How to determine if clergy listen humbly and learn...

Soon to retire Cardinal George of Chicago said before last week’s US bishops’ annual fall meeting that he doesn’t get what Pope Francis wants him to do.  “He says wonderful things, but he doesn’t put them together all the time, so you’re left at times puzzling over what his intention is… What he says is clear enough, but what does he want us to do?"

I don’t know… Maybe follow the gospels?  Maybe imitate Jesus’ effusion of inclusion, love and mercy?   

It’s a bit ironic that a 77 year-old self-acclaimed career Jesus-expert suddenly becomes confused when asked to imitate that very guy.  Maybe thoughts like this are rattling through his and other clergy’s heads these days, “The last two popes were so much easier….  You just really couldn’t go wrong with mindless regurgitation of their words and ruthless expulsion of people who disagreed with them…perennial Vatican crowd pleasers…like serving cake at a wedding reception.  It certainly got me where I am today, anyway… ” 

It seems sumptuously dressed Cardinal Raymond Burke is also confused.  Before his recent removal as head of the powerful Apostolic Signatura, Burke said, “At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder”.   

Ray, a ship heading in a direction you don’t like is not a rudderless ship.  It’s a ship going in a different direction than you want.  Getting a new job during a corporate reorganization is not the work of Satan.  Shifting power from you to another albeit most likely less stunningly dressed prelate is not grounds for a delicately worded public temper tantrum.  Calm down.  It’s still a bunch of guys in gowns who live in rarefied environments running the show.  I realize Francis’ focus on Christ-like simplicity might threaten your penchant for donning fancy threads and bejeweled mitres but as Jessie J sings and I think Francis is trying to say, it “ain’t about the ba-bling, ba-bling…”

During his November 12th general audience, Pope Francis said, “Bishops and priests must listen humbly and learn.”   To the average person, those words are very clear and unambiguous.  However, each of those words: listen, humbly and learn, pose a challenge to anyone unaccustomed to listening and with infallibility induced learning disabilities.

As a consultant, I often help clients set or improve their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).   The sayings in the business are, "what gets measured gets done" and "measurements drive behavior."  If Francis wants to change behavior, he needs to alter the church's current KPIs.  Things like Pew Counts (or what event coordinators informally call "buns in seats" numbers), to me, encourage clergy narcissism where revering clergy by showing up at Mass is equated with adequately imitating Christ and money accumulated via offertory collections are confused with Christian community vibrancy.

Desiring to apply my gifts to help my church, I decided to define new KPIs that Francis can use with the clergy.  Here’s an assessment I created to help clergy calculate their effectiveness in things like listening, humility and learning.

Please fill-in your numbers for the following statistics and then in the subsequent section, please follow the instructions to calculate your KPIs.  After having an independent non-clergy-rah-rah accounting firm certify the veracity of your numbers, please submit your scores to the Vatican and publish them for your flock to see.  Then host town meetings and roundtables to discuss next year's objectives and improvement plans for reaching those objectives.

Catholics in your parish/diocese (C):_____

People in the area served by your parish/diocese (P):_____

Ordained Catholics worldwide with whom you regularly interact (O):_____

Non-ordained Catholics in your parish/diocese with whom you regularly interact (c):_____

Non-ordained people in your parish/diocese with whom you regularly interact (p):_____

Ordained Catholics in your parish/diocese with whom you regularly interact (o):_____

Laity employed in church-related occupations with whom you regularly interact (e):_____

Number of suggestions implemented (S):_____

Number of clergy originated suggestions implemented (s):_____

Number of leadership positions (L):_____

Number of leadership positions held by clergy (l):_____
Money received for your parish/diocese annually (M):_____
Parish/diocese bank account and investment balances (B):_____
Money spent helping the poor (m):_____

Divide C by P to determine your Catholic Saturation Ratio (CSR).  For example if there are 60,000 Catholics in the geographic area of your diocese which has an overall population of 1,000,000 people, your CSR is 60,000/1,000,000 or .06.  6% of the population you should serve is Catholic. 

Divide (c+o) by p to determine your Inward Focus Rating (IFR).  A high IFR indicates you spend way more time with Catholics versus outwardly ministering amongst all God’s people.  Here’s an example.  If you typically talk to 50 priests, 100 Catholic laypeople and 200 people altogether, your IFR is (50+100)/200 or 0.75.  If you typically talk to 50 priests, 100 Catholic laypeople and 1,000 people total, your IFR is (50+100)/1,000 or 0.15.

Your IFR (Inward Focus Rating) must be viewed along with your CSR (Catholic Saturation Ratio).  Presumably if your area served is 90% Catholic, 90% of your time might be dedicated to interacting with Catholics so an IFR of 90% would be reasonable.  If you serve an area with 3% Catholics, you might expect a lower percentage of your time is spent interacting with Catholics and so might expect an IFR closer to 3%. 

Next, let’s calculate your Inward Navel Gazing Ratio (INGR).  A high INGR indicates you mostly talk to clergy or people employed by the church and thus are most interested in church bureaucracy rather than caring for people.  INGR is calculated by dividing (o+e) by p.  Here’s an example.  If you talk to 50 priests, 20 people employed by the church, and 100 regular folk total, your INGR is (50+20)/100 or 0.7.  70% of your interactions are associated with church bureaucracy.   If you talk to 50 priests, 20 people employed by the church and 1,000 regular folk total, your INGR is (50+20)/1,000 or 0.07.  In this example you spend only 7% of your interactions on church bureaucracy.

Your Clerical Preoccupation Factor (CPF) is determined by dividing O by p.  A higher number means you spend most of your time talking to clergy in or outside your diocese rather than regular folk.  For example if you typically interact with 75 clergy and 10 non-ordained people your CPF is 75/10 or 7.5 as compared with someone who interacts with 10 clergy and 75 non-ordained people whose CPF is 0.133.  The goal is for a CPF far below 1.

Your Hierarchy Infatuation Index (HII) indicates how much you value clergy versus regular folk.  Higher numbers indicate higher value placed upon clergy than laypeople.  It is calculated by multiplying two ratios, dividing s by S and dividing l by L.  For example if 10 of 10 ideas implemented are from clergy, and if 9 out of 10 leadership positions are held by clergy, your HII is (10/10)*(9/10) or 0.9.  This is a 90% Hierarchy Infatuation Index.  A contrasting example is if 1 of 10 ideas implemented are from clergy and 2 of 10 leadership positions are held by clergy, your HII is (1/10)*(2/10) or 0.02 or 2% infatuation with hierarchy.  The goal is to get this as close to zero as possible.

Finally, calculate your Rendered Unto God (RUG) number by dividing m by the sum of M+B.  This measures the amount of money used to help the poor versus hoarded in investments or used on inwardly focused things like decor, regalia, accessories, and institution perpetuating staff salaries.  Clarification: expenditures subsidizing people's Catholic school tuition only counts as money helping the poor if the family's income was well below the demographic median for the geographical area in question.  School tuition subsidies for the economically blessed do not count.  The goal is for this number to be as close to 1 as possible.

So an example of calculating RUG is as follows.  If you receive $500,000 in donations and have $2 million in investments, and give $10,000 per annum to the poor, your RUG would be 10,000/(2,000,000 + 500,000) or 0.004.  This equates to only 4 tenths of one percent of money collected being used to help the poor and clearly requires immediate attention.  Sadly, I think many if not most parishes and dioceses will have lower RUG numbers than my example because instead of apostles collecting material goods and redistributing to those in need as directed by Christ in the gospels, they have tremendous money hoarding and self-funding fixation issues.

Back to Francis' guidance...by asking clergy to listen, Pope Francis is asking you to align your IFR (Inward Focus Rating) with your CSR (Catholic Saturation Ratio) numbers to ensure you are listening to people inside and outside the church.  Similarly he wants you to decrease your INGR (Inward Navel Gazing Ratio) and CPF (Clergy Preoccupation Factor) numbers to ensure you listen to people outside your fraternity and fraternity cheerleader and enablement squads.  By asking for humble learning, he wants you to decrease your HII (Hierarchical Infatuation Index). 

Improving these five numbers along with your RUG (Rendered Unto God) number is kind of like lowering your bad cholesterol by altering your behavior and consumption patterns.  Unlike high cholesterol, there’s no pill to offset bad behavior.  But, like high cholesterol, they really destroy the body if not addressed.

Teaching credentials...

 Food for thought:

• Imagine your English teacher demonstrating mastery of the language by regularly uttering statements like this, “We seen them deer when we was up north!” 
• Imagine your mathematics teacher regularly adding numbers incorrectly. 
• Imagine your social studies teacher talking about visiting “Toledo, the capital of the U.S.” 
• Imagine your music teacher with an inability to count rhythms correctly or carry a tune.  

Now try to imagine yourself valuing these teachers’ lessons.  In each case, regardless of the theory expressed, actions belied their true subject-matter expertise to the point you probably justifiably questioned their credibility…a lot…  Their actions told you, “I am not qualified to teach about this.”

Now:

• Imagine your Catholic faith teacher, who professes to know more than you about truth, being exposed as a liar. 
• Imagine your faith teacher confusing the commandment about adultery with those about murder or stealing.
• Imagine your faith teacher enabling and covering up clergy’s sexual abuse of minors but writing the Church’s norms to protect children.

Such is the case with the Catholic hierarchy and sexual abuse.  The bishops declare themselves the ultimate teaching authorities on faith yet, on a weekly basis we read of bishops being caught telling lies or enabling abusers.  We live with the appalling reality that bishops equate raping children to an adulterous affair, though rape is about forcefully taking that which is not given and destroying the child’s physical, emotional and spiritual life in the process.  Perhaps lesser known, the primary authors of the US bishops’ charter to protect children, themselves harbored sexually abusive priests even after the charter was signed.  What is most puzzling of all is that a) the bishops think anyone should take them seriously as moral authorities and b) that anyone does.

Here are just a smattering of proof points:

1.  Archbishop John Nienstedt of Minneapolis said in an April, 2014 sworn legal deposition that he didn’t know until March, 2014 that Ken LaVan, a priest with multiple credible sexual abuse accusations, was still in active ministry.  However, this past week revealed that ole John was actually getting annual updates about Ken’s ministry activities. 

Psst….John, this is called “lying” and violates the 8^th Commandment: “Thou shall not bear false witness.”  John, I gotta tell ya, this really kills your street creds in the truth department.  Plus, when you lie under oath in this country, it is also called a “crime” further crumbling your “truthiness” credibility.  Much like Dr. Seuss’ book calling for another liar to depart public leadership, “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!”, I think it’s beyond time we say, “John C. Nienstedt Will You Please Go Now!”

2.  Moving on to Canon Law, we see the hierarchy actually classifies priests’ sexual misconduct with minors under the 6^th Commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”  Yes, appalling as that seems, the hierarchy officially equates trusted religious leaders’ sexual assault of innocent minors with extra-marital sexual activity between two consenting adults.  You read that right: the clergy categorize destroying children’s lives and souls against their will equally with two adults consensually caving to hormones in a tryst.  

Don’t believe me?  Canon 1395 states, “A cleric who in another way has committed an offense against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, if the delict was committed by force or threats or publicly or with a minor below the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.”  This is the one sentence in Canon Law that is meant to deter clergy sexual abuse.  Why are you not trembling in awe? 

As an aside, please notice that unlike ordination of women which incurs automatic excommunication, clergy raping children, according to Canon Law, is not grounds for excommunication.  It merely calls for possible removal from office…ya know, “if the case warrants” it.  It would seem that the Vatican should have inserted an emoticon of a face winking next to that statement…it is so fierce and followed.

Call me nutty but I think that when a priest sexually assaults a kid, they kill a soul, they steal…thus, they break the 5^th and 7^th commandments against killing and stealing…not the 6^th pertaining to marital fidelity.  This Canon Law classification reveals much about the hierarchy’s understanding or lack thereof with regards to the commandments, rape, children, marriage, sexuality, human life, etc…  In turn, it directly impacts the hierarchy’s credibility on all these topics.

3.  This brings us to the ace team of bishops who were principle authors of the US bishops’ “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” written in 2002: Archbishop Wilton Gregory, Archbishop Harry Flynn, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, and Cardinal Francis George.  With the exception of Wilton Gregory, all of them harbored sexually abusive priests … some even after the charter was written, signed and promulgated.  In the case of Cardinal George, it included harboring a known sexual predator in his very own episcopal mansion (2003).

Actually, Cardinal George’s rap sheet of enabling and covering up sexually abusive priests after the charter is so long I will just provide a link that enumerates some cases between 2003 and 2006 rather than turn this into a painfully long blog article.  Harry Flynn kept the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer in ministry despite Wehmeyer's sexual addiction and sexual misconduct.  He also failed to report a priest in possession of child pornography.  All of this after the charter was in place. 

Of the group, Mahony seemed to be the one who at least tried to reform his diocese’s practices but there always seemed to be a struggle between loyalty honoring the brotherhood’s clerical institution versus honoring truth and justice.

These aren’t the only bishops failing to follow the charter.  For example, we do have our friend and convicted criminal for failure to report child abuse, Bishop Bob Finn, still at the helm of the Kansas City Diocese.  I just thought since they wrote the charter, that maybe they would have been role models for doing the right thing.  Silly me.

So, as I see it, the bishops seem to have authored the charter as a PR stunt rather than as a step towards profound institutional reform.  Furthermore, looking at the whole situation, I think the bishops collectively demonstrate that they:

a) Do not understand the 5^th, 6^th, or 7^th commandments, and

b) Do not obey the 8^th commandment

I wonder if they have enough self-awareness to realize that many of the faithful see them as also violating the 1^st commandment against having false gods based upon their willingness to forfeit several commandments in favor of protecting their brotherhood’s clerical institution.  When a team who believes they are the guardians of the commandments demonstrates poor mastery of half of them, what are they really guarding?