{"id":579,"date":"2009-07-05T16:51:19","date_gmt":"2009-07-05T16:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/speaking-of-priests-as-monks.html"},"modified":"2009-07-05T16:51:19","modified_gmt":"2009-07-05T16:51:19","slug":"speaking-of-priests-as-monks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/speaking-of-priests-as-monks.html","title":{"rendered":"Model priests, long lives, short shrift"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of priests-as-monks<\/strong><\/a>…Boston radio station WBUR has this grim news for the priests there:<\/p>\n

\n

BOSTON — The Boston Archdiocese has admitted that, within two years, it won’t have the money to pay for the care and housing of its elderly and sick priests, unless major changes are made to those benefits.<\/strong><\/p>\n

An <\/strong>outside study<\/strong><\/font><\/a> says a combination of factors, including poor management, has brought the fund that supports retired priests to the brink of insolvency. As a result, starting Wednesday, retired and sick priests are having their benefits cut.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joe D’Arrigo is a consultant hired by the archdiocese to put the clergy fund on sound footing. He said the fund was managed by priests with little financial experience who didn’t see the problem coming. “A combination of retiree health care, the housing costs and the increasing number of retiring priests over this last eight years or so just acted like a locomotive and the cost just overtook the fund,” he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is terrible, given all these men gave to the church, and all they’ve been put through in recent years, esepcially in Boston. And it could have been avoided.<\/p>\n

Last week I spent a day at the sixth annual conference of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management. Led by former financier and devoted Catholic, Geoff Boisi, the NLRCM want to bring “best practices” in management to the church to make better use of resources and personnel, to avoid scandal, financial and otherwise, and to restore credibility to the church and thereby advance her mission. <\/p>\n

The initiative met some sharp resistance from many bishops and church conservatives early on, but it has worked diligently to overcome those suspicions, and the strategy seems to be working. <\/p>\n

Tony Blair–a fairly new member of the Church–and USCCB vice-president, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuscon addressed the conference. Kicanas will next year succeed Chicago’s Cardinal george as president of the bishops conference. Pretty high-powered players. You can watch their presentations here<\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n

I wrote about the event for The Tablet’s annual Fourth of July editio<\/strong><\/a>n (my piece, “Declaration of Interdependence,” is behind a firewall, alas). But worth checking out is Peter McDonough’s piece “Best Practicing Catholics,”<\/strong><\/a> in the April 24 edition of Commonweal (also behind a firewall–but well worth the subscription!). <\/p>\n

A taste, from my Tablet piece:<\/p>\n

\n

As Peter McDonough noted in a recent Commonweal article about the NLRCM, the transformation of U.S. dioceses and parishes from mom-and-pop (or just “pop,” actually) family businesses to professionally-managed enterprises was prefigured in the “quiet revolution” of the Catholic educational and health systems in the 1960s, which started incorporating universities and hospitals and bringing lay professionals in to do jobs once reserved for members of religious orders. <\/strong><\/p>\n

“All this reflects a larger trend in which social movements evolve ‘from mobilization to management’–the grass-roots convulsions of earlier decades giving way to donors and nonprofits who cast themselves as philanthropic entrepreneurs,” McDonough wrote. “This approach rarely sets the blood racing, yet it has significant implications for the services that the church delivers and for the way decisions are made. What’s more, for reasons traceable to differences in church-state relations, private donors play a more important role in American than in European Catholicism.” <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of priests-as-monks…Boston radio station WBUR has this grim news for the priests there: BOSTON — The Boston Archdiocese has admitted that, within two years, it won’t have the money to pay for the care and housing of its elderly and sick priests, unless major changes are made to those benefits. An outside study says…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nModel priests, long lives, short shrift - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/speaking-of-priests-as-monks.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Model priests, long lives, short shrift - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Speaking of priests-as-monks…Boston radio station WBUR has this grim news for the priests there: BOSTON — The Boston Archdiocese has admitted that, within two years, it won’t have the money to pay for the care and housing of its elderly and sick priests, unless major changes are made to those benefits. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}