A System Is What It Does: On Cardinal McElroy’s Appointment

A few years ago, I did a deep dive on my Church History podcast on the Council of Trent, the great reform council that responded to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Trained as an academic historian, I often come to historical questions thinking in terms of processes rather than events, of impersonal influences rather than the actions of individual men. On reading through some of the literature on Trent, one question occupied my mind: How did the Church recover from both the Protestant attack and the corruption that in part gave rise to it? What formula, what set of ideas, what long-term forces enabled the Church to succeed? (Aside from God’s divine protection, of course.)

In reality, none of these abstract, impersonal causes mattered much. What allowed the Church to turn things around was simply this: from the 1530s onward, genuine reformers began to make their way into the papal curia and—by the 1560s, when the final sessions of Trent were held—into the episcopate. Men willing to make the changes necessary to reform the Church—on clerical formation (inventing the seminary), episcopal absenteeism (making sure bishops actually resided in their dioceses), and other ills, while reaffirming Catholic doctrine—came to power and made the necessary changes. That was pretty much it.

I mention these considerations because recent events bring them to mind—in particular, for American Catholics, two recent appointments that have left many shaking their heads. I refer to the recent appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego to the see of Washington, D.C., and the appointment of Sister Simona Brambilla to be prefect of the Dicastery for Religious in the Vatican. Both are noteworthy for the same familiar, depressing, and entirely predictable reasons.

There is no defense for the appointment of McElroy, a protégé of the pedophile and criminal Theodore McCarrick, who knew of his mentor’s abuse of seminarians but kept silent. The only people defending this abomination are sycophants like the journalist Austen Ivereigh, who never fail to support any papal initiative that might make the Catholic Church more like a liberal Protestant denomination, no matter how egregious it might be. The message, if you had not already divined it, is this: the pope has nothing but contempt for sexual abuse survivors and Americans. But if you are an actual, practicing Roman Catholic in this country, you knew that already.

As for Sister Brambilla, who is a member of the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata, I know nothing about her, other than that she is a woman, which is the reason for her elevation. This pointless gesture, bizarre and potentially damaging to the Church’s notions of hierarchy, is a perfect encapsulation of the Franciscan pontificate. Her appointment will whet the appetites of those demanding women’s ordination but fundamentally changes nothing, while simultaneously throwing everything into confusion. It will also, no doubt, make miserable those members of the curia who hate the idea, which might be the best explanation for it. Pope Francis is the patron saint of spite and score settling, and it is quite possible he did this to stick it to those members of the curia opposed to his agenda or who were insufficiently obsequious to him.

But again, if you are reading these words, you already knew this. Why bring it up now? 

There is a saying among systems analysts that can help us understand what is going on in the Church. It goes something like “a system is what it does.” The idea is that the purpose of a system cannot be read from the intentions of its creators or from descriptions of how it should work in ideal conditions. If it consistently fails to do X, its purpose cannot be X. If it consistently does Y, then its purpose is Y. Some members of the “online Right” (or the New Right, or the “dissident Right,” or whatever you want to call them) have picked up on this phrase to criticize those who appeal to the U.S. Constitution to protect them from various leftist depravities, pointing out that it does not actually do what its founders intended it to do. 

No, dear reader, I am not saying that the purpose of the Church is to promote pedophiles and their enablers. This is not true, and I do not believe this because I am not a slobbering, low-IQ internet atheist who hates the Church. I love the Church. But what you need to understand is that the Church, at least in its administrative aspect, is a patronage system, as R.R. Reno pointed out a few years ago. 

Its purpose is to create powerful patrons who protect and promote clients. That is how the Church actually functions, through personal patronage, despite the modern bureaucratic machinery overlaying it. That machinery sometimes obscures this fact (and provides a convenient way of drowning the personal responsibility of bishops in the anonymity of bureaucratic bodies). Pope Francis promotes and protects his clients, just as did Benedict XVI and John Paul II and all those before them. The system is doing what it does.

It is infuriating, but it does so whether the men whom it promotes are good or evil. And that is the other part of the equation that explains why a system does what it does. “Personnel is policy” was the quip of Ronald Reagan’s director of personnel, and it is no less true when considering the problems of the Catholic Church. The Church’s way of elevating men to the priesthood and episcopate is going to have the same virtues and vices, no matter who is being elevated. What matters is the quality of the men so raised up. 

You may well ask: How did such men as McCarrick and McElroy came to prominence in the first place? You may well ask: How did such men as McCarrick and McElroy came to prominence in the first place?Tweet This

Most men, when they achieve power or status, never give it up willingly, whether they be good or evil. And wicked men gain control because they are more brazen, more aggressive, than decent, kindly men. Moreover, it is not always easy to tell the difference between good and bad men. The pontificate of John Paul II amply demonstrates this, and it may be that the wicked are better at distinguishing good from bad men than their opposite, since there is no thought or act they will not contemplate. To remove such men from places of high office is accordingly much more difficult, and it is never an easy or timely process.

Which brings me back to Trent. I am not saying that things like formal theology and liturgy do not matter to the resolution of this terrible moment we face in the Church. But they only matter if the right people are in the right positions. As any business owner can tell you, finding the right people for the right positions is the most difficult and important part of making an organization successful. No structural changes will solve the crisis the Church finds herself in (including burning them to the ground, à la Protestantism). 

For the Church to extricate herself out of this mess, those who are decent but passive will have to learn to be aggressive, to do things they never dreamed of, which make them dread the consequences—the suffering—that normally afflicts men for doing good where evil reigns. Through this suffering, God will raise up saints, and that is how the Church will recover from this insanity. 

This may sound depressing, as it means we are not in control of our fate. But the reality is quite the opposite, for God always comes through in the end. To end this essay on a note of genuine hope, let me quote the late Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., from his diagnosis of the sexual abuse crisis many years ago, whose final summation could serve for the Church’s condition in the contemporary world as a whole:

I believe that the Crisis will deepen, though undramatically, in the foreseeable future; I believe that the policies suggested to remedy the situation will help only tangentially, and that the whole idea of an administrative programmatic approach—a “software solution,” if I may put it that way—is an example of the disease for which it purports to be the cure. I believe that reform will come, though in a future generation, and that the reformers whom God raises up will spill their blood in imitation of Christ. In short, to pilfer a line of Frank Sheed, I find absolutely no grounds for optimism, and I have every reason for hope.