So many times one hears the phrase, “It can’t get worse.” Such is the common refrain of an optimist. Given enough time and talent, any situation can be made worse, often by an order of magnitude. While this is easily applied to politics, I will here apply it to shepherding a church. With the Catholic Church, we see the problem much less often, but you can still find it. A priest comes in and is on fire and finds before long his parish is half empty and his bishop is in receipt of letters from numerous parishioners. In Milwaukee, many were frustrated at the anemic pace Archbishop Dolan went about addressing problems. Archbishop Dolan asserted himself as a gentle reformer rather than a revolutionary. There was much blood figuratively spilled before Archbishop Dolan came, and one of his goals was not to add to it. Part of this leadership approach, which you also see in Pope Benedict, was not to make decisions until they needed to be made and to insure that voluntary cooperation would be as forthcoming as possible. Intrinsic to this was taking concrete steps to make things better rather than banking on the inability of things to get worse.
Having mellowed over the years – for the record, I am no longer in the Milwaukee Archdiocese – I can appreciate the wisdom of Archbishop Dolan’s approach, something I couldn’t say at the time. My attitude at the time was that things couldn’t get much worse, so the better approach would have been to make whatever changes needed to be made and those who didn’t want to get on board could leave; it was time to build the Church for the next generation. In retrospect, I can say that if he would have followed my advice, the odds are pretty decent that upwards of half the diocese would have broken away. Then the fun would really begin as churches would be sold and schools closed; both happened anyway, but they would have occurred to a larger degree under the nuclear option. As these things tend to go over, I still know a guy upset with Burke for closing his school when he was bishop of LaCrosse. This guy was a man who went to a small parish because he only wanted to receive communion from a priest.
Prudence is the application of reason to principle. In part that is a recognition of the situation before you. In Milwaukee that meant seeing a diocese that had been led previously by a man notorious for his spats with Rome, but also a man that many priests and parishioners admired and respected, even if they disagreed with him. It meant recognizing that these priests and parishioners had maintained communion with Rome, regardless of the opinions of those on the outside. At this point you evaluate what effects your actions are going to have. While the nuclear option had the advantage of unquestionable purity*, it didn’t satisfy the Church’s greatest priority, the salvation of souls. Declining the nuclear option didn’t mean of course embracing error. Archbishop Dolan simply gained the reputation of being a happy cleric. He proclaimed his love of Christ. He led by example and offered others the opportunity to follow. He listened patiently. And while one can find parishes in the Milwaukee area that are not the best examples of proper liturgical practice, you can find quite a few parishes that are a improved over where they were a decade ago. You can find people that were prepared to dismiss Archbishop Dolan’s every request who today will defend him even when they don’t agree with him. He has even managed to avoid having the Archdiocese file for bankruptcy, although no one would be grossly shocked if that does happen. And there are still challenges ahead that will likely involve further parish consolidations.
* Actually there are a number of questions regarding this purity. Pope Benedict will be interesting to watch in this regard with his deep aversion to schism. Paired with his rhetoric regarding relativism and non-negotiability, we are seeing emerge the substance of what is negotiable but wrong. For example, an aversion to the new mass and an affection for the old mass is something that Pope Benedict believes should be tolerated for the sake of communion. In order to realize a greater communion between groups that celebrate the old mass and the majority of Roman Catholics that celebrate the new mass, he has encouraged it to be offered at the parochial level so that, I would imagine, the communion at the local level could be more real rather than just theoretical.
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