I have been holding in storage a news article from Brian Fraga of the always reliable Our Sunday Visitor, dated January 30, 2019. His story is titled “Parishes, dioceses feeling the financial pinch,” a look at recent patterns of giving in the United States since the Pennsylvania/McCarrick scandals of last summer. I was not surprised at the general trends reported by Fraga except that the patterns he identifies have been in play for years. Years ago, Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill used to say that all politics are local, and the same is true with Catholic giving. The OSV story reports that while Catholics still contribute to the Offertory collections in their home parishes, they are less inclined to contribute to (1) second collections that go out of the parish, (2) diocesan appeals, and (3) capital campaigns.
In previous Wednesday posts we have looked at stewardship from a variety of perspectives; today we will plunge our hands into the actual proffering of our net worth toward God’s kingdom; Church-giving is probably the best objective measure of faith we have, short of martyrdom or offering our firstborn. There is a world of difference between paying bills and rendering homage to the intention of God by underwriting his good will. For this reason, I do not use EFT for Mass offerings, because taking a pen in hand and writing my offering is a concrete step in my weekly Mass preparation along with spiritual reading [and, since retirement, shaving.] The Offertory is a tangible, living act of common worship. Fraga’s article addresses what I would term “punitive withholding.” Anger toward the institutional church, or leaders, or specific policies, is given as a reason to discontinue Church giving altogether, or worse, to abandon the Eucharistic table entirely. There are always good reasons to be angry with Mother Church; Luther was right when he called for the Church to be semper reformanda, “always in need of reforming itself.” I would raise a few considerations about punitive withholding of self or support, though. First of all, your Church support does more than you know or realize. I volunteer with several doctors and dentists at a Catholic Charities clinic in a village about 30 miles from Orlando. We could not do this without CC and the neighboring parishes footing the bill for the rent and the salary of the clinic director, who daily makes bricks with very little straw. Such outreach is virtually de rigueur in parish life, and too little is publicized of the feeding, housing, and health care rendered under the Catholic umbrella. The punishment of withholding funds is borne by the suffering, not the guilty. Second, while the Lord loves a cheerful giver, I think He loves a judicious one as well. The mental health practitioner in me believes that being a part of the solution is emotionally and spiritually more satisfying than withdrawing altogether, personally or financially. Canon Law explicitly provides for lay consultation in the financial management of every parish, and a parish’s budget, at the end of the day, reflects its soul. If there is a major ecclesial obstacle blocking one’s stewardship to parish or diocese, the reason may itself be a gift to the Church and deserves hearing. My parish has had a weekly second collection for “improvements to the buildings and grounds of our parish home” for some years now, and it has netted well into seven figures. It is hard for me to reconcile the scale of our parochial quest for home improvement with the papacy of Pope Francis, who opened a health care facility smack in the middle of St. Peter’s Square for the homeless. It is not easy to personally communicate distress and/or opposition to a pastor, a bishop, or church administrator, when conscience drives one to do so, but it is a right and duty that comes with Baptism. So how does a donor divvy up the cash? The key is arriving at a total stewardship figure for all charitable giving, not just Catholic ones, in one’s annual budget and breaking it down proportionally. The tithe [10%] is still a good working number with some important qualifications [see below], but one need not feel bound to it if circumstances allow. My wife and I have been active in a quarter century of local parish support and parish capital drives, but with retirement we have felt called in recent years to address the Church’s mission beyond the parish boundaries, into such areas as Hispanic ministry, care for immigrants, Catholic Relief Services, our former religious communities, Catholic school support, Catholic Charities establishments within our diocese, and Catholic adult education and publishing, causes we have longed to embrace more deeply. We have established direct relationships with all these causes, and it is always good to bond at multiple levels of involvement where possible, including prayer and time. The variety of parish envelopes mailed to households can be quite educational. There is one second collection per month mandated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and they are conveniently listed here. It is worth reading, and if you scan the list, you’ll see a few you recognize, such as the Peter’s Pence collection for the charitable works of the Holy Father in late June, something we used to call “Peter’s Pants” in elementary school. I recall the initiation of the collection for the December Retired Religious Retirement Grant in 1988, after the Wall Street Journal broke the story in 1986 that the cost of caring for elderly sisters would exceed $2 billion if nothing was done. One is certainly free to donate to one or two at the expense of the others. There is a long-standing debate about whether Catholic giving should be considered separate from charitable giving in general. If a gift falls under the heading of doing good for mankind, I don’t see any reason to exclude it as part of one’s faith commitment. There is a world of difference between a $500,000 gift to a college’s breast cancer research center and a similar gift to the school’s athletic department, and I think most of us can intuit the difference. In the next post I will address capital campaigns and gifts from beyond the grave, so to speak, wills and bequests. But I would like to add one more point: in my counseling, and in my own circle of friends, I see many folks investing much time, care, nursing and housing in their love of elderly relatives. This, and other corporal works like them, is a unique expression of the love of God and a direct contribution to his Kingdom. Therefore, I hesitated to use an arbitrary number like 10% and prefer the citation of Luke 20: 1-4, the woman who gave all that she had. At its heart, stewardship is a gift of love with its own mathematics.
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Dave Dennis, a longtime friend of Margaret and me, and a CPA with years of distinguished experience in Church finance at the local and national level, was kind enough to go over my books on Wednesday’s post involving diocesan finances and annual bishops’ appeals [February 7]. On the Café Facebook site, Dave corrected a statement I had made, to the effect that Catholic dioceses in the United States must file an IRS 990 report that is available for public review on-line to the general public. I wanted to share his correct information on the blog itself.
Dave explained that Catholic entities listed in the “Official Catholic Directory” are generally exempt from this requirement [to file the IRS 990] and instead granted their Tax Exempt Status through a tax determination letter provided to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which precludes the IRS requirement for public filing of financial statements. Dave suggested that I explain the importance of the Official Catholic Directory, published since 1817 by P.J. Kenedy [correct spelling] and Sons. The OCD is a very large and expensive one-volume directory considered the official source of all Catholic institutions and clerical personnel in the United States between two covers. Every parish office has a copy despite the cost, because it is considered the reliable source for the addresses of every man in Holy Orders and every religious community, college, and institution. When your parishes observe First Communion, Confirmation, or marriages, certification of the event is mailed to the address of the church where the original baptismal record is kept, as it appears in the OCD. If you are trying to find the current assignment and address of the priest who married you 25 years ago, the OCD will contain this information. [Don’t be afraid to ask your parish office for assistance in this regard.] As Dave pointed out above, the OCD has quasi-civil legal status in matters of tax exemption, among other things. If a congregation sets itself up and claims the name “Catholic,” but is not listed in the OCD, it cannot claim Roman Catholic juridical status. The same is true with clergy. There are always imposter priests wandering about performing weddings and other services for fees, but only properly ordained priests incardinated into a diocese or religious order are officially recognized in the book. The OCD includes retired clergy and a necrology. The OCD in recent years has also served as an invaluable if sad service in the investigation of clergy accused of abuse. If my memory is correct, there is a scene in the movie “Spotlight” where the reporters are pouring through older volumes of the OCD to trace the careers of abuse perpetrators shuffled from parish to parish and diocese to diocese. As the OCD is an open publication, law enforcement officers can circumvent uncooperative dioceses by researching the book. The cost of the OCD in its various print and internet versions is listed for non-clergy at around $399. When I was a pastor, I think I bought ours every other year. Next Sunday my Diocese of Orlando will conduct its annual “Our Catholic Appeal” in all its parishes. In this age of wireless commerce, my household has already made its gift on-line [I never pass up a chance to earn frequent flier miles.] In his personal letter, Bishop John Noonan states that the appeal is made on behalf of the teaching, sanctifying, and administering office of the bishop. Church history itself supports the right of a bishop to call for financial and other forms of support of the ministry and eventually spelled out the obligation to support in Canon 1260.
Our Diocese has adopted a healthy transparency in recent years and was recognized last year for its financial transparency by a national Catholic watchdog organization for its openness. The full diocese audit (most recent June 2018) is available on-line, and you owe it to yourself to look at a diocesan report at least once in your life, if for no other reason than to understand what a complicated institution a Catholic diocese is. If your own diocese does not publish some sort of audited financial statement, you might ask yourself—why? As each tax-exempt entity must file a detailed IRS 990 form to maintain tax-exempt status, the information in any chancery office is at hand, even if not publicly posted. I am pleased that my bishop did not refer to the campaign as the “Catholic Charities” campaign, a title which suggests that all contributions go to direct services to the poor. A portion of Orlando’s annual diocesan appeal is directed toward the Catholic Charities corporation of the Orlando Diocese, which maintains its own books and publishes a similar full audit on line. But much of an annual diocesan campaign is focused upon “the business of running the Church.” I must admit that in my years as a pastor there was an “us-them” attitude toward the bishop’s campaign. It was in the nature of priests in my generation that we could run our parishes just fine, thank you very much; that may still be true today. I resented having to raise an assigned amount of money to fund the “bureaucracy” downtown. I remember attending a meeting of priests years ago where one pastor said he had programmed his fax machine to reject anything from the chancery. Five other pastors immediately shouted in unison, “How?” To sweeten the annual appeal, modern social communications sometimes portray the appeal as a vehicle of direct services to people—plenty of pictures of school children, poor people, the elderly, and nuns in habit (never in professional dress). Until recent years I always had at least mild ethical scruples about this approach. One never sees the typing pool in the Marriage Tribunal or a meeting of the diocesan financial consultants studying investment strategies for the diocesan reserves. As luck would have it, a January 30, 2019 essay in Our Sunday Visitor reported that while U.S. Catholics continue to support their local parishes, giving to second collections and diocesan appeals is down in a number of locations, a backlash to recent episcopal sandals. Our diocese, like all dioceses, funds the personnel and seed money for a wide range of ministries under the bishop. Dioceses in general carry administrative and fiscal responsibilities that most Catholics know very little about, if at all. Many of these responsibilities are not glamorous, but justice and decency demand that they be carried out. One such ministry is the “care of priests.” From vocational recruitment to appropriate burial, a diocese bears particular responsibility for those who devote their adult lives to sacramental-parish ministry, particularly its “incardinated” priests (i.e., those ordained for, or as in my case, legally received into, a specific diocese.) The Florida Catholic Conference (the eight-diocese consortium) is corporate owner of a state college-graduate seminary whose annual tuition/board is listed currently at $36,000/year. The seminary’s admissions catalogue seems to suggest obtaining tuition assistance through federal programs and a student’s sponsoring bishop. The catalogue also advises seminarians to exercise caution in taking out loans in view of the salary they might expect as priests. My diocese, like many, wears many other hats, including that of banker. This is literally true in Orlando as there is an internal entity called the diocesan bank dating back to my years as a pastor, the early 1980’s. Essentially this was and still is a “savings and loan” fund that we pastors were encouraged to use for our parish reserves. The interest paid to us was lower than commercial rate, but so were the interest rates to pastor borrowers. When I built a parish church in 1988, I banked pledge payments with the diocesan bank and borrowed the remaining 50% at lower than commercial rate. I might add here that the 50-50 rule [cash in hand and borrowed funds] to begin construction was the practice here in Orlando for many years and kept most parishes from falling too far into debt. Diocesan donors need to understand that like any corporation, dioceses are always in a state of flux, at the mercy of outside forces and their own management decisions. I found in our Catholic Charities audit of 2018 an auditor’s note: “Subsequent to year end, CCCF [Catholic Charities] was informed that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) would discontinue the grant for the Refugee Resettlement program in fiscal year 2019. Grant revenue for the year ended June 30, 2018 from USCCB was $239,549 and is included in contributions in the statement of activities and changes in net assets. The termination of this grant is not expected to have a significant impact on the ongoing operations of CCCF.” I’m not quite as sanguine as the auditor about the loss of a quarter million dollars of aid when the need for such funds remains significant, but these are the kinds of financial issues that bishops and their professionals face frequently, and routine administrative oversight by fulltime personnel in the chancery is a necessary expense. On the other hand, dioceses can make their own trouble. In the 2000’s it appears that my own diocese opted away from the 50-50 rule of construction finance into the world of selling bonds. Our present-day diocesan audit includes outstanding bond obligations for a high school (of which $15,000,000 or half has been repaid by school fundraising) and seven parishes [unnamed in report] with unpaid obligations ranging from $1 million to over $5 million. I know the story of one parish very well; its new church was built in 2008 upon the projection of a housing boom in the northwest Orlando suburbs. That project included land for a relocated elementary school and a new suburban high school. Bottom line: the diocese incurred massive obligations when the Great Recession struck that year. Dioceses work in tandem with other entities, and I think that many Catholics in general would be surprised at how much federal, state, and local funding passes through diocesan financial operations, and it should not disturb anyone as improper. It is not a new nor unique set of partnerships in my diocese today. I served as the priests’ representative to our Catholic Charities advisory board thirty-some years ago when a single county in our diocese was receiving over $1 million annually to run the county’s Meals on Wheels Program. What are the odds that my wife and I both volunteer at different diocesan entities and receive government funding? My wife receives a small federal stipend for her work with Hispanic immigrants at a diocesan community center, which she returns to the center. I, on the other hand, counsel on Mondays at a Catholic Charities medical/dental clinic, and the clinic receives a token reimbursement from Lake County, Florida, as I understand it, for each session. Diocesan funding of education and faith formation is extensive and complex. The Catholic schools of the Diocese of Orlando comprise a larger system than many smaller public municipalities and counties around the country. The expenses of the superintendent’s office are widespread. While parishes are expected to meet salaries and benefits of their teachers, the office of schools oversees teacher development and continuing education, software systems, texts, standardized testing, frequent safety and records oversight, etc. A new challenge for school supervision is heightened physical plant safety. The superintendent is also the officer of faith formation in the schools, overseeing the theological formation of all school staff. This responsibility in itself is quite expensive, as a few years ago the diocese contracted for on-line instruction from a larger diocese. Again, this is pure conjecture on my part, but it is possible that donors believe a diocesan tuition assistance program is a component of the campaign. I am not aware of such a full-scale program or an endowment for that purpose in my home diocese, and even if an endowment were to be established for that purpose, it would take fifteen years and massive investment to generate even a modest sum for diocesan-wide tuition assistance. My parish established and seeded a school endowment in 1995 when our school was built, and some other parishes may have done the same thing. I never got to the full array of diocesan administrative costs: health insurance underwriting, pension, real estate, needs of religious sisters, family life personnel including Pro-Life advocacy, pre-Cana/marriage enrichment/annulments, safe training and finger-printing, media and diocesan newspaper, several institutions for the indigent sick, elderly, and developmentally challenged children, legal counsel, construction and renovation oversight, adoption, campus ministry, cemeteries, and the diocesan retreat center. And I forgot plenty. In my forty years in this diocese, I have seen parishes and organizations undertake considerably more initiative in outreach to the hungry, the sick, the needy and the homeless through St. Vincent de Paul Societies, local food banks, and other ventures. I am sure this is happening around the country, particularly with the exhortations of Pope Francis in the direction of a common justice. Every diocese might be considered the generator of Gospel good works: preaching the Gospel, celebrating sacraments, forming Gospel consciences, providing structure and support for our work in the market place. The bishop’s appeal, by whatever name, does not fund a bureaucracy; it funds the people and structures who spark the fire. There are many avenues to express anger at Church leadership, but withholding the Church’s gifts of faith and food from the hungry is a strategy that would eventually be regretted. I posted last week that two critical components of financial stewardship are transparency and lay involvement. Catholic parish donors are, in many instances, college educated, or entrepreneurs, or highly successful in their business lives, or manage their own portfolios for retirement. They routinely examine professional financial data and enjoy enough competence to make sense of a parish financial report of greater detail than the simple 5-piece pie that many parishes provide annually. In fact, Canon Law itself dictates that at least a representation of practicing Catholics with vision and financial acumen need to be consulted on parish fiscal policy through the existence of the parish finance council, an ecclesiastical mandate.
The absence of lay review of Church operations can hide very serious operational problems, at the least, all the way up to crime itself. To borrow the now-famous phrase from the film “All the President’s Men,” reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are advised by their White House source to “follow the money.” In the 1930’s the infamous Al Capone of “Untouchables” fame went to prison not for murder and extortion, but for income tax evasion. We know today that the scope of the clerical child abuse problem became better understood when large private payouts to victims and church attorneys could no longer be hidden in the bowels of private diocesan operational budgets. A more commonplace scenario in many parts of the country is the closing of parishes and schools. One is more likely to trip over the consequences of poor transparency in matters involving local church operations. In these cases, I have to say that laity can be just as culpable as superiors where money is concerned. Church authorities can hide bad news, but lay vigilance is often trumped by reasons of the heart, i.e., my parish can never close. Such an unfortunate perfect storm occurred in my home town a few years ago when the local Catholic girls’ high school suddenly announced in the month of February that it was closing its doors in June after graduation. I devoted several days of blog posts on the Café to this happening, as I had a chance to do some research; no institution just “crashes” and I wondered how the closing came as such a shock to students and parents. On those posts I quoted directly from the blog response sections of the major Buffalo television stations, the Buffalo News, and the school and diocesan websites. The outpouring of vitriol was exceeded only by a massive vacuum of general understanding of the school’s finances and a remarkable absence of long-range fiscal planning on all sides. As the local Buffalo media outlets reported, and the sponsoring religious community’s official statement confirmed, the warning signs of financial Armageddon were in the books; it is not clear to me how much of the data was made public to school parents and/or the school’s advisory board(s) along the way—none, if social media is to be believed. The school closed in June of 2016, but the religious community which founded the school a century earlier began to reimburse the operations around 2003, and by 2016 the order had poured $7.5 million into a school of 160 students and 45 paid staff. In 2013 the school attempted a capital campaign but in the words of the Buffalo News and the sponsoring order the results were “disappointing.” In scouring the internet, I found minutes of the school’s advisory board meeting about a year before the closing. The minutes note general satisfaction with the results of the school’s annual fund raiser, a meat sale, which netted about $4500. Given heavy fiscal dependence upon a religious community whose median age in 2016 was 80 and had one remaining sister on the staff, the failure of a recent capital campaign, a disturbingly small student body despite multiple feeder schools, very modest regular external support, and the absence of any diocesan mechanism such as an endowment for student tuition, was there not one lay member of the school board or parent in the general student body who connected the dots and ran to the “break glass in emergency only” button? To read the hundreds of negative reactions in public media from parents, alumni, and those who hate the Diocese of Buffalo as a tenet of their religion, the word “disconnect” kept playing over and over in my head. This is particularly true now as I reread some of the news coverage, in which the religious community reports in its public announcement that the school’s future had been a matter of debate among trustees for quite some time. [Curiously, the idea of merging with another Catholic high school of 500 students just up the road (literally, 2.2 miles), a boys’ school run by another branch of Franciscans, was never entertained, at least publicly.] As I say, I don’t know how much of the school’s financial difficulties were effectively communicated at large in the last decades of its existence. Transparency is a two-way street: data regarding church finances must be available for parishioners and school parents to understand legitimate needs and respond accordingly, but a certain measure of vigilance is necessary on the part of all involved Catholics to pick up trends and conditions that assist parishes and schools in avoiding major potholes and in many cases getting the jump on worthwhile ventures. Can a Catholic school today, for example, thrive into the next generation without multilingual and multicultural adaptation? My last administrative assignment while in the ministry was a parish with considerable financial challenge and a school operating at about 50% capacity. The two strands of local “popular wisdom” had it that the school was weighing down the parish and that the diocese wasn’t doing enough to help. I am always wary of uninformed advice, so I decided to pay for hard data: I hired a consulting firm from Minnesota to consult by phone with every registered parishioner on several critical points, specifically the issue of the school. What I learned, among other things, was that from several measures, the school at that time was carrying the parish in many ways. I recall that one of the questions invited the respondent to indicate how much of the Sunday offering should be devoted to school support. I was truly amazed that many parishioners indicated 80-90%, a measure of good feeling about the school ministry, its tradition in the parish, and its administration. This information gelled with our demographic, specifically that there was a long tradition of families in the parish who attended the school and wanted it to survive. I left the parish after only four years, but the principal remained, and with a strong board and supportive pastor successfully implemented the school’s strengths and broadened its appeal to bring it to capacity. I am happy to say that nearly thirty years later the school continues to operate. Pastors of my generation tried to present the lowest announced tuition possible so as not to frighten off prospective student families. One of the Minnesota consultants at the time asked a very simple question: does your parish know the actual cost per student? “You don’t have to charge that figure,” he added, “but you might be surprised at the number of parents who are willing to pay the difference between announced tuition and actual cost for their own children. Just tell everybody the truth.” That was a very pleasant surprise, too. It has taken a few years, but the Catechist Café has begun to receive fascinating correspondences. Such letters are always welcomed, even the “controversial ones,” because the courage of one letter writer usually represents a number of individuals with the same question. [Johnny Carson used to say that as a rule of thumb he estimated that every letter he received represented 25 viewers of “The Tonight Show.”]
I am responding here to one letter which contains a mother lode of questions related to parish finances. [The letter can be read in its entirety as a response to the next post down on this stream.] At the conclusion of my last Wednesday post, I said that I would offer some advice on tithing, stewardship, and church offering, and many of the points below will provide at least some partial tools. I need to note here that (1) I have known the writer, Mike, long before I began the blogging Café business, when I was an instructor for the diocese’s Catholic school teachers, religious education personnel, and parish staff members and visited about 30 parishes for weekend workshops. Mike was a voracious student in those courses and moved on to complete the respectable on-line University of Dayton catechetical certification. (2) Mike and I belong to the same parish. Mike’s first question is “I wonder what our home parish pays to have our Sisters here that serve the parish.” He is referring to a community of three sisters who live in a house on our parish plant. They were invited into the parish by our pastor about five years ago. According to our directory, one is associated with the parish school and another is a pastoral assistant. [A third is “in residence” working at another location.] The mother community was founded in 1990 and appears to be based in Miami, Florida. I recall when they arrived and there was considerable interest and enthusiasm about having “nuns” in the parish, although their precise professional qualifications and responsibilities in the parish were never quite spelled out. I believe the pastor’s intentions in bringing them in was the witness value for our young women, perhaps attracting vocations to the religious life. There is something to be said for that. However, the young women such as those who graduate from our academy amaze me with their career plans, attending Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Florida, to name a few. Many appear oriented to serving the poor and rebuilding failing systems. Many have become doctors, attorneys, scientists and the like, and I have sometimes wondered if the more conservative, subservient model of our parish sisters resonates with the energized Z-Generation. I don’t know. I needed to set some background because the answer to Mike’s question is deceptively simple: it costs a lot to maintain a community of sisters. My wife Margaret, a retired Catholic school principal, told me that in her day the hiring of a religious sister was more expensive than a first-year full time Catholic school teacher, per the diocesan compensation directives. I could not find the compensation numbers for sisters on the Orlando Diocese website. However, I did find a detailed numerical pay scale for sisters for a similar sized diocese, Fresno, California. The Fresno scale includes a three-tiered salary structure based upon the responsibilities of the job holder, though no one working in any parish position is eligible for the premiere third tier of compensation in Fresno. Religious communities, in reduced numbers today, are in better command of healthy salaries and I would be surprised if communities looking for new placements didn’t gravitate toward dioceses with higher compensation rates, or dicker with pastors directly for compensation—or, for that matter, avoid dioceses where bishops have historically treated women religious poorly, which fortunately is not an issue in Orlando. There is nothing crass about this. Consider again that working-aged sisters support their elderly and ill confreres by their salaries and, what is less appreciated, they make possible the work of other sisters in their communities among the poor, where compensation would be at best minimal. Sister Carol Keehan, director of a network of Catholic health services, is paid $8.5 million annually, commensurate to a non-religious compensation for the same work. Sister Keehan’s salary is no doubt a major support to her community’s care of its aged members. I would say this: communities of religious that hope to survive will need to consider ways to generate income through professional services inside the Church or even outside, as need be. My parish, with its $5+ million annual budget, can probably afford to carry a small community of modest ministerial skills, but very few other parishes in my diocese could do so. Mike went on to comment about the absence of weekly offertory reports in our bulletin. My experience—and this is just my opinion—is that parishes who post such data really need to do it, i.e. they are living week to week. The posting is the weekly reminder of urgency, in my view. However, the weekly number tells nothing of the real financial health of a parish, because there is no context to it. If you visit a parish on vacation and you see that last Sunday’s offering was $4500, how do you know if that is good or bad? There is no context to know. If a visitor to our parish took a bulletin last week and read that our fall festival took in $57,000 or thereabouts for local charity, he would have no way of knowing that in the heyday of festivals $100,000 profit was not unusual or that our last several fall festivals have been bedeviled by hurricanes. I think the more pressing question from Mike is the annual financial report. My parish’s website posts a broad summary here. What we receive is a summary of an in-depth audit performed by an outside company, so a more detailed account exists but it is not a public document. [To go back to an earlier question, I suspect the costs related to the convent are detailed in the full audit.] To the question of whether our annual reports are accurate, I can definitively tell you that both Margaret and I will testify to the outstanding work of our parish manager, who has held the post for thirty years or more. In fact, it was our business manager who worked long and hard to convince our previous pastor of happy memory to do a public financial statement. True story: in the early 1980’s, when I was a young neighboring pastor breaking in, our previous pastor advised me “never tell them what you have.” Otherwise, he reasoned, they’ll pull back on giving. That said, my criticism of our present reporting is the lack of specificity, the difficulty in locating information that would give me a better picture of the health of the parish. As someone now in his 70’s, this kind of information is helpful to me in making estate plans and possible restricted bequests. For example, what is the current state of our school’s endowment? How much tuition assistance was rendered last year? (Sweet spots for me.) What is the cost of our liturgical music program? Given that our available numbers indicate a surplus in the 2016-2017 fiscal year, what are the total reserves of the parish? Are there plans to use these reserves for construction without detailed parish review, as has happened unfortunately in the past? Canon Law mandates that every parish must have a lay parish finance board. Nowhere in our public parish profile are the names/phone numbers/emails of the finance board available. In fact, the existence of a parish finance council does not appear on any public medium of our parish, though I know informally that we have one. This omission seems to derail the spirit and intent of Canon Law. (A finance board is not the same as a “parish council;” the former is mandated by universal Church Law.) At the end of his post Mike acknowledges that even after completing our diocesan catechists’ certification program and the highly respected Dayton University on-line certification, he feels a certain inadequacy, a lack of training, for the adult education program he currently he teaches. Catechists are addressing populations where most are college educated; in my parish there is a high number of successful business people who rightfully bring the same expectations of competence to Church-based programs. Many catechists, I am sure, perceive this and wish that they possessed a fuller professional immersion at a Catholic college or university. Call me a dreamer, but we need to make this happen in the American Church, to restructure financial priorities and encourage new donors to support our funding of college education of prospective theologians for meaningful employment at the parish levels. It may be too late for our present generations of catechists, but it would encourage them to know that the cavalry is on the horizon and their efforts will be enhanced. I would include a reform of this nature in my will. Part 3 of Catechesis of the Collection Plate, “Your Church Is Probably Broke, Really,” is now posted on the Wednesday Professional Development stream of the Café. For the earlier posts, just slide down the page.
I enjoy attending Mass on the road in such places as Juneau, Alaska; Chicora, PA; Roanoke Rapids, NC; or Saliverry, Peru, and even the early parish Mass at St. Peters in Rome. Wherever possible I take a bulletin home to digest the life of the parishes and, where available, to check the finances and see if any given parish has the means to sustain itself. Most of the weekly financial reports disturb me, not because I suspect embezzlement, but because I have a pretty good idea of what things cost from twenty years of pastoring, and costs have only increased since I left pastoring in 1993. Income and budgeting is not keeping pace. Some parishes do not release a collection tally from the previous week. Others release the weekly collection as a regular thing in their bulletin, while a few publish both the week’s collection and the corresponding amount expected based on the annual budget drawn up by the pastor and his financial board at the beginning of the fiscal year. The latter is probably the preferred method, though sometimes the annual projections themselves are misleading. Consider your home budget: if your year-end bank statement tells you that you met all your bills with nothing left over, then you are losing ground because all your expenses will be higher next year, there is nothing to add to your savings, and all your material goods are depreciating. If the idea of “staying afloat” is the benchmark of a parish’s financial planning, that parish has set out on the inexorable road to default. Which brings us to our first myth: the diocese is an eternal financial safety net. I might have agreed 30 years ago, when my bishop bailed me out with a $130,000 loan/grant to meet surmounting capital improvements impossible to delay, but as of this week 15 dioceses and 3 religious orders have declared bankruptcy in the United States since 2004. My lifelong experience has convinced me that the average Catholic does not appreciate how many dioceses sit at the edge of the financial cliff. Myth two: a diocese can never cut a parish loose from the corporate umbrella. In some circumstances dioceses are disengaging from the principle of corporate sole and setting up parishes as independent corporations. This tactic reduces corporate loss to the diocese where more abuse settlements are looming on the horizon. The Diocese of Tucson’s website addresses the practical implications of each parish with its own corporate board which makes fascinating reading. I am cynical toward the idea and I suspect that this strategy will not stand up in court indefinitely. For one thing, such an arrangement makes a parish totally liable for every elderly person who slips and injures themselves in the parish parking lot, and one wonders how parishioners in Tucson are responding to these new responsibilities. Myth three states that closing a church saves money. We are familiar with the fact that many churches, particularly the old, majestic ones, have been closed or are closing, particularly in cities with longstanding Catholic populations which have now moved to suburbia. One might think that such closures reduce drag on the diocesan budget, or even add to the coffers if a buyer can be found. But closing a church is very expensive. If you watch “The Property Brothers” on TV you have heard contractor Jonathan Scott approach the renovation of an older house—say, pre-1970—with considerable caution because “you never know what you’re going to find behind the walls of these old houses.” Consider the risks and expenses hidden in a church built in 1904, as my childhood place of worship was. In 1986 I looked up the Baptist minister who obtained my childhood church, and he told me he purchased the church, rectory, and convent for the paltry sum of $40,000. Dioceses cannot walk away from churches the way homeowners can abandon a home and toss the keys to the bank, since these church properties were paid for long ago. But dioceses are still responsible for upkeep and particularly liability of buildings in poor shape and often in blighted areas, or far out in the country. Given that when churches close, and parishioners are consolidated into a “regional” cluster of parishes under one pastor, that pastor and his new congregation is usually responsible for the costs incurred from the empty church in his cluster, particularly the insurance and security costs. Can a parish church be sold to a third-party for non-church purposes? Canon law makes provision for this: with permission from the Vatican, a church can be decommissioned, so to speak, and sold for “profane but not blasphemous purposes,” a rather curious phrasing. So, a developer can purchase a church on the block, bring it to code, and turn it into an appealing residential complex. This has happened, but not very often because of the costs, conditions, and locations of the church structures. I might add here that no matter how old or young your parish church is, it needs capital improvements. In Florida the roofs and the AC systems of all structures—including my house, unfortunately—have a fifteen-year run. Walk around the property and look at flooring, furnishings, computers, walls that need paint and parking lots that need repaving, security systems of all sorts that need updating. We’ve talked about law suits and property cost factors of the past two decades, so let’s turn to another key parish expense, personnel. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw large numbers of religious women [sisters] working in our Catholic schools, parishes, and hospitals. There are many reasons for this spike in vocations among women religious, one of them being that a woman of limited means could enter professional life and receive a college education. Catholic parishes profited greatly by the availability of religious providing professional services for the cost of housing [convents] and small stipends--$25/month in my home parish. By the 1960’s, however, women could seek these same Christian opportunities to serve outside the convent, as teachers, directors of religious education, medical personnel, college professors, etc. at better wages with greater personal autonomy. I doubt that 5% of American Catholics understand the relationship between the recent history of religious women and the cost of staffing a local parish and school. It is a simple proportional math: the labor of American women religious was ridiculously cheap until recently and made possible schooling and other ministry at a high caliber of professional excellence. Religious orders footed the college bills. Catholics did not appreciate the bargain, and the cost of personnel today is now coming around to market value, though still with a long way to go. There is a spiritual sidebar to the financial picture: parishes cannot afford professionals and find themselves conducting religious education programs, for example, with volunteers and those with “in-house certifications,” which do not measure up to even a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. Carrying this sad story further, very few promising college students even consider a career in religious education or faith formation due to low salaries and the simple fact that churches cannot afford just compensation. There is no standard salary range across the United States for the various positions in parochial life established by the USCCB. Even priest salaries are a local matter determined by the bishop. There is considerable Church teaching and documentation on the justice of a living wage. Consider, then, what would be a reasonable salary for a fulltime church minister, a faith formation director, who is a father or a mother with several children, who paid his or her own way through Boston College, the University of Dayton, Catholic University, St. Bonaventure University, or another theology school with national accreditation. You need to factor in the “bennies” of good health care and a decent retirement, maternity/paternity leave, and something that few administers think of, continuing education to maintain personal standards of excellence. Were I a pastor today, I would have to be thinking $50,000 to even $100,000 as a full compensation package. We are running things on the cheap, which severely impacts the excellence of liturgy, faith/religious education, and staff morale, where there are staffs. As one mother put it, “my kid couldn’t name the members of the Holy Trinity if you spotted him the Son and the Holy Spirit.” In all probability, his volunteer teacher might not have known the names of the sacred threesome, either. Money is the mother’s milk of politics, as they still say; money is also the mother’s milk of healthy ministry. Next post: when to give and when not to give. What kind of information do you need to exercise effective stewardship? This is the second installment of a four-part posting. Scroll down for the first entry.
The fiscal relationship of a bishop with his diocese flows from his position as successor of the Apostles and protector of the Church’s good name and fidelity to the Church’s mission in his diocese. The specific responsibilities of a bishop are enumerated in Canon law here, and I suggest that before going further in today’s blog, you might want to see how universal Church law delineates the mission and obligation of the bishop. I continue to be amazed at what Canon Law expects of a bishop, and it is amazing that most bishops endure till their required retirement age of 75. Canon Law [and civil law, for that matter] expect a great deal of a bishop. Commentators have noted since the release of the 1983 Code of Canon Law that it is impossible for a bishop to personally attend to every duty cited in the Code, and the custom in our country even before Vatican II was the assigning of competent clerical professionals to fulfill these responsibilities in the bishop’s stead, though always in full communion with the bishop’s mission for the diocese. When I was a boy in Buffalo all the major administrative diocesan posts were filled by priests—such as superintendent of schools, CEO, chancellor, director of the Tribunal, etc. For several reasons—particularly the Council’s call for lay involvement and the declining number of priests--these positions are often filled by lay persons and religious sisters and brothers today. Again, if you scan the canonical list of episcopal responsibility, you can safely deduce that the expenses of a diocese are significant. Last week I neglected to publicize that my own Diocese of Orlando, along with Burlington, Vermont, enjoys a perfect rating among all the 177 American dioceses in terms of public financial disclosure and transparency. To see the present independent audit of my diocese, you can follow the links on this page. An audit lays out where every dime has gone and where every dime is owed, but it cannot as rule tell you whether the expenditure was prudent or whether one’s diocese is sufficiently positioned to absorb another recession such as 2008’s. Church Law assumes that as the senior pastor of his flock, the bishop will enjoy the full support of the diocesan faithful, i.e. the members of each parish, with his pastors facilitating this cooperation by exhortation from the pulpit and/or other media about the nature of the diocesan good works undertaken. Ideally, there is a consensus between the bishop, the pastors, and the laity on the fiscal priorities of the diocese. However, this hoped for harmonious spirit depends ultimately on the relationship between the bishop and “his men,” i.e., the pastors, and further down the road between the pastor and “his people, which would be us. Even before I became a pastor myself, I was aware of the “contested space” between chancery and parish. I doubt this is a uniquely Catholic problem, and many of you work in circumstances where you must answer to an executive office across town or hundreds of miles away, or maybe even across the ocean. Orlando is by no means the largest diocese, geographically speaking, in the United States, but when I came here in 1978 there was considerable distance between our major cities, and each of our five deaneries or regions had a distinctive personality of its own. When I say distinctive, I am referring particularly to degrees of separation from local sites and the chancery in downtown Orlando. Historically, pastors want to exercise their authority with limited interference from “downtown.” This is particularly true in matters of finances, and specifically to the annual “tax” assessed to parishes by the bishop each year. Readers may recognize this tax by another name, “the annual Catholic Charities appeal” or some form of that type. Years ago, our local bishops named this early springtime financial harvest the “Bishop’s Annual Service Enrichment” campaign, which I have always felt is a somewhat more honest title because inclusion of the word “charity” in such campaigns is somewhat misleading to the donors. Monies pledged and collected routinely support the administration of a diocese. This is not to say that a fair amount of money does not go to good works, but the advertising can disguise the fact that a great deal of money goes toward administrative and office salaries. Our Catholic Charities promotional video, usually shown at Mass on the weekend before the campaign, is filled with clips of children on Catholic school campuses in full uniform. The expectation of a donor, I would think, is that poorer children of limited means receive tuition assistance in our Catholic schools through the campaign, but this is not so. “Catholic Charities” supports the office of schools, whose paid staff of chancery administrators is not small by any means. Pastors are keenly aware of such things and have complained about their annual assessments since Noah and the Flood. Each parish receives an assessment unique to their circumstances. For years I would sit with my pastor friends as we tried to decode the formula. The amount of the assessment is the “goal” of the Catholic Charities” campaign. This past spring my home parish’s goal was about $900,000; I doubt that there are more than four or five parishes in my diocese close to that range. My pastor has a reserve to cover a shortfall, but this would not be the case for most parishes in my diocese, and the annual campaign is truly a challenge for many of our parishes. In reading about dioceses that have recently gone bankrupt, I have seen reports that some bishops assess parishes about 20%, and even 30%, of their annual offertory intake. These might be dioceses with hefty expenses resulting from clerical abuse, and I often wonder if parishioners in those locales are aware of that. [Hence the need for annual diocesan audit publication.] In any event, the authority of the bishop to assess parishes for the diocesan mission is always a tender spot with pastors, most of whom in my experience would like the availability of funds on hand to meet capital expenses or other parish concerns. The quality of the relationship between bishops and their priests is probably the best determinant of how little or how much antagonism manifests itself in matters of money. My impression is that my own bishop, John Noonan, goes to great lengths to minister to his priests and reduce local stresses. On the other hand, if you want an example of how badly a bishop can manage his clergy, check out the three-part series in Crux Catholic news service on the Diocese of Memphis, where Pope Francis removed a bishop after only two years of his term a few weeks ago. Like all relationships, much depends on the sanity and good sense of all parties involved. This concludes the second post in the series on the catechetics of the collection plate. I had intended this stream to go three posts, but I am adding a fourth, because I believe it is important to illustrate why and how dioceses and parishes need much more money than they receive now. The final post will be some considerations on stewardship and targeting your giving according to your conscience. An excellent essay on fiscal diocesan responsibility appears in the October 28 edition of Commonweal with special attention to the lay organization VOTF, or “Voices of the Faithful.” VOTF was founded in 2002 in response to the Boston Globe’s unveiling of the dimensions of the clerical abuse crisis. Since its founding VOTF has served as something of a watchdog for the proper exercise of Church authority in matters of clerical abuse of minors, and its advocacy has centered upon transparency, or the clear and open flow of information to the Church at large. In 2017 VOTF focused its attention on the cost of the abuse crisis in actual dollars. There is nothing cold-blooded about such an inquiry; Commonweal agrees with the VOTF assertion that if Catholics in the pew had any idea of how much money their dioceses were spending in lawsuits, attorneys’ fees, and the care of abuse victims, they [as well as any competent outside observers such as the news media, child protective services, and law enforcement] would have been alerted much earlier to the widespread on-going nature of the problem, to the degree that many instances of abuse in this century might have been avoided.
VOTF undertook this study about the same way you would: it scanned the internet, or more specifically, the websites of all the dioceses in the United States, numbering 177. What this investigation uncovered is the reality that nearly half of the dioceses of the United States [47%] do not make any financial disclosures to the Catholics who comprise those dioceses. The Commonweal story provides links in which you can research what is or is not available from your own diocese in terms of financial information. As luck would have it, the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, declared bankruptcy earlier this week. Bishop John Quinn, in his public statement on the proceedings, assured his people that the Church’s business would go on as usual. Survivors would be compensated through a “combination of insurance, savings, money from the sale of assets, and “other sources” per a diocesan spokesman. Is “other sources” a code word these days for our Sunday collection plates? A diocese will go to considerable pain, particularly after a large and/or notorious settlement, to emphasize that no funds from the Sunday collections are being diverted toward abuse settlement payment or other related costs. Objectively speaking, though, it is impossible to claim that such cases have no impact across the board, financially speaking, on every parish and institution in a diocese. The best estimates from CARA and other respected sources puts the national cost of clerical abuse at $4 billion as of 2015, with the understanding that this is a minimal figure. Settled claims with non-disclosure clauses are not factored into the math. Using the $4 billion figure, we are looking at an average loss of $25,000,000 per diocese over the years. But again, there is yet another peculiar twist to the numbers. It is unknown how many Catholics stopped or reduced donating to their local parishes and dioceses since 2002, the first wave of media coverage of clerical abuse. The anecdotal stories, carried in local or national media outlets, tend toward belief in a decline in giving. The 2015 Ruhl Study summary outlines how hard it is to measure not just diocesan costs to date but also what researcher Jack Ruhl calls “opportunity costs incurred.” Every dollar spent, every hour devoted toward resolution of a crisis is money and personal time diverted from productive investment, in our discussion that would be fiscal solvency and the good works for Catholic institutions, such as Catholic school support and outreach to the poor. My own crude math, based upon statistics gathered in this post, indicates that the average loss per diocese calculates to $25 million, though there are wild swings in the per diocese amount. Another factor to consider is the civil structure of dioceses in the United States and elsewhere. Dioceses are established as “corporations sole,” meaning one sole person—the bishop--owns everything the diocese has. This structure was established in our country in the 1800’s when parishes were known to refuse the keys to a new pastor, often of a different ethnic background, that they did not want. The generic title for such controversies was trusteeism, where civil authorities recognized lay boards as the corporate spokespersons for a parish. Gradually the American bishops reclaimed full control of all resources and decision making in their dioceses by restructuring dioceses as corporations sole. Corporation sole has a theological justification, as a diocesan bishop is the pastor of his entire diocese and the ultimate steward of all material goods. In future posts I will talk about the kinds of expenses a diocese incurs that would never occur to most Catholics, such as the care of elderly priests without family. The corporate structure of a diocese has several operational advantages such as negotiating insurance coverages for its employees. Curiously, neither Vatican II nor the new Code of Canon Law [1983] added any strong measures of episcopal oversight by laity. Canon Law mandates a diocesan finance board, but its function is advisory, not deliberative, and in my experience most laymen are too eager to rubber stamp the enthusiasms of bishops. Bishops do make mistakes, and I am not referencing the clerical abuse crisis here. My last pastorate was a modest sized inner-city parish that worked mightily to keep its elementary school well-attended and highly regarded. Fifteen years after I left the parish the sitting bishop decided to build a rather elegant new church on the edge of the city. He made three major errors: (1) he banked on what he believed was a wave of new housing construction on the horizon; (2) unlike his predecessors, he authorized the parish to take on an exorbitant amount of debt; and (3) many of the parishioners prefer the older church in the city to this day, which continues use as a going concern. I might add here that the bishop approved the new construction in 2008. Corporation sole is not infallible. Coming next: (1) a closer look at parish and diocesan fiscal cooperation and (2) how to manage your own giving for best utilization in the Kingdom of God. Have you considered Catholic novels as part of your personal or ministerial faith formation agenda? See my review of James Carroll's 2017 work, The Cloister, posted today on Amazon as well.
During the trip to my seminary class reunion about two weeks ago, I reflected upon the changes in my province of the Franciscan Order over the past five decades. The very seminary in Callicoon, N.Y. that we all attended fifty years ago and toured again on Saturday, September 22, was sold in the 1970’s to the federal government and now serves as a secular vocational/job training center. About four years ago the Franciscans relinquished pastoral responsibility for the parish in Callicoon back to the Archdiocese of New York after at least a century of Franciscan pastoral presence there. Change is never easy and the reasons for the Franciscan disengagement from the area are many: decline in enrollment and available priests, finances, the new demographics of the Northeast, and the need for friars in new, more pressing ministries of need which have cropped up over the years.
One of the more serious and discouraging challenges to any group—religious or otherwise—is facing the twin questions of self-evaluation and the possibility that a group or ministry has served its purposes or at least given it the old college try. Religious orders understand the need for self-evaluation, and such a process is usually written into an order’s constitution. My Franciscan order held a triennial evaluative meeting or “chapter” to take stock of our ministries and our common life. It has always struck me that Catholic parishes generally do not have a “corrective” built into their operations, i.e., a process of periodic reflections on the progress and outcomes of its ministries. Put another way, parish groups and ministries have the right and the duty to correct themselves and even to disband if a goal is met or the prospect does not appear on the horizon. [In my work with parishes and parish personnel over the years, it has been startling to see an even greater omission: the absence of realistic job descriptions and at least annual job review of hired professional parish staff or senior volunteers. Everyone gets cheated when this learning venture does not take place.] Let’s bring this closer to home. About four years ago my wife Margaret and I attended an orientation at our parish of registration for “small faith groups.” To be honest, I never quite understood the purpose of small church groups, and certainly not as it was laid out for us at the orientation in 2014, aside from the generic explanation of St. Peter that “Lord, it is good for us to be here.” As the evening progressed, I had more doubts than answers. When I started graduate school toward a mental health psychology degree in 1984, I learned that The State of Florida requires all mental health practitioners to have earned at least three graduate credits in group leadership and to have mastered Dr. Irwin Yalom’s flagship text on group dynamics. Yalom’s text is described by one reviewer as “the quintessential book in the field of group work. It covers all the main ideas and pragmatic methods that anyone leading a group of any kind must master before beginning such a task.” Consequently, I had some idea of the things that might go wrong in church groups. My wife convinced me, though, that it would be good to get to know some of the parishioners better, as we are members of a mega-church. Given that I write a daily blog, I receive a lot of news and insight from a multitude of sources, and I have been paying more attention recently to the experience of Evangelical Churches and small faith groups. Evangelicals see the small group experience as intrinsic to congregational health. In an article here from Christianity Today [The Billy Graham Center] the authors argue that at least 70% of a congregation ought to be in intimate small groups, with 100% the target membership. However, I wonder if all members of Evangelical groups would subscribe to the third priority of small faith groups as described in CT, accountability: “the third factor is that small groups deliver deeper friendships that double as accountability. When people know you, really know you, your life becomes far more transparent, including your sin. Others learn to read you and will call you out for those sins, creating opportunities to deal with real life difficulties as they surface. This is part of what we should expect from good friends.” This is a much more intense definition of group experience than we ever received from our parish, and thanks be to God for that, because it does not take much imagination to see how delicate and even damaging such interactions could become in an amateur format. [When I ran therapeutic groups, I had to get each member’s signature indicating that I as leader would not be held accountable or sued if someone in the group violated confidentiality.] Wise old Dr. Yalom would probably hold that such a group might have considerable chances of success—saving each other’s souls—if all 660 pages of his admonitions were followed to the letter. As Professor Jim McCarthy would tell us students at Rollins College, the word “group” is so broad that without precise qualifiers it can be stretched like taffy. Evangelicals such as those cited above can call their intense encounters “groups.” In my parish, however, we have taken a safer approach to “groups” in several ways—we meet once a month and we follow a text from our parish. It is rare for us to have full attendance of a dozen. We are in the second year of the RENEW format, which is better than the home-made outlines we were first presented four years ago. RENEW attempts to merge learning and interaction in a very tight framework of time. There is a lot to read at the 2-hour meeting, and very little time, really, for targeted or extended personal reflection and interchange. Were Yalom to observe us via camera, he might ask, rightfully, what is it exactly that you are trying to achieve here? To be honest, the best sharing and mutual support seems to happen at the coffee hour, which often provides a better smorgasbord than a high-end cruise ship. [I am the group brew master, no surprise there.] I suppose that we could continue in this fashion except for one thing: four years ago, the group made a commitment to trek to a Catholic Charities shelter before dawn and prepare a hot breakfast periodically for a residential shelter for the sick and indigent. As last Saturday’s date drew closer, we were able to muster only three of the group to help, and that included Margaret and me. Fortunately, three good folks from outside the group joined us and bailed us out of what might have been an awkward dilemma. After we were finished cleaning up, my wife offered to write a letter to the entire group with the question of whether our group was able to meet this periodic responsibility of cooking breakfast. It was not a question of individuals slacking off, but a recognition that perhaps we are no longer able to assist this facility because of the circumstances of everyone’s life. I fully agreed with the idea. But I also saw the Saturday difficulty as symptomatic of a bigger issue we have not been able to address—whether at this point in our collective lives we can sustain a small faith group. This, of course, returns us to Yalom’s question about all groups: what are we really doing here? The specific mission of our group—in bold, concrete letters—was never truly defined by our parish or our group once we began to meet. I am no closer to understanding it than I was four years ago. I need to make clear that everyone in our group is extraordinarily active in other ministries in our parish and beyond, devoted to family care, professional involvements, raising children, etc. When I was teaching catechetical programs for the diocesan religious education training program, I would advise catechists to be cautious about overextending themselves in other ministries [except liturgical ministries such as lectoring.] Most ministries—to the sick, the young, the elderly, catechetics—require full attention and ongoing study. A catechist, for example, needs hours to devote to Bible study and theology in general, well beyond the time devoted to immediate class preparation. Throwing one’s self into a multitude of involvements results in “Rio Grande Syndrome,” a minister who is “a mile wide and a foot deep.” Moreover, a prerequisite of ministry is “a life.” We are better people, better ministers, when our most essential involvements are well tended to. Personal worship and prayer, sacred reading and study, time with spouse and family, cultivation and nurturing of old friendships, communion with the arts, physical fitness, community awareness. In my own case, my two major ministries are mental health counseling through my diocese’s Catholic Charities in multiple locations, and the [almost] daily production of my adult education blog site, “The Catechist Café,” which is coming up on its fourth anniversary and 1000th post. Both ministries are extraordinarily rewarding, and I am happy that at age 70 I still have the stamina for both. The challenge, to put it bluntly, is quality of work, which involves time and a full psychological investment. Having returned to more intensive clinical time, I am frequently reminded of how my profession has changed even in the few years since I closed my practice. While the state requires continuing education to maintain a license, I know that this is a minimal requirement that must be reinforced by my own initiative. With the Café, I feel an obligation to bring the best and the most current publications to adult Catholics, particularly ministers, who are under the gun for time and wish to use their reading time productively. Consequently, I am beginning to contemplate saying good-bye to my small faith group in favor of more dedication to my major involvements and, equally important, “my life.” One never knows what kind of a reaction this will get, but I must wonder if there are others in my group who might be thinking the same things about their own situations. There should be no shame here. The Church has initiated and terminated ministries since its inception under the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The gifts of the Spirit do not include stress and anxiety from attempting too much. |
Professional Development...
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