Checks, Balances, and Bishops

Talk about revolutions and semi-revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church has been a commonplace since the Second Vatican Council. Such agitations have, not to put too fine a point on it, become something of a bore.

There is another movement afoot, however, that could portend a very big change. Whether that prospect is hopeful or ominous, you will have to decide. The initiative is called the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, and the moving spirit here is Geoffrey Boisi, a major player in New York financial circles and former chairman of the board of Boston College. Also at the center of these fascinating developments is Francis J. Butler, the highly respected president of an organization straightforwardly named Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, Inc. (FADICA).

The Roundtable project got its start with a meeting at Yale in March 2003 and a follow-up meeting the next July, to which Geoffrey Boisi invited a group of mainly liberal usual suspects to think and plan about the future of the Church in America. He described the group as “our friends from FADICA, America, Commonweal, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, Zogby International, and leaders from various [mainly Jesuit] Catholic universities.” The July meeting was held at the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, with Theodore Cardinal McCarrick in attendance. When word of the meeting got out, there was a protest that no conservatives had been invited. In response, there was a later meeting with conservatives to hear, so to speak, the other side. That meeting did not go well. Los Angeles Lay Cath Attentive to the possibility of the project being viewed as a liberal conspiracy, Mr. Boisi has since reached out to noted conservatives, as well as others who at least are not notably liberal, to include them in the program of the Roundtable. I was invited but declined for reasons that will become evident. Other conservatives and moderates—please forgive the use of the almost unavoidable labels—also declined. As it stands, the Roundtable is a collaborative effort of wealthy East Coast Catholics, academics, editors, and Church activists who are determined to devise a strategy for establishing a major role for the laity in the governance of the Catholic Church in this country.

The initiative has produced a book, Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church, and a report, “The Church in America: The Way Forward in the 21st Century.” (Information is available on the website of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Life, which is directed by Alan Wolfe.) In its initial and subsequent meetings, the Roundtable has continued to advance its goal, which, according to Mr. Boisi, is to provide a “check and balance” on the role of the bishops and, according to Mr. Butler of Foundations and Donors, to “allow lay people to speak in the name of the Church.”

Undoubtedly, some who have been recruited by the Roundtable only want to assist the bishops in their leadership of the Church. And nobody would dispute that the bishops need all the help they can get in improving management and financial practices, and, to that end, should draw more fully on the talents of lay people. Yet it seems evident that the Roundtable has much bigger things in mind. The apparent goal is to create an institutional structure that will propose itself as representing the lay people in speaking for the Catholic Church, whether in tandem with or as an alternative to the voice of the bishops. The further apparent goal is to gain control of—or at least to exercise major influence in—a large measure of Church governance, employing the immense wealth to which the Roundtable has access.

Moderate Tonalities

These are goals long espoused by the academics, editors, and Church activists associated with this project. In its more modest statement of purpose, the project is to be a “clearinghouse” for the bishops, providing them with “best practices” in business management. But there is also the plan to establish a permanent national “Leadership Roundtable” of up to 225 members. Such an institution seems disproportionate to the task of giving the bishops business advice. Not surprisingly, some think they detect an effort to “democratize” the Church by establishing—somewhat along the lines of the Episcopal Church—a “house of delegates” composed of laity to balance the “house of bishops.” If that is the long-term goal, it would indeed be a radical change in the way the Catholic Church understands her constitution.

The tone adopted by those leading the Roundtable initiative is generally moderate. They say they do not intend to intervene in doctrinal matters; they are not, for instance, urging the ordination of women or the popular election of bishops. On the other hand, the leaders of this initiative are thinking long term, believing that they have time and resources on their side. In Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church, Francis Butler writes that the initiative will “marshal the talent, education, and experience of the best lay Catholic leaders in government, business, charitable, and other sectors to help chart a course of reconstruction in the church’s administrative life.” He proposes that this “could begin as an independent initiative of the laity, akin to a blue-ribbon panel, with the informal encouragement and participation of leading members of the American hierarchy to give it standing and yet the freedom to speak with independence.”

The project is developing into something more like a permanent assembly than a blue-ribbon panel, and it is reported that such an assembly will meet regularly, much as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops does, and have its own staff and programs to speak in the name of the laity. Once the Roundtable is perceived as a legitimate part of the structure of Catholicism in America, it would be in a position to raise funds in the name of the Church. That is a task for which its business and financial leaders are well suited. Presumably, bishops would be invited to submit applications for funding for their various institutions and programs.

If the 225 members of the Roundtable were subject to term limits, this would create an ever-expanding membership and perhaps lead to the establishment of “Leadership Roundtables” at the diocesan level. Such a “lay management ecclesiology” might be envisioned along the lines of the way that Jesuit and other universities have developed lay control in recent decades. The bishop would keep his teaching and sacramental roles intact but would share governance with those who define “best practices” and are in a position to give or withhold funding for preferred practices. Of course, it is not inconceivable that the definition of best practices could impinge also on what, from a business and marketing perspective, is deemed prudent in many other areas of the Church’s life and mission.

A commentary in the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission is sharply critical of the Roundtable. There it is said that “the collaboration models that the recommendations suggest smell more of a board of company stockholders than a plebiscite. We have here nothing so hopeful as a peasants’ revolt but something more tedious—a corporate takeover, for instance, or a parliamentary power play.” That may be overheated, but it is not without support in some of the documents and statements surrounding the Roundtable initiative.

The people associated with the Roundtable project are experienced, resourceful, and possessed of expertise in long-term planning and institutional management. Bishops who might welcome the help offered by the Roundtable project in its early phases may later find that those who only wanted to be of assistance have effectively taken over a large part of the decision-making authority traditionally belonging to the episcopal office. He who pays the piper, and all that.

An additional concern expressed by lay critics of the Roundtable project is that it would create a small elite of wealthy lay people and progressive activists falsely claiming to represent the millions of lay faithful. In response to this concern, it is said that the Boisi group is only taking the initiative in a restructuring of the governance of the Catholic Church that will, in its successive phases, expand to include democratically elected representation at every level of the Church’s life.

Catholics who have for so long been agitating for the revolution that they believe was mandated by the Second Vatican Council may be somewhat disconcerted to discover that their cause has been hijacked (as they might well see it) by the leaders of business and finance. But, as one has numerous occasions to observe, history has many ironies in the fire. And, of course, it is possible that Geoffrey Boisi and others connected with the Roundtable project really do have nothing more in mind than providing business advice to the bishops. Admittedly, the history of the project to date does not support such a modest reading of its leaders’ intentions.

The introduction to notes that the book’s essays “focus on the urgent and far-reaching changes in ecclesial governance, administrative style, and financial accountability called for if the congregation of the faithful in the future is to fulfill its hallowed aspiration to be the salt of the earth and the light of the nations.” In his own essay, Francis Butler writes, “Many, if not most, bishops have proven themselves unable to measure up to the demands of running the multimillion-dollar organizations which U.S. dioceses have become.”

Again, nobody should deny that the bishops need all the help they can get. But talk about “far-reaching changes in ecclesial governance” would be less problematic were it more obvious that those pressing for such changes have a firm understanding of and commitment to the ecclesiology by which the Catholic Church is constituted.