What Co-Responsibility Looks Like in 2026

Happy New Year, Pittsburgh.

Every January, we make resolutions. Lose weight. Read more. Call your mother. Most of them fade by February. But some resolutions stick — the ones that come from genuine conviction rather than calendar guilt.

I have a resolution for the Catholic Church in Pittsburgh: make 2026 the year of co-responsibility.

Co-responsibility is a word that keeps showing up in Vatican documents, and it's worth unpacking. It means that the governance and mission of the Church is not the exclusive province of the ordained. It belongs to all the baptized. Laity and clergy share the work, share the discernment, share the accountability.

This isn't a progressive innovation. It's a recovery. The early Church was built on co-responsibility. Paul's letters are full of it — greetings to Priscilla and Aquila, to Phoebe the deacon, to the whole household churches where leadership was collaborative by necessity. Somewhere along the way, we developed a model where the clergy decide and the laity comply. The synod is trying to correct that drift.

But co-responsibility isn't just a theological concept. It's a practical one. And it has practical implications.

What if every parish in the diocese had a finance council with real oversight — not advisory authority, but fiduciary responsibility? CCOC's Financial Transparency focus group has been asking this question for years. The answer we keep hearing is: "The pastor has that authority." And he does, canonically. But authority without accountability is how institutions fail. We've seen it. We lived through it.

What if lay professionals — educators, accountants, social workers, managers, attorneys — were systematically integrated into diocesan decision-making? Not as volunteers who show up when invited, but as partners whose expertise is sought and valued? The talent exists. CCOC's board alone includes professors, attorneys, IT consultants, nurses, and business owners. Multiply that across every parish in the diocese and you have an extraordinary resource that is largely untapped.

What if young adults were given not just programs designed for them, but actual roles in designing those programs? CCOC's focus group on Engaging and Empowering Youth has consistently found that young Catholics don't want to be ministered to. They want to minister. They want to lead. And when they're not given the chance, they leave.

Co-responsibility is how you keep people. It's how you build trust. It's how you prevent the kind of institutional failure that the Grand Jury Report exposed.

Bishop Eckman is making clergy appointments, reorganizing vicariate structures, and settling into his role as leader of this diocese. I respect the enormity of that task. And I offer CCOC as a resource — not a critic, but a collaborator. We've done the research, built the focus groups, and maintained a community of committed Catholics who want to help.

The resolution is simple: let us in. Not as guests. As partners.

That's what co-responsibility looks like.