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COMMENTARY

Just How Round is the “Roundtable”?

[What is the NLRCM? The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management is an organization of laity, religious and clergy working together to promote excellence and best practices in the management, finances and human resources of the U.S. Catholic Church by greater incorporation of the expertise of the laity.]

Mary Heins is VOTF regional coordinator in Indiana. Mary comments on her reading of the Roundtable report. The full text is available here.

The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management produced a report “Church in America Leadership Roundtable,” after a meeting held at the Wharton School in July 2004. The 88-page report comes from a relatively new group of Catholics and was distributed to the U.S bishops. It draws on the expertise and experience of the participants and comments on financial and administrative solutions to the Catholic Church’s business problems. These are CEO and top executive people who are not only qualified to give such advice but also represent a wide range of backgrounds and experience – women and men, religious men and women, a former governor, the head of a major banking firm, college professors, et al. Because of their high profiles, expertise in business practices, vast experience, and perhaps their power to withhold or influence donations to the church, this group may get the ear of the hierarchs.

At first glance, I was happy to see people with clout (money) addressing the problem. Perhaps, I thought, the bishops will listen to them. Later, I realized, however, that this is the whole problem – the bishops willing to listen to influential people, the privileged, those with money and prestige. But, they are not willing to listen to the voice of the common folks.

In addition, some in the church believe that “if the feet of the current administrators of the Church can be held to the fire and be forced to comply with what the Roundtable is recommending, the third goal of VOTF will be just about accomplished.”

Not at all, in my mind. This is not what VOTF’s third goal is about. Our third goal, “to shape structural change within the Church,” is not a primarily a financial goal. Its purpose is, rather, to help establish a right relationship between the laity of the church and the clerics, and the bishops, in particular.

We in VOTF are struggling against an old, long-established paradigm of Church governance in which clerics were the rulers and laity were the sheep. This was the model espoused by Pope Pius X . And, unfortunately, the Vatican has recently buttressed that vision by saying that the lines between the ordained and non-ordained “must not become blurred.”

If the Roundtable is successful in gaining the ear of the bishops, but the bishops don’t recognize the common person’s right to be heard, we will still be ruled by the privileged. The time has come for the hierarchs to admit, as Scott Appleby told them in Dallas in 2002, that the future of the Catholic Church in the U.S. depends on the laity.


Where There’s Hope – John Allen

An excerpt from John Allen’s column “The Word from Rome,” commenting on his recent visit with the Long Island affiliate of VOTF.

“Moreover, these people are backing up their talk with their time and treasure. I learned Saturday that the woman who processed all the tickets for the conference at which I spoke, Ileen Weidig, did so from home while recovering from an appendectomy. Meanwhile the woman who organized the speakers, Pat Paone, also worked from home while suffering from a case of the shingles so severe it left her blind much of the time. Yet both soldiered on, unpaid, because both believe something important is at stake.

It's a matter of fair debate whether VOTF's platform of ‘keep the faith, change the church’ is ultimately adequate, given that some elements of ecclesiastical structure are based on faith convictions about Christ's will for the church. It's fair, too, to ask whether there's enough spiritual depth, enough sense of being part of a worldwide family of faith, in the VOTF project in at least some instances. At the same time, it's equally fair to observe that VOTF members across the country have repeatedly reached out to bishops in a spirit of collaboration and dialogue, and sometimes they've been spurned. Pope John Paul II said on Sept. 12, 2004, in an address to the bishops of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, that ‘participation, consultation and shared responsibility’ are an ‘intrinsic requirement of the exercise of episcopal authority.’ The experience of VOTF to date suggests the American church still has some ground to cover to implement that vision.

All that, however, can be talked out in dialogue with church authorities and other voices in the Catholic conversation. The important thing to note, it seems to me, is that the VOTF folk I met in Long Island came across as decent, faithful people trying to do something positive for the church.

Surely that's something upon which one can build.”

[Send comments to pthorp.ed@votf.org]

 

 

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In the Vineyard
April 2005
Volume 4, Issue 4

Page One

VOTF in Rome

Survivor Support Community News

The Ethical Rights of Priests

Voice of Renewal/Lay Education

Affiliate News

VOTF Best Practice March 2005

Site-Seeing, Etc.

Commentary

Reflection For Our Time

Pentacost Prayer

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