There were 37 of us spread around the pews of St. Peter's Catholic Church on Barclay St., on a Sunday morning of seeping rain.

Many were regulars, including a few of the old Irish and Italians, some Latinos and a half-dozen Asians. A handful of tourists whispered in French and German, drawn to the area by the great gouged hole a block away, where the World Trade Center once stood. All faced the polished marble altar where the Rev. Mychal Judge was placed by firemen on Sept. 11, in the hour after his death.

This is the oldest Catholic church in New York, going all the way back to the years after the American Revolution, and on this morning, in a season of terrible crisis among American Catholics, the sense of time must have been consoling.

For embedded in the aged marble and stone of St. Peter's is one possible long-term solution to the disgusting mess in the modern Catholic Church.

Once upon a time, the church in New York was run in a better way. Each church had a board of trustees made up of lay people, and they — not the bishops and priests — had the true power. As Leland Cook, in his book about St. Patrick's Cathedral, sketches the history:

"Trustees, respected men of the community, were responsible for the functioning of the church. Priests were there to service the congregation spiritually, and to deliver — if they were good — sermons of sufficient vigor and persuasion to guarantee a weekly revenue from parishioners. The trustees approved all expenses, including the priest's stipends, and were responsible for church debts and internal management."

St. Peter's operated under the trustee system (assisted by a $1,000 startup gift from the king of Spain). The cornerstone was laid in 1785, and the Spanish minister was on hand to take a few bows.

The first pastor was a Capuchin named Charles Whelan, whose dull sermons drove his audiences into prolonged slumber. The trustees forced him out. They also removed his combative successor. They were serious people. The trustee system survived until it came up against Bishop John Hughes, a tough Irishman from County Tyrone, affectionately known as Dagger John.

As Irish immigrants arrived by the thousands, hordes of anti-Catholic bigots forced the creation of a fortress Catholic Church, with Dagger John as its commander. (Among the agents of darkness was the Know Nothing mayor, James Harper, of the publishing family). Mobs of Protestant yahoos, inflamed by notions of "America for Americans," assaulted and sometimes killed Catholics; church windows were smashed; children were beaten. It was no time for democracy in the church. By 1840, St. Peter's was $135,000 in debt, funds were impossible to raise from the impoverished Irish, and the church was sold at auction to an agent of Hughes. He kept it open. But the trustees vanished.

The days of nativist mobs are long gone. But the system created by Hughes, and endorsed by the Vatican, remains in place. A tiny group of careerist clergymen still runs the American church, adept at the intricacies of church politics, but immune from the scrutiny of 63 million Catholics.

Echoes of Labor Past

Most of the top clergy are Irish-Americans, while vast numbers of Catholics are Latino (a situation resembling the Transport Workers Union of 25 years ago). Those rank-and-file lay people have nothing to say about the bishops who are chosen for them. If the clergyman delivers sermons as if he has three oysters in his mouth, the members of the faithful can't get rid of him. If certain priests are suspected of corrupting altar boys, they can do nothing about them, either.

The people in the Sunday morning pews support the local church with their contributions, but because the financial workings of the church are secret — here and in the Vatican — they get no accounting of the funds. They can't track down payoffs to victims of pedophile priests. They can't get access to personnel files, if they suspect certain priests might have dreadful histories. They can't make judgments about the way money is spent, can't debate items of suspected priestly luxury or self-indulgence.

Much of that could be changed by going back to the future. According to several polls, many Catholics simply don't trust their bishops. Too many of them, starting with Bernard Cardinal Law in Boston, have shown themselves to be devious, evasive, incompetent and flatout stupid. They have turned blind eyes to the sick sexual subculture inside seminaries and rectories that has been known since at least the 1980s. Some might even have engaged in criminal coverups of rape. Certainly, through naiveté or indifference, they helped serve hundreds of victims to the likes of John Geoghan and Paul Shanley.

The quickest way to reestablish minimal trust might be to revive the notion of boards of trustees. These men and women could be chosen in church elections the way school boards are chosen in secular society. There could be 12 from each parish, evenly divided among men and women, but otherwise echoing the number of apostles. Each parish board could in turn choose one person to serve on a diocesan board, which would vote on such larger issues as the parochial school system.

The trustees, in short, would have the last say on nonspiritual matters, from bank loans to legal expenses. They would be responsible for hiring and firing priests, and researching their histories. They would be the point of the spear aimed at corrupt priests, with direct lines to the district attorney's office (sin being a spiritual matter, but crime being secular). Eventually, they could even demand from Rome the right to veto the Vatican's choices of bishops.

Need for Consolation

Meanwhile, lay people and clergy would work together to keep the church on its mission of providing consolation to human beings. On Sunday morning, there were seven people who came to St. Peter's alone. They listened in isolation to a wonderfully intelligent sermon from the Rev. Kevin Madigan, about the need to "live in the present moment," without a "fixation on the past or the future." He urged his 37 auditors to focus on "the life we have before us right now."

At the moment in the Mass where each member of the congregation turns to a neighbor to shake hands or embrace, one man moved back three rows to embrace a solitary Latino man, dressed in working clothes. The young Latino shared the abrazo. He nodded his thanks in this place far from home, and sat for a long time in the pew, while a frail rain fell on the city, and the nearby ruins, and the roof of the old church.