Houston Illustrates The Problem of Incompetence

Yesterday I posted on the clergy, staff, and volunteers at our novus ordo parish who, whatever you may think of the "social distancing" measures they were required to implement in order to start reopening, did a remarkably competent job in putting the program together. Consider that the priests and deacons had to create a detailed plan that covered all the requirements of the archdiocese and the health department and get it approved by the bishop. This appears to have been done pretty much on the first pass.

Then the staff and volunteers had to learn, understand, and be ready to perform what must have been dozens of completely new tasks to set up for mass, in the process unlearning old ones. They had to regulate attendees as they lined up to enter, reminding them courteously of social distance, direct them to social-distanced seating, explain new procedures for bathroom trips, receiving the sacrament, depositing the offerings, and on and on. I would imagine that they recognized minor glitches and shortcomings among themselves, but to my critical eye, they did an outstanding job.

These were, in short, competent people. Competent teams don't just happen. And it's worth reflecting that this sort of competence also reflects love of neighbor, making a potentially trying experience as pleasant as can be expected.

I think it was sometime in my mid to late twenties that I began to recognize that there was a thing called incompetence. That thing began to pop up for me yesterday, when my regular correspondent sent me a screen shot from the Fort Worth ordinariate Facebook page (click on the image for a larger copy):

If this were just a one-time blooper, it might be something simply to be overlooked -- maybe the Houston staff is rattled from the lockdown, they've just come back to work, whatever. But one thing I began to realize about incompetence is that it's something other than random inadvertencies. It becomes entrenched in organizations, repeated and habitual. My regular correspondent reminded me of this problem's history in the North American ordinariate:

It took several cycles of Bishop’s and Seminarian Fund Appeals for Houston to grasp that Canadian donations had to be handled differently in order for Canadian donors to get tax receipts, a couple more to create donor cards with correct info for Canadian donors. And yet, not rocket science, really.

In fact, this became a major project fo Msgr Reid when he was dean of the Canadian deanery. Canadian donations aren't tax deductible in Canada unless they go to a Canadian charity. Houston for a number of years was simply advising Canadian members to send their donations to Houston, which made them not deductible for Canadian taxes.

So of course, Houston "fixes" the problem by sending US donors instructions to send their donations to Canada. This says to me that there's an institutional problem. It goes so far as to create an expectation that people will routinely get it wrong, and in fact, that's OK.

Once, my wife and I boarded an Amtrak train, first thing in the morning, and even just to load a couple dozen people, it was a disorganized mess. Then I realized that for the crew, this was one of the main things they did all day. And they did it every day. It was their job. They'd been doing it for years, and they'd never gotten it right. This is true incompetence, fostered, not just tolerated, at the institutional level.

I asked my regular correspondent for some estimate of who in Houston was the screwup.

So do we know who is responsible for these glitches? Both Ms Miller an Sr Amata Veritas have “development” in their titles.

The reply:

I think the financial nuts and bolts of the OCSP, as opposed to “development” is/was the department of the Stockstills, pere et fils, parishioners of OLW. I don’t think they had any idea that Canada had different tax laws. Msgr Reid finally got things sorted with them, but it was a slow process. Sr Amata just doing office duty. I’m sure none of them could find Canada on a map.

Based on my adult life studying incompetence as something of a hobby, I would say that things are the way they are because Bp Lopes likes them that way, and in any case, Fr Perkins can't be bothered to fix them, so they'll just keep on keepin' on, just like they do at Amtrak.

But as I say, if nothing else, competence does reflect a concern for one's neighbor.