Why Did the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Launch the School Closing Campaign?

The employees of the archdiocese who are behind this campaign do not believe that they are failing at running a Catholic school system. They think they are succeeding in achieving goals of their own. There's a short explanation of what's going on here. A much longer discussion of what they are up to, with supporting evidence, here.

(Since this post explains what the blog is about, I keep it permanently at the top.)

Boston

It is, of course, true that things are going on in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. I hope to start writing about those developments in the near future. But in the meantime here is an excellent discussion of the rule of the planners in Boston from that excellent blog, Boston Catholic Insider.

I Like This Picture

From 1852 to 1860 St. John Neumann was the bishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia and worked tirelessly to open Catholic schools.  In 1863 the parish of St. Peter the Apostle, where St. John had been buried, built a school. In 1916 the parish built a new school, but incorporated the cornerstone from the 1863 building. In 2012 the “pastoral planners” of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia tried to close the parish school, open for almost 150 years, to replace it with one of their regional schools. Because of the work of the parishioners of  St. Laurentius in Fishtown, the planners were unable to close St. Laurentius school, leaving the planners with no excuse to make St. Peter’s the site of a regional school, and the parish school survived. A defeat for the planners and a victory for the Church.

What Am I Up To?

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

                                                          Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics

The purpose of this post is to try to explain what it is I’m trying to do with this blog. In the most narrow sense the answer is easy. I think that the “pastoral planners” of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia have an ideology that controls what they want to do to the Catholic Church in Philadelphia. They pretend that they have no ideology at all. They act like they’re just neutral planners with no agenda. If you read their stuff it’s clear that they have an agenda, and I don’t think it’s a Catholic one. I think that the more people understand their actual ideology, the less likely the planners are to succeed, so I try to tell people about it.

I got interested in this issue in the summer of 2011. The archdiocesan bureaucrats were closing St. Kevin’s school in Springfield. The dispute was weird. The school’s supporters would be identified in the newspapers by name and they would explain exactly why they thought the school was financially viable and worth saving. Their opponents were not named in the papers and their motives for closing the school was only explained in the most vague and general terms. The pastor, for example, would make statements about why the archdiocese wanted the school closed, but he didn’t say he was speaking for himself, he was relaying the opinion of unnamed archdiocesan employees.  Spokesmen for the archdiocese would issue statements vaguely saying that the school had to be closed because it didn’t have enough kids in it, vaguely implying that there was some financial reasoning involved, but they didn’t claim to be the decision-makers, they were merely the spokesmen for the decision-makers. The archdiocesan employees who were actually making the decision were never quoted, never named. There was never any explanation for why it was so urgent, why it had to be closed right away, why small schools were so intolerable.

Cardinal Rigali wouldn’t meet with the parishioners. Eventually the parishioners bought a billboard on the Schuylkill Expressway asking for a meeting, and he agreed to meet with him. It took a while to actually happen because the Cardinal was traveling. When he finally met with the parishioners he told them that archdiocesan employees had decided to close their school and he wasn’t going to interfere with their decision.

The most common explanation for this campaign against St. Kevin’s was money. People would write letters accusing the Church of caring about nothing but money and taking the school away from the people of St. Kevin’s for reasons of greed.

I didn’t think they were right, but I had no alternative explanation. I started a research project to find out. For one thing, not much money was saved by closing the school. There was no financial reason for doing it immediately. Even more important, I thought, was that closing the school didn’t save any money for the archdiocese. The school was run by the parish. It didn’t cost the archdiocese any money at all.

One of the things I found in my research was the blog “Boston Catholic Insider.” I wished that there was a similar blog for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. I wished that someone on the inside would explain what was going on, who was doing it and why. After a while I realized that was not going to happen. Nobody was going to provide direct evidence about what the bureaucrats were up to or what their motives were.

I kept working and eventually read enough of the public writings of the pastoral planners that I think I know what they’re up to. Since no insider was going to step up, I would be the outsider who had learned something and was willing to tell people about it.

Since Vatican II the Church has had the problem of people inside the Church trying to replace the Catholic faith with something else. James Hitchcock’s “Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism” is, I think, one of the best books on this phenomenon.  Msgr. George Kelly’s “Battle for the American Church” is another great book on the topic. It’s also a theme that runs through Philip Lawler’s “The Faithful Departed,” a book about the history of the Boston Archdiocese. I think that if the Conference for Pastoral Planning and Council Development had existed when Dr. Hitchcock and Msgr. Kelly wrote their books it would have earned a chapter in both. Instead it flies under the radar, pretending like it’s completely without a spiritual agenda, when it most assuredly has one.

One thing about being an outsider is that it’s easier for me to keep this impersonal. I don’t know any private facts about any of these people. I’m very willing to admit that they think they’re doing good. They don’t think that the religion the Pope promotes has anything useful for the modern world. They think that those who can should adopt the “Gather Faithfully Together” religion. I think they’re wrong. I have no opinion regarding whether they are bad people. That’s not my business. I’m not supposed to be judging them.

I don’t think that original sin has left a bigger mark on Church bureaucrats than it has on anyone else, but I don’t think it’s left less of a mark, either. Church bureaucrats have the same tendency to employ the resources of their employer to advance their own goals, as opposed to the goals of the organization, that all bureaucrats do. Robert Conquest didn’t know any of the employees of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, but his Third Law of Politics is an exact description of their behavior. Nobody thinks priests, for example, should be allowed to do whatever they want without supervision. All of us have checks on our behavior. Things restrain us from doing what we want to do, and we are required to do what we’re supposed to do, especially at work. I just think that it can’t be assumed that because lay Church employees are not motivated by money, that they are therefore doing the right thing.

There are two facts regarding the management of the Catholic Church that are undeniable. First, objective observation from the outside indicates that things are in a shambles. Second, the people doing the managing act like they are not failing, but are succeeding. The explanation is not that the Church bureaucrats are unaware of what’s going on around them. The goals they think they are successfully working toward are just different from the goals most outside observers think they have.

Letting a Screenshot Speak for Me

I've had complaints that my posts are too wordy, but pointing out the planners' values isn't easy. This post, though, won't require much typing. This screenshot shows a search of "Conference for Pastoral Planning and Council Development" on the FutureChurch website. It makes my point for me.

More from St. John Neumann

One of the saint's biographers, Father W. Frean, C.SS.R., noted that the “results which attended Neumann’s efforts were not attained without stiff opposition from some quarters. For example, the pastor of St. Michael’s refused to build a school, saying that the undertaking was an impossible one in the circumstances in which he found himself. The bishop who was always very mild, but equally firm when God’s honor and the salvation of souls demanded it, quietly informed the parish priest that if he did not do this work, then he would find somebody else to do it for him.” Blessed John Neumann: The Helper of the Afflicted, pp. 154-155 (Majellan Press 1963).

Things are different now. If a pastor says that it is possible to keep a school open, his opinion is disregarded in favor of the conclusions of the lay bureaucrats. A priest’s career would be furthered by closing a school, not by opening one. And the “salvation of souls” is a subject that is not addressed by employees of the archdiocese.

Denouncing "New Doctrine" in the Inquirer

Now that the crisis is over for most schools I was hoping that some reporting and commentary would appear in the papers that would let people know what had happened and why, but there's been very little. Few reporters seem interested in doing more than printing whatever public spokesmen happen to say.

Some reporters have brought out some interesting facts, and I’ll try to highlight them in some future posts, but in the field of commentary there’s only been one thing written that’s at all insightful, and it appeared in the Inquirer of all places. I think the editors may have perceived it to be somehow useful against the Church because they took its tone to be strident and maybe a little revolutionary. 

A.J. Thomson, from Fishtown, was well-positioned to learn something from this fight, and he did. He was instrumental in the successful appeal of the plan to “merge” St. Laurentius with St. Peter the Apostle, and have the regional school at St. Peter’s. I think that one may have been important to the planners. I think they would have loved to have made the Catholic school at the shrine of St. John Neumann into a regional rather than a parish school. It certainly seems that their plan to close St Laurentius was unnecessary, even under their criteria, since they were unable to come up with a basis for rejecting the appeal.

His column appeared in the Inquirer on February 26. Here’s an example of a sentence that I'm not quite sure about. “And like any struggle for one’s identity, it made us better.” Well, I certainly agree that it was an inspiring struggle. I also agree that it made us better. It got lots of people together in a good way. Those who won accomplished something very much worth doing. Those on our side who did not save their schools were also fighting for the right. But for their “identity?” That strikes me as the kind of psychobabbly word that the planners use. Maybe, though, he used it to mean “heritage.”

I very much liked this paragraph, which shows he’s paying attention.

The archdiocesan officials who delivered the news of the reprieves looked as if they were in the receiving line at their own funerals. Their morose expressions underscored the vast distance between those who want Catholic education and those who have concocted a Byzantine system for telling us we can't have it.

The archbishop was happy. The rich guys were happy. The politicians were happy. The planners and their minions weren’t. They didn’t start this process to get lots of money at the last minute and save schools. They started it to close schools. They don’t like the high schools being saved, and they don’t like all those grade schools’ appeals being granted, showing how shoddy and unsupported their “work” was. Mr. Thomson knows that the people he and his friends fought against to keep St. Laurentius open were not trying to lose. They were trying to win. Maybe the archbishop noticed and learned something from the way his employees acted when they were announcing the saved grade schools.

Mr. Thomson also has spotted the most important issue. He knows that the excuse for the mass closing of grade schools makes no sense.

The new doctrine suggesting that a parish shouldn't support a school seems to come from a mail-order business-school curriculum, not the tradition of Catholicism as we know it in Philadelphia. The paramount aim of our church should be to educate and instill our faith in as many of its young people as possible. For centuries, it has been. Only now is the principle being questioned by a few.

Grade schools don't get money from the archdiocese. They used to be supported by the parishes. If Catholicism is a religion, there’s no reason why parishes can’t support schools. St. John Neumann’s whole idea was that parishes would support schools. The planners never explain why parishes shouldn’t support schools, they just assert it.

I’ve got no business quibbling with Mr. Thomson. He said, in the pages of the Inquirer, no less, in the face of the violent disagreement of the entire archdiocesan bureaucracy, save only the guy at the very top: “The paramount aim of our church should be to educate and instill our faith in as many of its young people as possible.” The planners have many, many goals that come before that one. I’m going to go through with the quibble, though. This “new doctrine” comes from the Conference for Pastoral Planning and Council Development and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's Office for Research and Planning. They don't preach this new doctrine for business reasons. No business would deliberately damage its main source of new customers. They preach their new doctrine because they want to be in an entirely different business. This is an effective plan for getting the Church where they want it to be.

One more quibble. Mr. Thomson compares the fight to the Civil War and Lincoln’s problem in getting his generals to fight. He says that “it is time to ditch the McClellans―the generals who shrink from a challenge,” and: “We should be asking the archbishop to promote the Grants and Shermans.” Certainly the leaders in the fight to save schools did the right thing. Leaping into the breach on very short notice and putting up a good fight deserves praise. But what does Mr. Thomson want to be promoted to? It may be this request that got his column into the Inquirer. They may have thought he is fighting to reorganize the Church along the lines of Congregationalism, or something. And some of the heroes in this battle were not lay people. Father Olson of Bonner and Prendie certainly distinguished himself in the fight.

More importantly, our problem is not that we have too many McClellans. I wish the planners were more timid. They faced the challenge of a new archbishop who might take away their control of the diocese. They decided to meet that challenge as Michael Corleone would. They put together a plan to “settle all family business” on one day before the new archbishop knew his new diocese.

Anyway, Mr. Thomson did a great job. He saved his school, and he learned enough in the process to write the most perceptive article on the school closings that I’ve seen published anywhere, and he got it published in the Inquirer. I hope he heeds his own call to continue to fight for Catholic schools.