A quite interesting article on Church finances from Forbes:

What would a turnaround artist do with an $8.6 billion (sales) organization with 133,000 employees, falling market share and a mountain of multimillion-dollar lawsuits?

You can’t break it up into pieces or sell off the whole shebang. This, after all, is the American Roman Catholic Church. But Geoffrey T. Boisi, a veteran Wall Streeter and devout Catholic, has an answer: Rationalize the assets and look for a better return, just as you would in any business. First, says Boisi, 58, "we’re recommending a rigorous analysis of how all parishes and dioceses in this country are being managed. The laity is now offering up its expertise to help the Church through a very difficult time." But ultimately, he concedes, "we have to face the realities that some parishes will have to go. Some schools will need to be shut down. There is no other way."

A pitched battle is shaping up between reformers and traditionalists within the U.S. Catholic Church. On the one side are businesspeople like Boisi and former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. They have few if any disagreements with the Pope on matters of dogma. But they are openly defiant of the Church authorities on matters of money. The rebels argue that better financial management by an informed laity is the only way to reinvigorate the fallen-away faithful. "How could anyone in Rome argue it wouldn’t be better if the Church were run more efficiently?" asks Vincent.

Lots to ponder here, much of which we’ve discussed before.

1. The Church is, ultimately called, not to be financially efficient, but to live the Gospel. The real saints among us recognize that if the finances of the Church completely collapsed, that would not be the end of the Church, and, in fact, might be a necessary cleansing. Others who are not perhaps saints yet, still wonder about the system of Catholic education in this country, for example, that for the most part is evolving into a tuition-based system that educates the middle and upper classes rather than a system supported by the entire Church that educates anyone, with a special emphasis on the poor. Others look at the system of hospitals and health care facilities run by Catholic orders and institutions and wonder if they, sometimes, stray from their original mission, even as they become financially more powerful.

2. That said, the Church exists in the world. And in the world, it costs – money and time – to educate, to treat the sick, even to help the poor. Here, in my mind what’s happened on that score, and it is not related so much to a dearth of donations as to (here it comes) a paradigm shift.

For millenia, the Church’s primary presence in the world, beside a more or less purely spiritual one, has been of living out the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. For centuries, that happened via people power – that is people who gave their lives to Christ, via the Church, and in turn were supported by that Church.

In the past fifty years in the US, that model has disappeared and been replaced by a professional one. The Catholic way of doing the works of mercy is no different than what secular institutions do, except in some aspects of the mission and in the name above the door. Both involve money and support. The Church had to support nursing and teaching sisters, just as it has to pay health care workers and teachers today. But the paradigm – and hence, the motivation for Catholics to give to support – is completely different. When the Church becomes a bureaucracy and a business with human resources managers, hiring committees, and so on, it is a competely different, somewhat distant feel from a community that produces religious vocations and lay people to do these works of mercy in the world. There’s less of an urgency, less of a connection between these works of mercy and the people. There are fewer ties, less of a sense that they are of us, doing work on our behalf, and that we owe them our support in their living out the Gospel. Professionalization is the death of everything, in my opinion. (By that I don’t mean professionalization in the sense of doing things well or expertly. I mean, the exaltation of profession as opposed to vocation and service.)

3. Catholics don’t give at rates comparable to Protestants just because of the sex scandal. They don’t give partly because we haven’t yet absorbed this new paradigm, that running a school or even a parish costs bunches of money. Even though we, as individuals, grapple with rising energy and health care costs in our own homes, we haven’t quite grasped that institutions are feeling it too, big time.

I also think that there is a general skepticism about the efficacy of Church institutions. Older people don’t trust Catholic schools and are unwilling to support them because Catholic schools failed their own children – I heard this all the time  in Florida. Catholic parishes whine and whine about money and then whine some more about the lack of adult religous literacy, and then when they get some money, what do they do with it? They pour it into ridiculous, useless, trendy programs that no one comes to because they’re the product of the wishful thinking of some whacked-out nun and her lay syncophants, and has no connection to a) every day life as it’s lived in the world or b)the authentic power of the Gospel.

Rather than overhauling parish finances on the basis of assumptions about Catholics and the sexual abuse crisis, it would be a better idea to look at parishes and dioceses that are thriving, and not just financially, but in terms of ministry and service. What’s going on there? What’s being preached? What kind of presence do the clergy give to the people? It’s not a desert everywhere. Everyone isn’t broke. Part of the problem is the simple attraction of materialism. People who don’t blink about dropping 75 bucks on dinner Saturday night think that it’s not worth it to them to drop more than ten bucks in the collection plate on Sunday morning. Why? That’s not a financial problem – it’s a spiritual one, and one that all of us, living in this prosperous nation, share.