For many, retirement starts with a visit to Human Resources. There are forms to sign, benefits to review, keys to return, and maybe even a handshake from one of the HR workers. Some leave with relief after decades of hard work. Others leave with mixed emotions. They know they will miss familiar routines, hallway conversations, and the friendships formed over many years. For many, that day is a clean break. They may never again see the place where they devoted much of their life.
In higher education, professors who have gone above and beyond their job requirement may be named “professor emerita” or “professor emeritus.” This not only recognizes past service but also extends an invitation to stay connected in any way they might choose. This might be a guest lecture, attending ceremonies, or being a guest at a committee meeting. These titles express gratitude while affirming that friendly connection does not disappear with retirement. The relationship continues.
But this raises an interesting question: How do we acknowledge people who have served the church, be they paid or volunteer workers? Who are the hidden emeriti of the church?
I think of a religious educator I knew. I’ll call her Susan.
When I was a junior in high school, our CCD (religious education) class occasionally left the classroom and walked in small groups at a nearby park. On one of those walks, I met Susan: a recent graduate of Loyola University, she was excited about becoming involved in religious education.
She entered that ministry and remained in it for nearly 40 years. Generations of children came to know the faith through her. Her ministry extended beyond the classroom. She sometimes opened her home to teenage girls who needed a safe place for a few days. She co-signed loans for people who needed funds. On picnics she packed the picnic basket. Volunteers sought her advice. She earned the respect of her pastors, even when they occasionally disagreed. Like so many dedicated lay ministers, she was part of the fabric of parish life.
I do not know how her retirement was marked. Perhaps there was a wonderful celebration. I hope there was. But whether or not that happened, I have often wished that there had been some lasting acknowledgment of her decades of service, coupled with an invitation to remain connected to the parish community in a new way.
I suspect there are thousands of unseen “emereti” like this throughout the Catholic Church. They are parish secretaries who welcomed anxious parents preparing for baptism, grieving families planning funerals, and nervous couples arranging weddings. They are the Catholic school teachers, in school and CCD, whose influence shaped generations of students. They are the music ministers, parish administrators, business managers, maintenance workers, youth ministers, and countless volunteers whose faithful service often goes unnoticed beyond the walls of their parish.
Many devoted decades to the church. When retirement comes, they may receive flowers and applause at a parish reception. Maybe they’ll get a framed plaque. Does this mean they are expected to disappear from the life of the institution they helped sustain? Wouldn’t it be better to maintain that connection, and that relationship, as universities often do with retired professors?
To be clear: An emeritus title should not be presented in lieu of financial compensation. For someone who has retired from paid church employment, no honorary title can substitute for fair wages, adequate benefits, and employer-supported retirement funding. Those are matters of justice. They should be addressed throughout a person’s employment. But ongoing acknowledgement of the relationship, and of the value of the person’s work, is also important.
The purpose of recognizing someone as an “emeritus” of the church would go beyond symbolism. It would be an expression of gratitude that helps preserve a person’s place in the community and keeps decades of service from disappearing from institutional memory.
Nor should this simply be a matter of getting people to keep offering free labor after their retirement. Service can be joyful because it is a gift. The difficulty arises when the boundary becomes blurred. Scheduled, accountable work should be defined and appropriately compensated. This is especially the case when it comes to gender inequality, since women already often donate their time and talents to the church.
Creating some honorific for retired church employees could help balance things out. Often, women’s service, whether paid or unpaid, ends up minimized or forgotten. Priests and deacons retain titles and an acknowledged place after retirement; a woman such as Susan can serve faithfully for decades and then vanish from the institutional story. Naming her an emerita or a similar term would help keep her in the parish memory. It would affirm that her vocation and service enhanced the life of the church.
The Second Vatican Council reminded Catholics that the church is not simply an institution staffed by clergy but the people of God, with every baptized person sharing responsibility for its mission. In the decades since the Council, lay women and men have assumed leadership roles that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. They have become principals, theologians, pastoral associates, directors of religious education, campus ministers, and administrators. In many places, parish life has been enriched.
If lay leadership has become one of the enduring fruits of Vatican II, shouldn’t we also think more intentionally about honoring lifelong lay service?
How might the church communicate to faithful servants that retirement marks not an ending but a new chapter? Could retired lay ministers be invited into mentoring roles? Might experienced teachers advise younger faculty? Could former staff members participate in parish planning, historical projects, or evolving ministries? Might dioceses establish annual celebrations recognizing decades of lay service with the same warmth often shown to retiring clergy?
Human beings long to know that their work mattered. One of the gifts of the emeritus tradition is that it says precisely that. It recognizes that wisdom accumulated over decades should not simply be shelved when someone reaches retirement age. It reminds both the retiree and the community that relationships endure.
Our culture prizes productivity to the neglect of memory. Once the work is finished, we quickly move on to the next employee, the next pastor, the next teacher, the next administrator. But the church has always understood itself as a community bound together across generations. It remembers its saints, treasures its elders, and tells stories that stretch across centuries.
Perhaps that spirit can be expressed more intentionally toward those whose names rarely appear in history books but whose labor and fidelity helped build the church one classroom, one office, one choir rehearsal, one parish bulletin, and one act of kindness at a time.
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