Euphemism & Bureaucracy: A Recipe for Scandal in the Church

Quanta malignatus est inimicus in sancto!

Any American Catholic with a pulse and a passing interest in Church news has become aware in the last couple months that the Church in the U.S. is facing a new round of accusations that it has systematically covered up rampant sex abuse by the clergy. This summer's revelations--the public disgrace of Cardinal McCarrick, the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, and Archbishop Viagno's affidavit--are even more shocking than those of 2002, which were serious enough to bring about the downfall of Cardinal Law of Boston. In 2002, the general public found out that many American bishops had for decades been systematically covering up for the sexual abuse of minors by their priests. But the summer of 2018 has shown that our bishops were covering up for themselves and an extensive homosexual network. Cardinal McCarrick was a pederast who treated seminaries as brothels where he could lust after and molest those handsome young males who tickled his fancy. Cardinal Wuerl, McCarrick's protege and successor in Washington, D.C., protested that he knew nothing of his predecessor's predations and that he had an outstanding record for dealing strictly with any allegation of sexual impropriety among the clergy--but then the attorney general of Pennsylvania published a special grand jury's report, which featured evidence that, while serving as Bishop of Pittsburgh, Wuerl failed to adequately punish a priest (George Zirwas) who repeatedly fondled boys and was later found to be a leader of a child pornography made up of fellow priests; Wuerl simply placed Zirwas on personal leave and allowed him to move to Florida and then to Cuba, where he died in 2001.

And then came the affidavit of Archbishop Vigano! The former nuncio to the U.S. accused Pope Francis of being complicit in McCarrick's rehabilitation and called on him to resign. If American Catholics had been trying to ignore the bad news coming out in the media, it was no longer possible. Even ordinary parish priests were joining Vigano in calling for the pope to resign. (I was surprised to hear just such a sermon from a mild-mannered priest while visiting a small town in Michigan the day after the affidavit was published.)

However, it is important to note that before both of the American Church's recent anni horribiles, the most important facts leading to the widespread scandal were already widely known among the clergy and, in many cases, among the laity as well. The Church was full of open secrets. After McCarrick was disciplined by the Vatican, commentators came out of the woodwork to announce that "everybody knew," inter alia, about the now infamous beach house on the Jersey Shore. These facts, then, were not, strictly speaking, news. What was new was the public outrage.

So, how could it be that we are living these scandals all over again? What went wrong?

There are obviously many factors, and the reader could do far worse than to consult Fr. Paul Mankowski's summary of the causes (from 2003!). But, I would like to focus on two factors that work hand in hand: euphemism and bureaucracy.

Euphemism in this context simply means the refusal to call a spade a spade. It is a problem that affects the Church in many areas. When it comes to sexual crimes, as the Pennsylvania grand jury reported, it leads bishops to describe rape as "inappropriate contact" or "boundary issues." But, it applies in other areas of the Church's life. For example, here in the Archdiocese of Chicago, Cardinal Cupich (who, incidentally, dismissed public outrage over widespread sexual crimes among the clergy as a "rabbit hole") has initiated a program he calls "Renew My Church" but which is essentially a new process for closing failing parishes. In the presentation given at my parish about Renew My Church, the phrase that cropped up over and over in the archdiocese's talking points was that we were dealing with the consequences of "demographic change." True, certain neighborhoods are no longer heavily Catholic like they used to be since their inhabitants moved to the suburbs back in the 1970's. But, white flight only explains so much. What we are dealing with is not some anodyne shift in the population, but mass apostasy! The reason why so few Catholics bother attending Mass every Sunday is that they do not believe in basic Catholic doctrines such as the Real Presence and the propitiatory nature of the Mass. Only around 25% of American Catholics attend Sunday Mass every week, compared to around 75% before Vatican II. If Catholics were anywhere near as faithful as they were sixty years ago, demographic changes would explain why we might have to close a few small parishes in the inner city but found a dozen new ones in the suburbs. But instead of confronting the staggering loss of faith since Vatican II, we talk about "demographic" trends.

The chief moral danger of the euphemistic style employed by our bishops is that it turns concrete wrongs for which bishops must take responsibility into vague, impersonal processes that they "manage" as best they can. A bishop who writes in this euphemistic style sees himself not as a moral agent who by the very nature of his office is called by God to avenge wrongdoing and to do justice, but as a passive spectator who only feels the limits of his power in the face of a challenge. These bad bishops are not consumed by zeal for the house of the Lord but instead busy themselves with their dioceses' quotidian affairs and their personal comforts while events overtake them. Euphemism makes many bishops into feckless bureaucrats.

Bureaucracy here means managing the Church like a secular institution for the sake of the administrators, not as God's "universal sacrament of salvation." It entails the loss of any sense of a mission; instead, the administrators simply try to do just enough to ensure that the institution continues so that the next generation of administrators can take over. When bishops lose this essential sense of mission, they look to provide for the comfort of themselves and their close companions. Cliques form in competition for bishops' favor, in the hope that their members will receive preferment in the form of easy jobs in the chancery office downtown or be named pastors of wealthy suburban parishes with several associates to do the real work. Bureaucracy enervates.

When euphemism and bureaucracy combine, then, we have a recipe for scandal in the Church. Euphemism allows bishops to avoid examining a problem closely; the fancy-sounding name they give to a problem becomes a veil they toss before their own eyes. The bishops then only see vague shapes in front of them, not flesh-and-blood people who demand justice. The spirit of bureaucracy saps them of their moral vigor and the demands of justice become petty administrative hassles, an unpleasant part of their day jobs. Soon enough, the bishops go from avoiding problems to believing their own self-deception. At that point, they are no longer capable of reforming themselves. Any reform will require divine intervention--often in the form of a hostile (quite possibly godless) prosecutor or an aggrieved mother who refuses to be silent about the abuse of her son.

God has chosen to rebuke His Church, but it is up to us to accept this punishment in the right spirit. Let us pray, then, for the Church! Let us pray, above all, for our bishops to repent and to become real men who do not seek after pleasure but will allow themselves to be consumed by zeal for the house of the Lord!

Exsurge, Deus, judica causam tuam!

Bureaucracy: Isn't It Strange?

Has it ever struck you as just a little strange that the world today is governed by bureaucracies, in other words, that modern nations are run out of offices? For that is what the word literally means: rule from an office. According to dictionary.com, the word is first attested in French in the 18th century, and was coined by physiocrat Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759). Gournay presumably coined the word to name a phenomenon that had not yet been named. In other words, bureaucracy was a mode of governance that was relatively new in the world and had yet to be described.

But, since when were we ruled by a race of pale-faced men who spend their days sitting behind desks? In days of yore, kings held court and did justice for the common man in the open air. And they didn't get bogged down in technical details either, because it must have been difficult to keep track of files when a gust of wind could blow all the papers away at any moment. For example, according to Jean de Joinville, St. Louis

after hearing Mass, went to the wood of Vincennes, where he would sit down with his back against an oak, and make us all sit round him. Those who had any suit to present could come to speak to him without hindrance from an usher or any other person. The king would address them directly, and ask: "Is there anyone here who has a case to be settled?" Those who had one would stand up. Then he would say: "Keep silent all of you, and you shall be heard in turn, one after the other."

(Quoted in Antonin Scalia, "The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules," 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1175 (1989))

Besides doing justice for their subjects, many kings were renowned for their martial prowess. William the Conqueror earned his epithet at the Battle of Hastings. Richard the Lionheart wasn't going to stare all day at some dusty parchments when he could be fighting the infidel in the Holy Land. Frederick Barbarossa died a rather inglorious death--drowning in a stream on his way to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade--but he had already spent a considerable part of his reign on the battlefield.

Not only did medieval kings act this way, this was how they were expected to act, as reflected in popular tales from the Middle Ages. The King Arthur stories tell us of knights errant who delighted in rescuing damsels in distress, not in negotiating legal settlements with villains and knaves. The closest King Arthur himself ever came to becoming a bureaucrat was when he sat down once in a while with his wisest counselors at the Round Table to discuss some pressing matter. Once that was done, he was free to return to the jousting tournament or the banquet hall.

The average medieval court, of course, was not Camelot, and real medieval kings were supposed to take care of their fair share of administrative duties, but which most of them seem to have avoided by going out hunting. For example, relatively soon after the Norman invasion, the kings of England found themselves so overwhelmed by these mundane tasks that they had to delegate them to others. Over time, the Lord Chancellor became in effect England's chief justice and "keeper of the king's conscience." The Exchequer was assigned the duty of collecting revenue for the royal household. Nevertheless, these medieval bureaucracies were nowhere near as large as their modern equivalents. Moreover, the stories that have come down to us always show the ideal ruler as either a man of action or a man of wisdom, or in a really ideal word as both: a wise warrior. They never portray the king as a pencil-pusher, or even as the pencil-pushers' boss. And this ideal had some basis in reality.

What would happen if a contemporary American or European ruler tried to act more like a medieval king? The effect would not necessarily be that which he intended. For instance, were most Americans really impressed by George W. Bush when he landed a Navy jet on an aircraft carrier (or rather sat in the cockpit while a real pilot landed it for him)? Would we respect Barack Obama more if, after playing a pick-up basketball game (no jousting permitted), he took a seat on the White House lawn and listened to federal inmates' petitions for habeas corpus? Do we fear Vladimir Putin because he likes to be photographed shirtless while horseback riding? Did Benito Mussolini inspire awe in his people, or his enemies, because he liked to ski shirtless?

My guess is that most people just laugh at these examples because they're somehow ridiculous. Nowadays we expect our highest-ranking government officials to act less like kings and more like business executives. First of all, they need to keep their clothes on. Second, their chief domestic concern is usually the national economy, such as ensuring job growth and overseeing government entitlement programs. Indeed, when presidents go to economic summits or visit foreign leaders, they could almost be seen as traveling salesmen drumming up interest in their product, or in this case their country (albeit traveling salesmen with huge expense accounts and bodyguards). Third, while they may retain power as the "commander in chief," they usually have little or no military background; most senators or cabinet secretaries, I suspect, are not accomplished sword-fighters.

There was obviously a significant shift that took place, from the earlier conception of the ruler as a wise warrior to that of the ruler as a business executive at the head of a vast bureaucracy, but I don't know anything about the causes and ultimate importance of this shift. I apologize for not giving any answers here, but I do have two questions, which are probably better than any answers I could offer:

1. When and why did this shift from the king as man of action and wisdom to the president as business executive take place? My hunch is that this modern preference for business executives as national leaders is simply one aspect of the transition from feudalism to mercantilism (and beyond).

2. Have we lost something importance with this shift? Granted that some administration will always be necessary, it nevertheless seems that the world has lost some of its romance. Many people, for instance, who work primarily in an office still itch at the opportunity to get out.

So, next time you see a picture of Vladimir Putin strutting his stuff, ask yourself: Is he simply a misunderstood soul trying to revive medieval kingship? Or, is he just a peacock?

Life Imitates Art

One year ago I took a look at the classic Britcom Yes, Minister. And just today I was reminded of how great that show really was.

It turns out that the state of Virginia has built a brand-new prison...but has no prisoners to put in it. Administering an empty prison can be quite complicated, as well as quite expensive: it cost $715,000 this year alone just to maintain the facility in its current condition.

Just in case you never could have imagined a bureaucracy so bumbling as to do something like construct a prison without being able to fill it, the writers of Yes, Minister did. One of the best episodes tells the story of a hospital that is brand-new, and fully staffed, but without patients.

The minister decides he needs to investigate the hospital, and is taken there to meet with the directress and the labor union's representative:



For those of you who haven't watched the show before, a linguistic note: very often the crazier characters are given regional accents, such as the maniacal Scots trade unionist in this episode.

Bureaucratic Infighting: Yes, Prime Minister

For a more humorous look at the phenomenon I tried to describe yesterday, I heartily recommend the 1980's Britcom Yes Minister, and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister.

The show follows a fictional British cabinet minister, Jim Hacker (who becomes the prime minister in the sequel), as he tries to reform the Department of Administrative Affairs and trim the vast bureaucracy. At every turn, however, he is resisted by Sir Humphrey Appleby, the head civil servant in the department, who sees it as his mission to rise in the bureaucracy himself, to protect the jobs of other civil servants, and to deflect all accusations of misfeasance in the civil service. Over the course of 38 episodes, the show was able to cover the entire spectrum of British politics and bureaucracy.

Many of the references are uniquely British--such as Sir Humphrey's snobbish references to the "two universities" and the personal secretary's conern for niceties of Greek syntax--but can be picked up after a little background reading.

More importantly, although the show was made in the 1980's and thus contains a few out-dated references (e.g., the Soviets), it remains surprisingly topical today. For instance, the episodes about scandal in the City (the London equivalent of Wall Street) and bank bailouts could have been filmed this year. Here's the beginning of one episode--ignore the cheesy intro music:



(Here are part 2 and part 3 of the episode.)


But most amazingly in my opinion, everything about the foibles of politicians and bureaucrats rings so true. Yes, Prime Minister can be viewed as a sociology of bureaucracy. Quite an amazing accomplishment for a TV satire.

As a final aside, Yes, Prime Minister also touched on other topics. Here is a very funny explanation of the Church of England, which might explain the need for Pope Benedict's promulgation of Anglicanorum Coetibus:

Bureaucratic Infighting: The Underwear Bomber

A few days ago, there was a headline on Shadow Government that read: "Someone's head should roll, but whose?"

The article was about the enormous bureaucratic mess-up that allowed the "underwear bomber," Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, to nearly blow up an airplane on Christmas Day. Somehow, despite several red flags--such as his stay in Yemen and warnings from his own father, a Nigerian diplomat, that his son had become a radical Muslim--Abdulmuttalab was allowed to board a plane into the U.S. Fortunately, it was Abdulmuttalab's own mistake which (apparently) saved all the passengers from death in the sky. It is a depressing story of mistake after mistake by various governmental agencies. President Obama has called the underwear bomber affair a "systemic failure" and promises to find out who was responsible for it. The article from Shadow Government posits one possible cause for this sytemic failure, besides individual stupidity: bureaucratic infighting.

In the U.S. intelligence community, there is an alphabet soup of agencies responsible for detecting and investigating these matters: FBI, CIA, NSA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security, and probably some others that I am forgetting. But, even though they all share the same mission of protecting American security, they do not all get along. Each one is jealous of the others, distrusts the others, and is generally nasty toward the others. And whenever something like the underwear bomber happens, they point their fingers at each other, never taking the blame themselves.

But, such is the nature of bureaucracies. Nearly every government agency wants more power and influence. The key way to grow in power and influence is to fight other government agencies for a larger share of the operating budget and of decision-making power. This is the classic example of a turf fight. Yet, each agency also tries to insulate itself from responsibility for its actions (or inaction, as the case may be). One way is to institute procedures so complicated and arcane that a failure to act can be attributed to a small mistake in procedure, over which it would seemingly be unfair to fire a bureaucrat. Moreover, there is in most bureaucracies an instinct to protect one's own, and never question someone from inside the agency. A related way to deter being held accountable is to blur the lines of communication, to make it unclear who has to report to whom.

But, whenever a big mistake occurs and lands the agency in the news, we are confronted with the essential question: "Whose head should roll?" However, the question of responsibility is not nearly as easy a question to answer. This is where Congressional investigative committees get involved. Independent investigations supposedly give the public a chance to find out the answer to this question. In reality, these investigations really give the chance to the different agencies involved in the mess to take their fight directly to Congress; they get to play the blame game in public, while making the public think that someone's head is going to roll.

And that, after all, is what we individual citizens demand from those in a position of authority: we want to see heads roll--at least metaphorical heads. In other words, we demand personal responsibility. However, bureaucracies are a maze of anonymous procedures, guidelines, and goals, and often real people are manipulating the twists of the maze to avoid responsibility. It's this use of anonymity to avoid responsibility, more than the sometimes epic bungling, I would venture, that we find most disturbing about bureaucracies.

A tad cynical? Perhaps. But, at least we can have a good laugh about all this tomorrow.

On Gobbledygook

I recently stumbled upon this passage in Edward Fischer's The Chancy War. If you have ever had to read a military document, you know he tells the truth. Sadly, I think his conclusions are probably true of most bureaucratic writing, and probably far too much of academia as well.

In the Infantry School at Fort Benning, I had spent a year writing Army field manuals.... During basic training at Camp Croft, South Carolina, and while studying in the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, I had groped through enough field manuals to know how riddled they were with gobbledygook. If everyone was to understand the material in those manuals, so that we might hurry up and win the war, it seemed sensible that the prose be clear and concise.

My first manual came bouncing back from the review board in Washington. Nothing was omitted, the board said, and there were no errors in fact; it just didn't sound like a field manual. The colonel who headed the writing project lacked interest in simplicity and clarity; all he wanted was the approval of the Pentagon. He said just that as he tossed the manuscript to me and stomped into his office, where the grapes of wrath were stored.

The only way I could write military prose was to burlesque it. So I made some rules for myself:

• Never write a simple sentence if you can stretch and torture it into a compound-complex sentence.
• Never use a one-syllable word if you can entice a five-syllable word into doing the same job.
• Never use the active voice, if you can back the idea around into a passive construction.
• Always substitute utilization for use, subsequent for after, and initial for first.
• Use frequently the words supersede, implement, and impracticable.
• Ignore the advice Horace gave: "More ought to be scratched out than left." Instead, keep adding to what is there; federal prose is not written, it accumulates.

So put the idea into a simple declarative sentence and spend the morning building it. Enlarge each word, nail on more phrases, synonyms, and redundancies; twist the sentence structure until scarcely a tag-end of the meaning sticks out.

As a final test, read aloud what has been translated from English to gobbledygook. If it sounds like an excited turkey going, "Gobbledy, gobbledy, gobbledy," the translation has been successful. (Perhaps Congressman Maury Maverick had the sound of an excited gobbler in mind when he coined the word gobbledygook to label government jargon.)

The rules that I complied worked well. My manuscript was long and wordy and as dull as a butter knife. Reading it was like slogging through a swamp under full field pack.

But the Pentagon liked it! The book was printed in five languages. I often wonder how that gobbledygook sounded in Chinese.

Personal Authority (Part II)

Yesterday, I tried to show that even in our bureaucratic age, we still desire personal authority, whether we realize it or not. Today I want to add just one more observation in connection to a book I recently read.

In Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, the story revolves around the protagonist (K) and his attempt to navigate a village’s labyrinthine bureaucracy so that he can go to work there as a surveyor. The village officials rarely go into the village, usually staying in the castle above the village. Each higher official has hordes of secretaries, many of whom seem to work at cross-purposes to each other. Many of their decisions seem completely arbitrary; letters are written, then stored away for years, and only sent years later after the whole affair has already been cleared up, causing more confusion than there originally was. Interestingly too, these bureaucrats are at times referred to as “the count’s officials,” but nowhere is the count given a name. And most disturbingly, many officials seem to have faces that don’t remain the same. This is literally authority without a face. And yet, the people of the village really seem to love these bureaucrats.

Kafka’s novel is obviously a nightmare about a bureaucracy taking over society, and it might come across to a reader skeptical of my thesis as just a clumsy exaggeration of the bad experience we’ve all had waiting on hold for an hour just to speak with an insurance representative or to an IRS agent. There is some truth in this objection, but there is a fact that most people don’t know: Kafka was a lawyer for an insurance company. Kafka knew the system from the inside. He dealt mostly with workplace accidents and improving safety guidelines for workers. He must have known the hardships—physical and spiritual—faced by a worker who finds himself unable to work and thrown upon the mercy of a bureaucracy. This sympathy with the ordinary individual must be what led K, in The Castle, to exclaim when he was most frustrated by the bureaucracy: “I feel that my very existence is threatened!”

All this is to say: Try telling an injured worker that the delay in his medical treatment is the system’s fault, and he won’t believe you. He needs a person, an authority, to blame (or to praise for resolving the problem). As much as we try to deny it and work our way around it, we can’t change the fact that authority needs to be personal.

Personal Authority (Part I)

Last Friday one of my law school classes took a field trip to the federal Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago to hear oral arguments. The second case of the morning involved a woman who was suing her health insurance company for breach of contract. The key issue was whether the insurance company had actually authorized the surgery. This may sound like an easy factual question to resolve—just look for a letter or some other record—but what made it difficult was the fact that even though the insurance policy seemed to state that it did not cover surgeries related to the woman’s condition, this policy was nearly impossible to decipher, a customer representative gave oral authorization for the surgery in question, and the insurance company had approved a surgery relating to the same condition just a year earlier.

The insurance company’s lawyer tried to make the case that this was an ordinary insurance policy; she even said to the three judges that this 50-page contract was probably just like their health insurance policy. This move backfired, however. All three judges looked rather uncomfortable at this comparison, and one of the judges even asked: “But, counsel, what about the ordinary person reading this contract? Would he know that this procedure wasn’t covered?” From then on, the judges’ questions seemed to indicate that they wanted to rule in the woman’s favor.

This made me wonder about two things. First, these three federal appellate judges appeared not to have read their own health insurance policies. They seemed uneasy—if I may extrapolate a bit from their reactions—with the realization that some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by contracts and regulations which even the finest legal minds in the nation have a hard time understanding. Health insurance, taxes, Social Security, probate, etc., these are all areas of law whose details are nearly incomprehensible to a non-specialist.

Second, lurking behind all this was the question whether a mere customer service representative can speak for the insurance company and whether a patient should rely on that representative’s word. This is a completely natural question for a vast bureaucracy, such as an insurance company or a government agency. When an organization is made up of thousands of people, many of whom do little more than answer phones and look up answers to simple questions on their computers, it’s obvious that not everyone can speak with authority for the entire organization. But, who speaks with authority then?

These two considerations, I would submit, point to the conclusion that one of the main problems with modern bureaucracy lies in the anonymity of authority. Authority is nowhere to be seen. When we deal with authority, we naturally look for a person to exercise that authority. But that’s simply not how the world works today. Rather, today we try to compensate for this lack of personal authority by weaving an ever denser web of contractual and regulatory obligations to give the appearance of authority, but don’t really succeed.

This is not to say that we should breach all our contracts or disregard state and federal regulations. All this means is that in a world of impersonal bureaucracy, supported by impersonal law, we will remain deeply dissatisfied because of the lack of personal authority. Laws and contracts are not enough, and can often make us unhappy, but it’s nearly impossible to rebel against just a law. Rebels and revolutionaries understand this quite well. They don’t fight against abstractions. What did American colonists do to protest the Stamp Act? They went out and tar-and-feathered the first British official they could find. What did they do to protest the taxes on tea? They dumped crates of tea into Boston harbor. Even today, when members of one political party in Congress express their opposition to a particular bill, they denounce “Senator X’s bill” or “President Y’s proposal.” The ad hominem attack may be bad logic, but it’s indispensable to the way people think. Authority needs to be personal.

Part II tomorrow...