Archbishop of Sydney

Administering and Ministering: Putting Christ’s Mission First

Catholic Administration Conference
Novotel – Brighton-Le-Sands

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
24 October 2004

Introduction

I am very pleased to be here this evening to help launch the first Catholic Administration Conference.  The Sydney Archdiocese is happy to be a major sponsor, because of the importance of such an event for the Church in Australia and I welcome all those of you who have traveled from outside the Archdiocese.

I would also like to express my grateful thanks to the Conference organizers for their work in assembling the programme. It is a tribute to them that we have such a fine range of speakers and so many registered participants.  I very much hope that everyone learns a great deal from these three days, and that new relationships are forged and some old friendships revived.

Recent years have seen enormous changes in the administrative, financial, and legal requirements which the Church must satisfy.  The practices and standards with which we must now comply have increased dramatically, both in number and complexity.  We all know how demanding it can be to address these requirements while continuing to steward the temporal goods of Christ’s Church according to his will.  The Church is fortunate indeed in possessing an impressive array of talent—clerical, religious, and lay—able and willing to care for Church resources in a professional manner, and in a Christian spirit.

An important feature of this week’s event is that it brings all of us together under the one roof.  Thus looking around the room, we are reminded of the extent to which the contemporary Church is a collaborative ministry.  We are an integrated team of many specialties, demonstrating both skill and faith, and depending upon each other in our service of the Church and wider society.

A happy feature of this gathering is that it provides an opportunity for people not just to swap ideas on strategies and tactics, but to look at the bigger picture.  If I have one hope for this week, it is that we take time to remind ourselves of just what that bigger picture is, to rededicate ourselves to it, and to take encouragement for our professional activities within the Church.

One

All of us here are stewards of the Church’s temporal goods. Outsiders might imagine that the role of the steward is all about being efficient with the Church’s resources.  According to this picture, the best steward—or bureaucrat, manager, official—is the one who trims off most fat, increases out-put while decreasing financial and human in-put, makes the Church a slicker, better-oiled machine.  This is a dangerously narrow view of those who administer the Church’s resources.

‘Efficiency’ is not a good: it is not the end that the Church exists to achieve. Rather, efficiency is a judgement about the means we use to achieve the good.  What is the good we are seeking? Simply, it is the mission of Christ and of the Catholic Church as his continuing presence in the world.  This is our big picture.  All of the decisions we make about the temporal goods of the Church must be actively directed towards furthering Christ’s mission, and to furthering the key parts of that mission which the Church has identified over time—that is, such activities as regular worship, supporting marriages and families, spreading the Gospel, educating in the faith, supporting the poor and suffering etc.

If efficiency ever becomes our end-goal, the criterion of our decision-making, we have committed the classic fallacy of mistaking the means for the end. This fallacy is easy to commit. Indeed, many in secular society commit it regularly.  But if we in the Church commit it, that is serious indeed.

What does this mean for day-to-day management responsibilities?  It means that the good Church manager is not the one who can say at the end of his career, or the end of the tax year: ‘there are more resources, or greater efficiency, than when I first joined up.’ Rather, the good Church manager is the one who can say: ‘thank God: I can see that Christ’s mission has really been progressed through my stewardship.’

Of course, if progressing the mission can be achieved while also stopping waste, and doing so justly, that is a very good thing indeed. But saving Church money and resources is of no value whatsoever if the saving does not show clear progress in forwarding the mission.  In other words, we must be able to demonstrate that through savings and efficiency at least some of the following effects are occurring, mass attendance and prayer are increasing, marriages and families are growing in numbers and in stability, more adults are converting to the faith, more children and students are accepting the truths of the faith, the poor and suffering are being helped effectively.

It is easy to fall into the trap of saying ‘our goal should be saving more money and becoming more efficient now, because this will set up the Church better for the future.’  Seeking more efficiency while numbers decline is like fiddling while Rome burns.  The future we want is being created now, and it may never come about unless we take risks for the sake of Christ’s mission.

In the Parable of the Talents, in Matthew’s Gospel (25) and in Luke’s (19), the master rewards those servants who invested his money wisely, and scolds the servant who buried the money in the backyard. We might think that the moral of the story is that it is good to invest wealth and so to end up by making more.  That would be to misunderstand Our Lord’s teaching.  The parable is about making the most of our God-given opportunities so as to contribute more to his mission. The last thing the Church needs with its resources is to keep them buried safe in the ground (or in the bank vault).  The Church needs to be creative with its wealth, and this is what Our Lord is saying: use resources wisely—use them for the Kingdom.  This is the only justification for the Church e.g. diocese, parish having a modest patrimony.

If I can speak personally, I have always believed in taking a prudent risk.  By that I mean that when we can afford a project such as a drug counseling agency, a new university, an institute for marriage and family, or a major conference, we should seriously consider doing so.  In the secular world, this might make no sense: ‘Why risk it?’, people might say. ‘Will it ever become self-funding?’  But our mission is not the secular one of increasing our resources or making a profit: it is Christ’s mission of saving souls.

Now, of course, that does not mean that a good manager of the Church’s resources is a crazy idealist.  The Church’s resources require careful planning, best practice standards in accountancy and legal services, professional administrators, and totally committed advisers.  Every bishop looks to his team to apply the brakes with good counsel when this is best for the mission.  But in each field of every Catholic bureaucracy, and in every agency, what matters is recognizing resources as opportunities for spreading the Kingdom of God.

And that must not become a remote, pious-sounding goal: it should be the quite concrete standard we apply in our everyday, professional decision-making.

Two

A major theme in Catholic administration is the relation between administrators and pastors.  Some of you, of course, will occupy both roles.  For Church administrators, the task is to carry out effectively those projects given by pastors.  A Church administrator should never see him or herself as there to pour treacle in the works. If the bishop or priest wants a new catechetical programme, new set of text books, or whatever, the accountant may well panic; but his task is, after giving prudent advice, to make it happen.  It is important that advice be clear and accessible and that priests and bishops have the consequences of their policies clearly outlined.

There is of course another model of administration with which we are all familiar.  This is the Yes, Minister model, gloriously portrayed by the BBC years ago.  In the Yes, Minister model, bureaucrats see their function as making their masters impotent. Sir Humphrey and his super-efficient team are committed at every stage to making sure that nothing the Minster wants to happen happens.  Their professional training is to ensure that nothing changes, that power always stays with them, and that their leaders are the ones left with egg on their faces.  Meanwhile, the leaders in the Yes, Minister model are people with no idea of reality.  The Honourable Jim Hacker MP is a loveable fool, trundled out to make ceremonial appearances and to give fairly meaningless speeches, but with no idea how the world really works, and with his head permanently in the clouds.

In Yes, Minister, the most damning remark that any bureaucrat can make is to describe his master’s proposals as ‘courageous’. ‘Courageous’ basically means ‘this will draw attention to yourself—probably negative attention’.  It is basically used to kill any new plan dead.  It is applied to any dramatic change, any attempt at vision, any boldness or creativity, and it invariably cowers the hapless leader.  What I am suggesting of course is that pastors cannot be Mr. Hackers and administrators cannot be Sir Humphreys.  Pastors cannot be unrealistic, but they must have vision and they must be open to risks; administrators cannot function simply to frustrate pastors’ wishes, but they should share the vision and work to minimize the risk.

Focusing on the administrators as we are tonight, let me put it this way: having obtained appropriate professional qualifications, the ideal Church administrator will then regard his or her work not as a job but as a vocation. Let us imagine that the entire bureaucracy of an Archdiocese goes on holiday together for a month and a team of top-notch professional administrators is brought in from an agency to replace them.  If everything ran smoothly in that month, if no one noticed any difference, then something would be very wrong indeed. Because for us—for this great collaborative team gathered here—our work is not simply top-notch professionalism.  For us, our work is a call from God and a daily conversion to Christ’s mission.  And that is something for which no degree of professionalism can substitute.

While seeing their role as a vocation, administrators of Church temporal goods have a special responsibility to strive for professional excellence in the areas where they serve the Church.  I have, on occasions, heard it suggested that because we are a Church we have to expect mediocre administration or that we must somehow accept a lesser standard of performance in management and administration.

I take a very different view.

A commitment to Christ’s mission is completely compatible with professional excellence.  Church administrators should be recognized for their professional competence and should, in many ways seek to set standards that others in the secular world will want to follow.

Our policies and work practices should be built on sound principles and we should continually seek to improve as new ideas and technologies emerge.  On going professional development is an important obligation.  Given the response of so many of you to this Conference it seems my views on professional development are shared by many across the Church.

I accept that there is a great risk for an Archbishop speaking on these matters that he might romanticize the role of Church administration—place impossible expectations on his team.  But I do not think that that is what I am doing.  I have worked with Church administrators of all grades for more years than most, and I am constantly amazed by the professional quality of our people and by the depth of their faith in, and witness to, the living God.  All of us are called to be saints, and if we looked closely around the room tonight, we might be surprised at how many future-saints are sitting around the tables with us.  For many gathered here, their work is indeed a vocation, and that is a message worth passing on to the next generation of Church administrators.

I am well aware that not every administrator can dedicate the same time to the Church as a priest or a religious.  Some do as much, some do much more.  Lay administrators have lives and families, after all, other duties and other interests that they rightly follow.  Nevertheless, good administrators are men and women who have made their professionalism part of their response to Christ’s call to mission. In that sense, our administrators are bridges between the best values of the secular world and the perennial values of Christ and the Church.  This balance of professionalism and sacrifice is the main gift they bring to their pastors, and they deserve to be honoured and thanked for it.

Three

It is sometimes said that the Church is not a good employer; that our attitudes towards, for example, women at work or justice issues in the workplace could be better.  No doubt each and every one of us could do better—though I think our record is on the whole pretty good. But what is certainly true is that the Catholic Church must give the lead to the world in showing justice and charity in the workplace.

The world needs to see Catholics applying Catholic social teaching.  We need to take the lead here, and that lead begins at home, within our own dioceses, and in our own chancery offices.

Thus Catholic administrators ought to be compassionate: committed to giving employees their due, and supporting them when they are not able to give of their best at work or are finding the workplace burdensome.  Administrators should be scrupulously honest in all matters affecting resources and personnel.  They should also show respect for colleagues and workers—never treating them as ‘resources’, but respecting the Church’s view that persons are prior to resources.  And they should practice and build up trust, by having faith that in the great majority of cases employees will work their contracted hours, continue their professional training and development, and will work well.

Perhaps above all, a Catholic administrator cares about his staff and colleagues as more than mere workers.  In other words, he has an interest in them as people and a concern for their welfare and happiness outside the office as well as in it.  Every good manager knows that a happy worker who feels trusted and respected will work better.  Of course, we should not need such extra reasons for caring about each other’s happiness, but it is certainly true that working to create happy, trusted employees will pay dividends in terms of creating better workers.  And let us remember, administrators are people too: it would be good if Church workers cared about their employers’ welfare; for ethics flows both ways, not just from the top down.

Perhaps we need to give a higher profile to ethics in Church bureaucracies. We routinely consider law, accountancy, IT, PR, governance, tax, law, advocating the highest standards in each.  But operating ethically is surely more important than anything else.  All good businesses today know this, and many offer regular ethics training.  And since the Church is not a business but is the presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the world, surely it should go without saying that ethics should have a high profile in the professional development of Church bureaucrats.  If ethics seminars and presentations are standard practice within many giant corporations, should this not be normal practice too within Christ’s Church?

One approach I am keen to adopt in the Archdiocese of Sydney is to take not just a financial audit of our agencies, but also a missionary audit.  We all know that the business world today is alive with audits, mission statements, vision statements, and so on.  If even an IT business or a PR company realizes the importance of this, again, surely the Catholic Church can conduct an audit of its success in furthering Christ’s mission?

This need not represent an enormous change or place any undue burdens.  It is simply an opportunity for those at the coal-face to describe how they have used the Church’s resources in the past year to implement the Gospel; to show to what extent they have succeeded in healing broken marriages and families, attracting converts, increasing the reception of the sacraments, enrolling more adults in faith enrichment courses, and so on. Our Lord will one day require of us all an account of how we have used our resources, as the Parable of the Talents reminds us.  It might be worth preparing for that great ethical audit well in advance

Four

The immediate future may well prove difficult for the Church in Australia. There will be opportunities, challenges, hurdles and disappointments.  Everyone knows the facts about declining Sunday mass attendance, confusion about sacramental discipline, breakdown in family life, rejection of Church moral teaching, and so on.  But this is only part of the story.  We still have formidable strengths.  All this has to be placed in its context.  The Church has known extraordinary challenges from its foundation. The early epics of dramatic growth in converts followed by sudden, violent culling of Christians are matched in our own age by great growth in certain regions, in particular Asia, and new forms of challenge to Christian identity and practice in other areas. Clearly, Australian Catholics face major opportunities and challenges in 2005 and onwards.

In great part, the response to those challenges lies in the hands of the people in this room.  It would be all too easy to go with the flow.  It would be easy to switch our administrative operations to maintenance-mode; to note that contributions are likely to decline and so to pare back the works of the Church to just keeping parishes and schools ticking over.  If the main aim is to plan for priest-less parishes, you are likely to achieve that!  This is exactly what Pope John Paul II has been telling us must not happen.

Long years before the Great Jubilee, the Pope prepared us for the consecration of the new millennium to Jesus Christ.  As the calendar ticked over, he appealed to the world to contemplate the face of Christ (Novo Millenio Ineunte, 17) and, inspired by Christ’s gaze, to ‘start afresh’.  The message was not to ‘keep going’, to stay as you are; but to make a new start, to do some fresh thinking, to launch out into the deep.

The Pope has pledged the Church to the task of re-evangelising the world in the new century.  He made clear in Novo Millenio Ineunte that this was not so much a matter of new pastoral plans but rather a return to the great plan: seeking holiness, increasing prayer, revitalising the sacraments, rediscovering the Word of God.  It is not maintenance-mode that the Church in Australia requires today: it is evangelising-energy.

Hundreds of thousands of young Catholics have responded to the Pope’s call for a new evangelization.  We who are older, and, let us dare to hope, sometimes a little wiser, should follow the lead of youth and of the elderly Pope here.  What the Church needs from her loyal administrators in the years ahead is an energy and a creativity parallel perhaps to that shown in the early days of the Church in our country.  We should pray, then, for the vision of the religious women who hacked their way through the bush and built schools, and the courage of the priests who carried Christ’s mission and his Very Presence into every corner of our land.

Conclusion

Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has been clear that the normal role for the laity is not serving as acolytes in sanctuaries, or as bureaucrats in chanceries.  Most lay people serve God and his Church by action outside the institutions of the Church (Ecclesia in Oceania, 43).  The normal role of the laity is baptizing the Stock Exchange, the law courts, the department stores, the universities, and so on. Nevertheless, we do require some laity to work within the executive arm of the Church, and we are blessed with those whom we have.

Our employees are people of skill and faith: not people the secular business world has rejected, but people whom the business world would probably like to get its hands on! I am deeply grateful for the professional skill and high standards that so many people bring to the Church in Australia.  And I am even more grateful for the vocational commitment and loyalty that you display.  I pray that this Conference might give us all new heart and a deeper faith, and I look forward to our very close collaboration in 2005 and beyond.