Vows of obedience, a weekly stipend, JobKeeper - but the commission still found no employment
Can a priest be unfairly dismissed by his own religious order? A South Australian ruling says no - and the reasoning should interest anyone who manages non-standard workers.
On August 7, 2026, the Fair Work Commission dismissed an unfair dismissal claim brought by a Catholic priest against the religious order he had served for more than two decades, finding he had never been an employee to begin with.
The priest was sent from Poland in 1999 to minister to Polish Catholic communities, moving between cities in Australia and New Zealand over the years. In January 2020, his order reassigned him to Adelaide. The next year, it suspended him, relieved him of his Adelaide duties and directed him to relocate - first interstate, then back to Poland. He didn't go. He lost the use of a community car and the home he had been living in, and his weekly allowance stopped. In September 2024, the order expelled him. He then filed for unfair dismissal.
The order raised two jurisdictional objections. The Commission accepted both.
The first is the one HR should sit with: the priest was not an employee at all. The Commission ran through the familiar tests - control, pay, leave, tools of trade, and whether the parties ever intended to enter a legally binding contract.
The relationship failed at that last, threshold question. The priest had joined the order by taking lifelong vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. That, the Commission found, signalled a commitment binding in honour to a vocation, not a contract a civil tribunal could enforce. The reasoning drew on the High Court's decision in Ermogenous v Greek Orthodox Community of SA, which cautions against assuming a minister's tie to a church is automatically contractual - or automatically not.
Some markers of employment were there, but each had another explanation. The order controlled where the priest worked, yet there was no evidence it dictated how he carried out his ministry. His stipend of one hundred dollars a week, plus food, health insurance and accommodation, was treated as support tied to his vow of poverty and to Canon Law, not as a wage. No tax was withheld; no superannuation was paid. Even the JobKeeper payments he received during the pandemic worked against him - the form he signed said he pursued his vocation "but not as an employee."
The Commission flagged another revealing detail: he couldn't simply quit and work elsewhere. Under Canon Law, he needed his order's release to minister in another diocese. Being unable to walk away, it noted, sits oddly with employment.
One factor did point toward a contract. His written arrangement promised leave well beyond the statutory minimum - two months every second year, with travel money, and a month in between. The Commission agreed that looked contractual, but found it wasn't enough to shift the balance. Weighing everything, it held the factors against employment "significantly" outweighed those for it. No employee, no dismissal - and a dismissal is a jurisdictional pre-requisite for an unfair dismissal claim.
The second objection was timing. Even assuming he had been an employee, the Commission found any dismissal took effect on October 7, 2021, when he lost his Adelaide duties - not on his 2024 expulsion. That made his claim 1,097 days old, far beyond the statutory time limit. An extension required "exceptional circumstances," and the Commission found none.
His explanation was that he had spent years appealing through internal church channels, up to the Vatican, before coming to the Commission as a last resort. The Commission acknowledged the toll - his home, car and ministry gone at once - but held that pursuing an internal review is not, on its own, an exceptional circumstance that excuses a late filing. That principle is settled, and it's the takeaway most likely to matter for everyday employers.
The application was dismissed.
The real lesson for HR has nothing to do with clergy. "Employee" is a conclusion drawn from the substance of a relationship, not from what a document is titled or what an allowance is nicknamed. And on process, it's a sharp reminder that the unfair dismissal clock starts when a role effectively ends - and that fighting an internal grievance first almost never pauses it.
