What About Diocesan Bungling Marginal Performers?

Another visitor asks,

I was wondering if you might consider the question of what a non-marginal performer might look like, as far as the Catholic Church goes. My question is based on my observation that most priests in the diocese I live in are what I consider to be "bungling marginal performers". I would venture to say that, take a random 10 priests from around the country and ask them to start a new community parish, and most of them would fail miserably. This is because it is easier to maintain a structure, rather than build something new. Most do not have the charisma, or more importantly, the drive to be that kind of leader.

That might be part and parcel to the problems we have in today's clergy, which Michael Voris has clearly shown has reached the upper levels of the hierarchy. In my days as a protestant, I saw that the church went though a big effort to hire the right guy to take over the church when the senior pastor was retiring. They knew that their success was based in large part on the man's ability to preach a good sermon and fill the plates. With the Catholic Church, replacing a pastor is a completely different process. The priest is not tasked with the same burden as a Protestant pastor is.

It seems to me that if the priest that has drive and ambition, there are often negatives that go along with that. See the documentary on Netflix about Malachi Martin, for example.

I can only start by saying my wife and I have been Catholic for only six years, and we're really familiar with only three parishes, two near our home and one where we often visit. Our first parish was in many ways stereotypically happy-clappy, flip flops and halter-tops. A major factor, it seems to me, is that it continues to be run by an elderly and in some ways defeated priest well past canonical retirement; his associate is more energetic but not terribly bright. An issue there is that it's run by a liberal order that's running out of priests, so its bench isn't just not deep, it's hardly there at all.

One day I got fed up and decided to go looking. A 15 minute drive away is a parish that's prosperous and growing, with not just a music program with a paid choir but a small orchestra with brass and strings that plays every Sunday. We were sorry to see the former music director go, but the new one has full concerts on Saturdays several times a year that attract the likes of Bp Barron. Several people in our Bible study group are familiar with other parishes in the general area, and while ours is pretty remarkable, it appears that there are several others within a convenient drive that are also worth attending.

However, my wife and I remark after mass almost every Sunday that what we see at our parish meets or exceeds in reverence of service, liturgy (keep in mind TEC has Rite Two, which is perfectly fine), music, quality of clergy, and general atmosphere any Episcopalian parish we've known. And that's with clergy making no special effort to be "Anglican". (And at some of the TEC parishes, you had to lean across two rows of pews to exchange the peace.)

So I can only speak from limited experience. Certainly we've seen no need to go looking for a Latin mass, though we could attend several within half an hour's drive if we wished. My sense of things is that the Church is far more diverse than it's portrayed in any media, including Church Militant, which does have an interest in portraying things as a small band of good guys against a huge cabal of pervs and gays intent on coverup.

The visitor does make an important point, which is that Protestant churches are congregational. Personnel decisions are made at the parish level. I agree that a parish with a dedicated and prayerful vestry can hire a succession of pastors who serve the parish's interests well, but there's no guarantee. It's just as likely that a low-church clique can hijack a high-church parish and cause all sorts of havoc, or you can have a situation like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood that went generationally off the rails.

One puzzle that I'm working through is that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is heavily criticized by Randy Engle and others as a bastion of liberalism, with gays at the Camarillo seminary coming in for particular criticism. Yet our pastor and his seminary classmate the archdiocesan vocation director are down-the-line fine, intelligent, hardworking priests. Promising young products of the Camarillio seminary cycle through our parish as associates; it seems plain that the intent is for the senior men to give them training and experience at an outstanding place to go on into other parishes and keep the Church going for new generations.

There is a bell-shaped curve in every sample. Ideally, in making good personnel selections, you skew the curve to the right. On the other hand, the wrong circumstances can cause bad performers on the left side of the curve to self-select into bad environments and perpetuate themselves. My guess is that more often than not, the personnel system in a real diocese works properly, even if you have a Wuerl or a Law at the top protecting a certain number of perverts.

The problem with Anglicanorum coetibus, as far as I can see so far, is that it creates a quasi-diocese that has almost no diocesan functions, with nobody experienced in the day-to-day issues that come up in a real diocese. But I need to qualify this by saying I've only been Catholic for six years, and I've been remarkably lucky in the experience of the Church that I've had.