There was some interesting news breaking when St. Louis got its new archbishop: he announced was bringing along a woman who’d worked with him in Saginaw to be his chancellor.

That’s not unprecedented — lay people have been allowed to fill that role since the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law — but it’s still out-of-the-ordinary.

And the local paper has taken the time to profile the new chancellor-to-be:

Nancy J. Werner is the first lay person, as well as first woman, to hold the post in the diocese’s history, which goes back to 1826. Only since 1983 has church law allowed lay people to hold that diocesan post. Now lay chancellors have become almost common place in the United States, freeing more priests for full time ministry.

Werner who worked for Carlson in Saginaw, Mich., is expected to move to St. Louis and begin work in mid-August, he said.
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“Nancy brings to the Archdiocese over 26 years of parish, diocesan and national leadership experience,” Carlson said in a statement released Wednesday. He was installed as archbishop last month. “The occasion of this appointment gives me the opportunity to name a highly qualified woman to a senior position within the Archdiocese of Saint Louis.”

Werner has worked in Catholic parish and diocesan ministry since high school.

Now 48, she’s said she would not have been surprised if she’d been told in high school that she’d spend her career in the church.

“I always expected that I’d be involved in the church,” she said in a phone interview Thursday. She grew up in Holy Redeemer Parish in Marshall, in southern Minnesota. The large parish had “great pastors” and wonderful programs that involved youth. In high school, she was in leadership programs in her parish, in its New Ulm, Minn., diocese, where she became a friend of its bishop. She also was student body president of her Marshal public high school.

“The love of my live is the church, especially the young church,” she said. “It’s made me the woman I am.”

She enjoys being a bridge between people, working directly with people. “I’ve had success in bringing together people and creating an environment that is positive,” she said.

She enjoys desk work, too, especially complex effective church projects. “I love organizing the details that come with a big project,” she said. “My favorite is the combination of managing people and projects, I love my work,” she said.

In the 1990s she served for three years on an advisory committee of Catholic women to the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Warner went to college at the Benedictine Sisters’ Mount Marty College in Yankton, S.D. In 1997, she got a master’s degree in pastoral administration at the Jesuit Regis College in Denver.

Just out of college, she worked in a St. Cloud parish for a year then moved to the St. Paul-Minneapolis area where for the next 17 years she was a youth minister at St. Peter Parish in Forest Lake, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul.

While there in 1984 she first met Carlson, who was then a young Minneapolis-St. Paul auxiliary bishop with great devotion to youth ministry. He lived in a college house with a group of Catholic students.

Her success in developing an effective youth ministry caught the attention of Sioux Falls Bishop Paul Dudley who hired her as the diocese’s director of youth ministry in 1989.

“He was a very dear man,” she said.

Over the years, she led groups of teen Catholics to three World Youth Days in three different countries. She saw youth gravitate to Pope John Paul II as if he were a rock star-like prayer leader at all three events. She led 900 youth to Denver, 100 to Manila and 100 to Paris.

She was at first surprised at the idea of leaving youth ministry for diocesan administration but in 1996 about a year after Carlson had replaced Dudley as the Sioux Falls Catholic bishop, he passed her in the office hallway one day, invited her into his office and asked if she’d be interested in “winding down” her work in youth ministry to work in diocesan administration. She loved it right off and became vice-chancellor of the Sioux Falls diocese.

About six months after Pope John Paul II sent Carlson to Saginaw the bishop invited her to become the chancellor of that Michigan diocese. After she had prepared the bishop’s house for a new resident, helped moved a beloved monsignor into long-term care housing and other “loose ends,” she moved to Michigan in 2005.

Nancy Werner attended Carlson’s installation at the St. Louis Cathedral Basilica in June and “liked everything about St. Louis but the humidity” she said. “I think I’ll need new hair care products,” she said.

After he had a few weeks in St. Louis, he invited her to become his chancellor here. She’s looking forward to being in a large metropolitan city like Minneapolis-St. Paul again and is pleased that the winters here have mild stretches.

You can read more about her at the link.