Or, as (Judge) Hettenbach wrote — straddling the line between the divine and the earthly — “The Archbishop may own the souls of the wayward St. Stanislaus parishioners, but the St. Stanislaus Parish Corporation owns its own property.”

Judge Bryan Hettenbach’s courtroom was quiet Thursday morning as a clerk handed out copies of the judge’s decision in an agonizing legal dispute between the Archdiocese of St. Louis and St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church.

Among the handful of lawyers present were Winston Calvert, representing St. Stanislaus, and Bernard Huger, counsel for the archdiocese.

They’d been here 415 days earlier when the two-week trial ended. Now, at separate tables, they flipped to the final paragraphs of the 50-page decision.

One phrase repeatedly jumped out, in count after count: “Judgment is entered in favor of Defendant Polish Roman Catholic St. Stanislaus Parish.”

After a minute, Calvert, expressionless, stood and approached Huger. The two men shook hands.

“Looks like you won,” Huger said.

It was a moment achieved through months of legal strategy by St. Stanislaus. But it also came with some luck.

In Hettenbach, fate gave the Polish church a judge willing to tread a thorny legal path that others more leery of church-state entanglement might have avoided.

A question the judge encountered in his deliberations was an obvious one in a church dispute:
Given the First Amendment’s guarantee that religion would be free of government interference, should a civil court be able to decide internal church matters?

Hettenbach was careful to point out in his ruling that civil courts have no business wading into theological or ecclesiastical issues, or interpreting church law.

But he also acknowledged that the case brought by the archdiocese had given him no choice but to grapple with the laws of the Catholic Church — known as canon law.

St. Stanislaus’ lawyers believe Hettenbach succeeded. On Thursday, Richard Scherrer, one of the church’s attorneys called the judge’s opinion “unassailable,” and a “correct finding of law.”

“I don’t see any way that a court of appeals is going to disturb this brilliant job by a fine jurist,” Scherrer said as he stood outside St. Stanislaus.

The ruling upholds St. Stanislaus’ ownership of its property and its right to craft bylaws that limit the authority of the Roman Catholic Church over its governance.

The ruling comes just two months after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision held that religious employees of a church cannot sue for employment discrimination. That unanimous ruling, known as Hosanna-Tabor, was one of the high court’s most important church-state decisions in decades and amounted to a huge victory for religious institutions.

The archdiocese saw in Hettenbach’s willingness to explicate canon law an encroachment by the government on religious freedom that the Hosanna-Tabor decision halted. In a statement Thursday, St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson promised to appeal the judge’s opinion “all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Historical Origins
Hettenbach relied on so-called “neutral principles of law,” secular documents like deeds, constitutions and bylaws that govern individual churches as organizations. In using the neutral principles approach, Hettenbach rejected another older approach in which civil courts largely deferred to the internal legal mechanisms of a church.

In crafting his decision, Hettenbach had to dig back to the historical origins of St. Stanislaus.

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