Tuesday, November 25, 2025
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Court of Appeal:
‘Ministerial Exception’ Doesn’t Bar Wage-and-Hour Claim
Ninth Circuit’s Contrary View Is Rejected as Overly Expansive View of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. Five of the First District Court of Appeal has reversed a summary judgment in favor a Zen Buddhist church in a wage-and-hour dispute, rejecting the judge’s notion that the action is barred under the “ministerial exception” to employer-liability laws and repudiating the contrary view of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The decision, filed Friday, reinstates proceedings in the San Francisco Superior Court. The San Francisco Zen Center appealed from a Labor Commission decision awarding $149,177.15 to a former employee, Annette Lorenzo, but Judge Rochelle C. East held that a trial de novo was unwarranted, granting the center’s motion for summary judgment based on the First Amendment’s religion clauses.
In his opinion reversing the judgment, Justice Danny Y. Chou said:
“…Lorenzo concedes that the Center is a religious organization, regardless of whether it was engaged in commercial activity. She also concedes that she was a minister for purposes of the ministerial exception. The only question then, is whether the exception bars her wage and-hour claims despite the lack of any evidence that her claims raise an ecclesiastical concern. We conclude that it does not.”
Supreme Court Decision
The ministerial exception was first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2012 decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. There, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:
“Certain employment discrimination laws authorize employees who have been wrongfully terminated to sue their employers for reinstatement and damages. The question presented is whether the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bar such an action when the employer is a religious group and the employee is one of the group’s ministers.”
Roberts declared that a lawsuit brought by a man who claims he was wrongfully fired as a minister is barred, saying:
“We cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”
In 2020, the nation’s high court held in The Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru that under the exception, an action by a teacher at a Catholic elementary school for age discrimination was nonjusticiable. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the teacher’s lack of the title of “minister” did not preclude application of the school’s affirmative defense of the exception, explaining:
“When a school with a religious mission entrusts a teacher with the responsibility of educating and forming students in the faith, judicial intervention into disputes between the school and the teacher threatens the school’s independence in a way that the First Amendment does not allow.”
Ninth Circuit Case
The Zen Center, in moving for summary judgment, relied primarily, for its persuasive value, on the Ninth Circuit’s 2010 en banc decision in Alcazar v. Corp. of the Catholic Archbishop of Seattle. Circuit Judge Susan P. Graber said the three-judge panel’s holding in the case “that the exception applies to the minimum-wage claim at issue” was being adopted.
Chou scoffed in Friday’s opinion that “the Ninth Circuit has provided little or no analysis to support its overly broad interpretation of the ministerial exception.”
He noted that the three-judge panel’s
decision “relied primarily on a quote from McClure v. Salvation Army,”
a 1972 Fifth Circuit decision.
“But McClure, like Hosanna-Tabor and Our Lady,” he pointed out, “involved only claims for employment discrimination and wrongful termination,” declaring:
“[W]e do not agree that McClure establishes that claims for minimum and overtime wages are barred by the ministerial exception.”
Commercial Activities
Explaining why the exception should not be applied, Chou said:
“…Lorenzo is only seeking the amount of wages for her work in furtherance of the Center’s commercial activities that the Legislature has deemed minimally necessary for her to subsist….We do not see why the Center’s refusal to pay this subsistence wage should always be deemed a purely ecclesiastical matter and should therefore be subject to the ministerial exception.”
On her appellate brief, Lorenzo described her work as “a bath house attendant and kitchen helper” at the center’s “summer mountain resort.” She was enrolled in the center’s Work Practice Apprentice program.
Chou went on to say:
“[W]e find no reasoned basis for expanding that exception to bar all wage-and-hour claims even if there is no evidence that the adjudication of those claims would infringe on matters of ‘internal governance’ protected by the Religious Clauses.”
Church Autonomy Doctrine
The Zen Center relied exclusively on the ministerial exception. However, Chou wrote that the exception “is an example of a specific application of the church autonomy doctrine” under which governmental interference churches’ internal affairs is proscribed.
The jurist wrote that “nothing in the record even suggesting that the amount of compensation” given to trainees or staff “implicates an ecclesiastical concern,” but added:
“Of course, our ruling here today does not foreclose the Center from presenting evidence at trial that applying wage-and-hour laws to ministers like Lorenzo raises an ecclesiastical concern and should therefore be barred under the Religion Clauses.”
Two individuals were found by the labor commissioner to be obligated to pay the award: Shinchi Linda Galijan, former president of the center and Mike Smith, who was its director. Although the center posted the amount of the award, a requisite to appealing, in its own name, Galijan and Smith were not mentioned.
That means, Chou said, that the trial judge should have dismissed their appeals for lack of jurisdiction, requiring reversal of the judgment in their favor.
The case is Lorenzo v. San Francisco Zen Center, 2025 S.O.S. 3371.
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