[Catholic Caucus] Hierarchy as Middle Management

Crisis Magazine ^ | September 29, 2021 | Darrick Taylor

[viewfromthefrontier]

The Church has always struggled to find good leaders. However, as recently as a hundred years ago, bureaucratic structures did not dominate its life as they do today. What happened?

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The Vatican also furthered this revolution, despite already having a centralized bureaucracy and despite the vaunted “collegiality” proclaimed at Vatican II. When Paul VI reorganized the papal Curia in 1967, effective control over other curial departments fell to the Secretariate of State, marking a “turn to the world” in its orientation, downgrading the importance of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Paul VI also allowed bishops to be members of curial congregations. Such reforms made the Vatican more centralized than ever. When the Roman Synod objected to the liturgy the Consilium concocted in 1967, the Consilium simply ignored it, and Paul VI promulgated that liturgy virtually unchanged in 1970, on his own authority. Meanwhile, the number of Vatican officials grew during Paul VI’s pontificate from 1,322 to 3,150.

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Burnham doesn’t give any clue on how to take back control from this “managerial class”... he describes “liberalism” as an ideology which allowed Western leaders, who had already lost belief in the uniqueness and goodness of Western civilization, to believe they were entering a wonderful new phase of history even as it collapsed around them. With the “Synod on Synodality” now upon us, his analysis is becoming more applicable to the Church by the day. And yet, there may be hope that, in part at least, the Church’s bureaucratic malaise is generational, as its current managerial class came of age in the 1960s and is now passing from the stage. ... We should work for and pray that such a change occurs sooner rather than later, before the Western Church manages itself into oblivion.

[viewfromthefrontier]

"Critics have noted that the dependence of the Church on government funding, especially in America and Germany, makes it unlikely that the Church will act in ways that upset secular governments. (Not coincidentally, Germany’s church tax also dates from the WWI era, like the USCCB.) The current administrative regime in the Church sees it as a primary task not to upset such relationships, formed in the postwar era, and this is one reason why the Church fails to act on its most contested beliefs (on sexuality, on its claim to be the true Church, etc.).

"This also explains why it is so difficult, if not impossible, to get anyone in the Church to admit the failure of any part of Vatican II or the reformed liturgy. Both have their origins in the public mood of postwar Europe and America in the 1960s, and many working for the Church today owe their jobs to one or the other, or both."