The Economist: Skip Ryan, Read about the Church

I really wanted to set fire to this week's Economist--or better, the pants of the editor--as I watched them quaff a full beaker of Paul-Ryan-is-serious kool-aid: "athletic and brainy;" "a brave man" (link);  "a note of rare intellectual clarity" (link).  Oh meyo myo.  Let's settle for this, okay?   Paul Ryan may indeed be one of the few politicians to open a briefing book, but as Robert Waldman says, the best you can make of this is that it makes him a non-wonk's idea of what a wonk must be (I have my own doubts about whether a guy who spends that much time at the gym will ever have time for real wonkery, but that is perhaps a sidetrack).

So, shame on you, big E,  not really excused by the fact that your detailed (wonkish) coverage od of the Ryan "budget"  is actually pretty clear-eyed--proving only that your fatuous lead-in was less by way of ignorance and more on the order of actual misdirection.  But I will forgive give you this one time only for a bit of knockout redemption: that superb briefer on of the finances of the Catholic Church in the US.  Main takeaway: over and over again, the bishops engage in--and get away with-- stuff that would send them to the stony lonesome if they did them in the private sector, or at the very least, strip them of their employment or at least of their bankruptcy discharge.  Commingling assets, shell-game moving of assets, misuse of trust fund taxes--this is stuff that causes real trouble to real people even in the highly forgiving realm of private-sector corporate America but not, it seems, for those who are so securely wrapped in the cloth of sanctity.


Some of the E stuff is from public documents, thanks largely to the eight church bankruptcies of late.  Much else is the E's own guesstimate and  of necessity can't be any more reliable than guesstimates about Mitt Romney's taxes.   Still, even allowing a large margin for errors, the numbers help to create a context.  Example: the briefer pegs annual gross revenues at about $170 billion--bigger than General Electric, albeit with fewer than half the employees of Wal-Mart.  Perhaps the most striking datum is just how small potatoes (if the briefer is right) is the role of ordinary diocesan and parish work--only six percent, it says here, contrasted with some 57 percent for health care.  The corollary is the relatively small role occupied by ordinary Sunday offerings--a tad over 7.5 percent of gross revenues, if the guesses are right.  This offers a hint of the relative clout of the big donors like the Papal Foundation whose 138 members pledge to deliver $1 million each annually.

You get the drift. And I'm just rehashing stuff stuff already well said in the piece itself. If you've got a short list of long form stuff, put this one on it.  Re Paul Ryan, you'll do yours blood pressure a favor if you just look elsewhere.

Good Earners, and Others

I think my all-time favorite Mafia movie scene is the bit in Donnie Briscoe where the underboss (sic?*)  is trying to sweat some collections out of the caporegimi while they rebuff him with a wall of excuses, evasions and promises.    You can sense the fear on both sides--not least from the underboss (is that Michael Madsen?), whose performance is a cosmic soup of wheedling, seduction, threats and fear.  That would be the fear he tries to instill in the capi, of course, but also the fear he fears for himself if the doesn't produce for his betters.  Little fish, as the poet says, have bigger fish to bite 'em

Meanwhile on the other side of the room we have Lefty Ruggiero --Al Pacino to you--who repeatedly slugs a parking meter with (if memory serves) a sledgehammer.  More than once, somebody from the negotiating table shouts something on the order of will you shut the f--- up?  To which Lefty respond with threats, excuses and evasions of his own.

And that, it occurred to me, is the Mafia. A bunch of not-very-effectual hoodlums in a not-very-remunerative business.  A brilliant insight, this?   I suppose not; I suppose in the post-Sopranos (and post Donnie Brisco) world, it's old stuff to recognize that the Mafia is old stuff.

Yet there still may be room to meditate on how easily one can generalize this model.  If you sell auto repair tools (I name no names), you spend half your life haggling with your customers to pay down some of their marker, and the other half haggling with your supervisor over how much of your commission you get to keep.  If you sell cosmetics (again, I name no names), part of your job is hustling customers and the other half, trying to line up subcontractors in an ever-expanding period.  If you broker anything, you find that everybody who ever lost a game of golf to the guy thinks he deserves a piece of your deal.  A taste, Tony Soprano would say.  I want a taste.

Or the  Catholic church.  It's also old stuff to mutter "Mafia" and "Catholic church" in the same breath when discussing, say, the machinations of the Vatican Bank.  But how often do we consider  the comparison at the level where parking meters are smashed open?

One person who does is the novelist J. F. Powers, in The Wheat that Springeth Green, the wry, bittersweet ("comic" is too strong) account of Father Joe Hackett, and his daily life as a suburban pastor--spirituality, politics,  and very far from least, the neverending task of raking in the bucks.  "A good earner," we can hear some distant subdeacon muttering.  Or, more sinister: "not a good earner."

I thought about Father Joe this morning when reflecting on the ongoing dustup between the Pope and the nuns.  How much of this, I wondered, is just a fight over money--recapturing some prize property, for example, or (perhaps more on point) getting the girls off the pension rolls?

I put the question to my friend Ignota--Ignota, Catholic born, who took to the hills a few years back as the world began to learn the awful truth about priestly child abuse.  Ignota takes a somewhat different view:

You mentioned it's probably all about money.  My feeling as well as others'  (the Pope and Cardinals and the other men in Black Dresses--how they love to float around in those dresses and their little red skull caps!!!! ) --we feel they just want to get off the topic of sexual abuse and dishonor the good work of the good nuns who in most cases just worked for their board and room in the rectories--cooking, laundry, house cleaning.  All for the love of God.  God bless these devoted and unappreciated women.

So, more about realpolitik than about more lucre.  But having spoken her piece about realpolitik then moves on to the question of money:

If they received any pay--so for certain it would have been little--I believe they were considered as Independent Contractors--as are the Priests.  At least that was the way the Priest compensation was treated when George was doing taxes after his retirement and had a couple of Priests whose taxes he did.  They had to pay both sides of FICA

I worked as a secretary for the regional catholic system when my three kids were in college all at the same time.  I worked for 2 1/2 years and learned so much.  We had several young school teacher nuns who wanted to earn money as their pay was so small.  Of course they had their housing provided for them by the parishes,  and all I had to do was send the convent a check for their food.

It's so long ago I don't even recall how much I sent for each nun living in that convent, but I do know that several got part time jobs, in order to provide clothing etc for them selves.  One who was very young and as one would call a "live wire"--was a bartender in one of our better local restaurants.  Of course patrons didn't know she was a nun.  Just Mary.  Another wonderful nun, who was a good friend of mine, got a job delivering records in a cart around at a local medical facility.  Others took care of children on weekends.  So sad they were treated so very badly, when the local priests drove around in good size expensive cars.  OH gosh I'll get off my SOAP BOX as I get so frustrated thinking about the unfairness within the church.

 Ignota signed off so she could go find out what the NCAA did to Penn State.  Hope she was satisfied.  Meanwhile I wonder whether the girls got to keep all their earnings, or whether the pastor got his taste. 

==
*Okay, I may have ranks wrong.  I make no claim to proficiency in the rankings of the Mafia.  Or the Catholic Church,.

Maybe He Never Really Wanted the Job?

Read of the day for me so far is this superb piece from Der Spiegel on (sorry, I can't help myself) der Pope, Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, Papa Ratzi.   Surprising to me--but perhaps I haven't been paying attention--in that it describes a guy seems never to have really wanted the job in the first place, and seems to be wishing every moment he could figure a way out of it now. That's the trouble with being Pope, they say, you can't retire.

Surprising to me, I say. I had the impression of the incumbent as a focused hard-liner who would pull down the columns in support of his agenda. Maybe he once had some such fantasy, but if der Spiegel is right, he seems never to have had stomach for the kind of slash-and-gab organizational intrigue that such an agenda would require.  Bonus points for this anecdote:

For a long time, Ratzinger himself could hardly believe he was suddenly the leader of all Catholics. More than a month after his election, on May 24, 2005, he paid another visit to the place in the Vatican where so many things had begun for him: the seminary in the Campo Santo Teutonico, a green island in the cramped papal state, directly adjacent to the sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica.

He had lived here during the Church's sweeping modernization effort known as Vatican II and, in 1982, he returned to Rome from Munich, staying "in a room with only the bare necessities around me so that I could make a fresh start."

Ratzinger remained loyal to the seminary community until he was elected pope.  . . . He hasn't been to the seminary since his last visit, in late May 2005, which lasted over an hour. In parting, Ratzinger signed the guestbook. He wrote "Benedict XVI" and then, leaving a small space, scribbled "pope." At first he wrote it with a lower-case p, but then he changed it to an upper-case one.


None of his predecessors had ever signed anything like that -- and Benedict himself would never do it again. It was almost as if he had to tell himself: My God, I'm the pope.

It happens I was in Firenze the night the bells rang out to announce his election ("habemas papam!").  I was walking back to my apartment from an internet cafe.  I remember wondering what the new guy might be thinking (at that point, I didn't know his identity).  Maybe he was wondering, too. Recall the ancient Buddhist prayer (which, I think, I made up): I hope you get what you wish for, and I hope you still want it once you get it.

Swinging Nuns

American nuns come out swinging against Vatican 

in face of ‘radical feminist’ accusations

Question, how much of this is just about money? The nuns are sitting on a ton of valuable property--hospitals and such--while the Vatican bankers appear to be going through some sort of existential crisis. Might be nice to get our hands on some of that stuff, not so? Of course we may have to excommunicate a few (i.e., and strip them of their pensions) but you have to break a few eggs.

H/T Marge, John.

In Case You'd Been Thinking About Forgiving the Catholic Church...

Consider:

[O]n Easter Sunday this year when Cardinal Sodano dismissed criticism of the child sex abuse scandal in the Church as ‘idle gossip’. Or on Palm Sunday in New York when Archbishop Timothy Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was ‘now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar’, and ‘being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo’. Or on Good Friday in the Vatican when Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, told those at St Peter’s Basilica, including the pope himself, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because ‘they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognise the recurring symptoms.’ He was referring to the ‘collective violence’ of those who have been critical of the Church. He went on to quote from a letter written by an unnamed Jewish friend: ‘I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world.

--Colm Tóibín, "Among the Flutterers,"
London Review of Books  19 August 2010

Hello Again...

My friend Joel reports that Catholics may soon be a majority in England for the first time since the Reformation, what with all that immigration (I assume he means the Central Europeans, not the Middle Easterners).

Anyway, it delights me to think of all those Jesuit priests crawling out of their hidy holes in the mansions of great aristos, blinking and bewildered before the TV cameras, and the first daylight in 350 years.