November/December 2002
Bishops and Big Business
In the Same Boat
by Eugene Cullen Kennedy
Catholics, and others, who are upset because they think that their church is falling apart may be heartened by the bad news about big business. In fact, many CEOs and Catholic bishops occupy the same boat, up the same creek, for the same reason.
The similarities are astounding. American newspapers report that Catholic bishops, once deferred to as saviors, have, by hiding the sex abuse crisis, lost the confidence of believers. The Boston Globe demands that Cardinal Bernard Law resign. Some ordinary Catholics think that every bishop should resign.
In the same season, The New York Times reports that "the imperial chief executive, hailed not so long ago as a savioris suddenly under siege" for hiding the accounting crisis and has lost the confidence of investors. Some CEOs have resigned and many ordinary Americans think they all should go.
Ordinary Catholics tell interviewers that it is not the Catholic faith, or the idea of the church, that is imploding. And average investors inform us that it is not capitalism, or the idea of the corporation, that is coming apart before our eyes. And most businessmen are honest.
Something is self-destructing in both church and business. What is it?
Their hierarchical settings, that, like 18th century sailing vessels, once carried people across the seas and around the world but, with transportation long since transformed by invention, serve now only as training ships or tourist attractions. The human need to go places and move goods, however, has increased with every new era of transportation.
We are witnessing the demise of the sailing vessel equivalents of the authoritarian boss and the hierarchical form. Like worn-out satellites that burn up as they re-enter the earth's atmosphere, the authoritarian hierarchical form used by religion and commerce has flared out on entering the space/information universe.
The authoritarian, top-down mode of managing human beings in church, state and marketplace was, ironically enough, repudiated by both the Catholic church and big business long before the 20th century ended.
The Second Vatican Council, for whose decrees Bishop (and now Pope) Karol Wojtyla voted, replaced hierarchy, and its divine right of kings ethos, with collegiality, the model of the church at its grass-roots beginning in the College of the Apostles. A few years later, large corporations spent fortunes replacing inefficient hierarchies whose top-down styles did not work in a world flattened by advances in information processing and the space age's healing of the imagined rift between the earth and the heavens on which hierarchy had been based.
After becoming pope, Wojtyla praised Vatican II but restored hierarchy and imposed his own authoritarian personality on the church, demanding absolute loyalty from any man he would make a bishop.
Contemporaneously, Jack Welch praised post-hierarchical structures but imposed his own authoritarian personality on General Electric, demanding absolute loyalty from any man he would make a vice-president.
They became the larger-than-life heroes in their domains -- saviors and symbols, each of them -- while the hierarchies they advocated looked and ran like roller coasters until they collapsed, victims of the dry rot of passing time.
Hierarchical authoritarianism -- featuring absolute top-down control, exemption for the privileged, seductions of the innocent, write-offs of trust, no feeling for the people ruined by institutional misdeeds -- is the villainy, making bishops and CEOs the villains.
The same PR firm seems to be writing their excuses -- the lower-level accountants/doctors recommended, and, let's see, stock options are like plenary indulgences, only good when you cash them in.
There is nothing wrong with religion or business. What has failed, and booked bishops and CEOs onto the same boat, is the outdated authoritarian hierarchical model through which they thought they controlled their worlds.
Most bishops and CEOs are good men, convinced that they were doing the right thing or struck nearsighted by ambition when they assented to dubious practices for the "good of the church" or the "good of the corporation."
As officers on square rigger authoritarian vessels, they believed that if they obeyed the captain's orders to furl their sails against the breath of the spirit, they could make port without either a moral or an ethical compass. Men picked to ride on the divine tide never doubted that they were in the right. They answered questions, they didn't have to ask them.
Such exhausted authoritarian presumptions explain why bishops and CEOs now find that they have drifted to the dead end of the same creek without a paddle of moral authority between them.
© 2002 Religion News Service
Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of the recent book, The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality, published by St. Martin's Press.