Christine Schenk’s Bending Toward Justice: Sr. Kate Kuenstler and the Struggle for Parish Rights is an important contribution to contemporary church history. Kate Kuenstler, a pioneering canon lawyer in a previously all-male field, helped countless local congregations to exercise their rights successfully to keep their communities intact.

Canon law is not often the subject of compelling stories and surprising results. But this work is a theological page-turner revealing inner workings of the Vatican, dioceses, canon lawyers, and parishioners as the institution sells off property to cover the nearly $4 billion costs of clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups. The bold work of laypeople to push back against the institutional Roman Catholic Church that closed many parishes is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint for successful action.

One hero of the story, Sr. Kuenstler was a member of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ and earned a doctorate in canon law in Rome, assuring that she was highly competent to deal with often complicated and fraught struggles. She shared her knowledge and savvy strategies generously, if usually quietly, helping countless groups find their way through the ecclesial thickets. Most of her work was pro bono thanks to her supportive congregation.

In deeply detailed renderings of three church closings, Schenk makes clear that without Kuenstler’s help, more local parishes would have been shuttered long ago. The other heroes are the local parish people who toiled in good faith, including sit-ins in some churches, to hold onto the sites of their communities.

There are some surprising revelations in the volume. For example, many assume that parishes are targeted for closing because they are small, diminishing, or too poor to pay their diocesan assessment. In fact, this study shows that large, wealthy parishes are also in the local bishops’ crosshairs. They can be leveraged to pay the assessments of the poorer parishes as well as have their own resources absorbed by a diocese.

Another such revelation is the large number of cases that were lost because local groups did not get their paperwork together in a timely way. Sr. Kuenstler taught parish groups that timely filing of their responses to Rome was key. She advised them to prepare their next steps even before they receive a reply to the first ones. This simple, obvious approach saved many groups from having Rome automatically reject their requests because of late paperwork regardless of the merits of the case. The institutional church makes lots of procedural mistakes too. Only with a keen eye toward canon law—enter Sr. Kuenstler—can these errors be rectified and justice prevail.

The case of a parish in Camden, New Jersey, is illustrative of the many factors involved in each instance. The bishop announced the closure or merger of nearly half the parishes. The pastor of one church, who suffered mobility issues, had many parishioners who donated to a new parish center and to retrofit the church facilities for wheelchair accessibility. Despite that work, he was reassigned to another parish in the shuffle.

The moral breach is obvious, but in this case, there was an obligation in civil law to use funds for the purposes for which they were donated. Eventually, and with Sr. Kuenstler’s intervention with the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Camden church case was resolved and the parish was preserved. Eventually, the bishop admitted that he had not been his “best self” in the proceedings; the pastor forgave him in the end. This shows how very human, if not always humane, these canonical processes are.

This volume makes a very useful textbook on contemporary Catholicism and the workings of canon law. It is suitable for both graduate and undergraduate classes and for parish book groups. Chancery and parish councils can glean from it some ways to work together in the future. The book is very well written, highly accessible, and compelling at the human level. It is a rich resource for the ins and outs of canon law as it is applied today in a synodal church. Leo XIV and US Catholic bishops would benefit from reading and discussing this volume with people like the late Sr. Kate Kuenstler and the very competent Sr. Christine Schenk.