assist him in the governance of the whole diocese.”

Mesure explained that like the moderator of the curia, the vicar general must be a priest.

But the moderator of the curia coordinates the work of other people and departments, while a vicar general shares more broadly in a diocesan bishop’s authority to govern the diocese.

Canon law recommends – but does not require – that the moderator of the curia also be the vicar general.

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Fr. John Beal, canon law professor at The Catholic University of America, said that in his view, dioceses need to be cautious about moves that might see them lose sight of their mission — and lose a unique approach to decision-making, informed by the Church’s theology. 

“Canonically, there’s nothing wrong with [having a COO rather than a moderator of the curia],” Beal said, “because the role of the moderator of curia is optional to begin with. So there's no need to have one in the first place.”

“The problem is that the Code does not view the Church as a business. It sees it as a Church, and therefore it structures the administration along Church lines.”

In the United States, he told The Pillar, there is a long history of modeling the Church’s structure after trends in business. That, he said, can see finance officers, or operations personnel, in positions of significant decision-making authority — and sometimes making decisions through the wrong lens. 

When an organization is run by business and financial officials — or sees them as policy decision-makers — mindsets can shift, defining success in business and financial terms, rather than by the missions of evangelization, catechesis, or pastoral care.  

“The Church has to operate on sound principles,” he acknowledged, “[but] we are not a business, we are not in the business of making money. We have a mission to perform, and we organize ourselves for the mission.”

“The danger of the business model is that we'll forget who we are … you see this in most dioceses, where they're top heavy with diocesan bureaucracy, and the place where the faith is lived — in the parishes — gets short shrift.”

In Beal’s view, the problem is not simply a question of whether a lay person or a cleric oversees things at the chancery. Instead, he expressed caution about the prospect of shifting viewpoints — of leaders approaching the Church as a business, and defining success accordingly.

“You’ve got to have someone who knows what it is to be a Church.”

But Beal also acknowledged that it would be helpful for priests to have better business sense.

“Seminary formation does not prepare people to be the administrators of complicated operations, whether it's the diocese or the parish. There's nothing in the seminary program that trains people to, for example, hire and fire and manage personnel or even make a budget or do elementary accounting. We don't even teach people how to keep a checkbook,” he said.

“So it would help if we had a little bit more training for priests. But we have to remember who we are.”

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Still, advocates of the COO model maintain that the institution of a lay COO need not threaten the core mission of a diocese. 

The job of a COO, they say, is not to set the vision or priorities of an organization, but to implement the vision and priorities set by the CEO — or in the case of a diocese, the bishop. 

And the role is continuing to grow across the country.

At the time that the Archdiocese of Denver was determining whether to create the position of COO, it was still a relatively rare phenomenon in Catholic dioceses in the United States.

“There were only a handful of COOs that we were familiar with, aware of, in what I would call the mid to large size dioceses,” Parsons said.

Historically, many smaller dioceses had a chief-of-staff position, sometimes exercised by the diocesan chancellor, which filled a similar role on a smaller and simpler scale, he said.

But in the past five years, most large archdioceses in the U.S. have adopted the role of COO, and a good number of mid-size dioceses as well. 

There’s even a working group of diocesan COOs who meet regularly to share ideas and best practice. Of the 10 or so members in the group, most are in positions that didn’t exist five years ago.

Parsons said that in his view, the creation of a diocesan COO role has been a positive development for the Church in the United States, allowing for operations to run more smoothly and efficiently. 

“Just to have … a qualified individual who's been educated, trained, and experienced in business matters has been, I would say, very positive from a diocese perspective.”

Whether the Vatican will eventually agree, or even weigh in on the question, remains to be seen.