If you did this, you would necessarily give Apache “permission to certain root-owned files,” and that would Not Be A Good Thing™.

You see, any script run by apache would now have those same privileges! And... you don't want that.

What you should do, instead, is to arrange for another service-process to be sitting out there, waiting for (say...) a SOAP-request to do certain things. The web-site code issues that request and waits for the response:   apache does not have the privilege to perform this action by itself. Furthermore, the SOAP request should be constructed in such a way that there is some modicum of “authentication,” such that it has some degree of confidence that the request that it receives is actually the one that you intended for it to receive.

“Never assume... never assume...”