>There’s the realization that if those with responsibilities don’t do their job, someone else can.
Sometimes. Maybe. The problem is that what you're doing is inherently, and unavoidably, subversive. You certainly can "just do things" within an existing institution/organization, but only to a certain point. Beyond that, you're no longer really acting as part of the institution/organization anymore.
In many circumstances, this is fine. I have a long-standing (though good-natured!) disagreement with one of my relatives about reforming/improving government agencies that runs along these lines. His position is that if you try to change an agency too quickly, you wind up alienating people critical to the agency's operations, making it even less efficient and effective than it already his. The point is a valid one, it must be said. But my position is that a lot of agencies are doing things that are net negatives for society, so making them less efficient/effective is no bad thing.
But now you're talking about the church. The Roman Catholic Church, no less. I'm a magisterial Protestant myself (Presbyterian), but I have enough respect for church tradition and authority to recognize that there are plenty of things that can only happen under the auspices of church authority. The Sacraments are an obvious example, but the whole panoply of church discipleship and discipline is very much in view. Like it or not, this woman is part of how your church operates. If you work around her, rather than with/through her, you're ultimately working around the church rather than with/through it.
You have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem here. It's not the secretary. Not really. Your archetypical "church secretary" takes many forms, obviously. But the real problem here is not that people with soft power are abusing it. It's that the people with "hard," i.e., explicit, formal, hierarchical authority, are asleep at the switch. All of the institutional/organizational power this woman has over you is, in effect, borrowed/delegated from your parish priest. If he isn't satisfied with her performance, he has the ability to do something about it.
After all, there is an obvious solution to this problem: your priest, who presumably has more-or-less unilateral hiring/firing authority over parish staff, can tell this woman to cut out the passive-aggressive bullshit on pain of getting fired.
That he hasn't, and almost certainly won't, tells you most of what you need to know about the situation here. Indeed, you hint at it yourself towards the beginning of the post
>Young families have been streaming in because the priest is solidly orthodox, some unfortunately refugees from other parishes the archdiocese laid the hammer down on.
The real problem here isn't that this progressive harridan is a progressive harridan, though that's obviously not great. Her power isn't really soft at all. It's hard power, though it's borrowed from men higher up the hierarchy. The real problem is that the bishop/archbishop/whoever would take her side in any dispute with your parish priest. Which both you and your priest are presumably aware of.
Ultimately, those invested with hard power are either too afraid/lazy to wield that power for your good and the good of the church, or they are actively, whether covertly or overtly, using that power against you. Your troubles with the church secretary are just secondary-order effects caused by the real elephant in the room: most of the men holding formal leadership positions in the Roman Catholic Church (Just like most other institutions and organizations these days! Including most Protestant denominations!) are cowards.
"It's hard power, though it's borrowed from men higher up the hierarchy. The real problem is that the bishop/archbishop/whoever would take her side in any dispute with your parish priest. Which both you and your priest are presumably aware of."
This is the ultimate problem and it does exist in any organization.
I wonder to what degree secretaries should just be wives? Like, I made a note joking about how I would hire my wife to be my secretary in order to have an affair with her; but considering how historical this trope is, I wonder if your secretary should actually be your own wife, lest you be tempted. I was also thinking about the "work wife" phenomenon, and honestly if you don't count sleep, you spend more time at work then you do at home. I know the husband being a breadwinner and the wife being a homemaker is trad, but the trad before that was the husband working in the fields right outside your own house while the wife milks the cows and takes care of the chickens.
I had a very similar experience with a church secretary in a liberal parish who took an immediate dislike to me because of my conservative views. Once, in small group, we were being urged to donate for the homeless. I impetuously quipped, "you can't help the homeless by giving them stuff." My name was mud from that point onward. This is in Portland Oregon, mind you, where "homelessness" has long been a euphemism for drugs, crime, and social disorder. She made things very difficult for me. Once I made the mistake of trusting her (reasoning, apparently incorrectly, that as Christians, we could put aside or political differences), and she inflicted a serious harm on me. I had to leave that parish. Never trust a church bureaucrat, perhaps especially not the female ones. This experience of Catholic bureaucracy made me appreciate my Protestant friends a little more. I was like, okay, now I get it...
I watched a community get rid of such a person by having a groundswell effort to give her a great retirement with honours. It was all dressed up as "it's unkind to work this person so hard, especially when she is clearly in mental decline + How can we reward her properly for those long years of service." An enormous amount of passive-aggressive behaviour can be usefully reframed as cognitive decline. Forgetfulness. Willfully misunderstanding others (so you do not have to do what they want). Now the problem here wasn't that the secretary had support over the head of the pastor, but that the pastor was too kind-hearted to exercise his authority. But worth considering ....
Bravo! Your pithy (relatively), poignant, and profound essay is precisely why I come to Substack. (And I could tell a few stories myself ... ) Pax Christi
I have wanted to write this article for years. Thanks for doing it better than I could have. No, you're not imagining this. In my adult life I have moved 5 times and each parish I've been part of is ruled over by these petty church ladies. The pastors all seemed to be cucked and just let them do whatever they want. One of them told me that they do so much of the work that he would be overwhelmed of they left. So what? Cut all the extraneous bullshit committees, make every mass use Missa de Angelis VII, and focus on Mass, confessions, and last rites. Hiring some mature, orthodox charismatic men(!) of action to get shit done who will carry out your orders instead of playing henhouse pecking order status games. Not sure why this doesn't happen.
This has been my experience at many parishes in the Midatlantic, Pacific Northwest, the Southeast, and the Intermountain West. So many genuinely terrible church secretaries and/or staff. I don’t think people understand how terrible it is for a parish to have the person with some of the highest degree of contact with the outer world (e.g. people who don’t normally go to Mass trying to get married in the Church or their kids baptized) — be some combination of incompetent and/or malevolent. Not to mention the damage to regular parishioners trying to make things happen.
This intersects with two things I've been thinking about lately.
The first is the ancient tension between witness and institution - any organization will behave like an organization even if it is a church. It will necessarily include both good and bad people. If you ever had a clandestine service, like during Covid, you'll feel that spiritual awakening of the first Christians. However, rebellion isn't scalable or durable. Religious that survive get organized, and that means secretaries.
Which brings me to the other thing I've been thinking about: petty tyrants. They thrive in environments of low accountability. Documentation and consequences are their kryptonite. I wrote a post about them here:
"With time, it has gone from an older, more moderate parish to becoming younger and more traditionally minded."
Ah, my brother...remember when that was the other way around? God is on His throne and He will win.
I'm a Protestant myself, but it seems that young Christians of all denominations hunger for God's truth over empty rhetoric and going through the motions. Hopefully a sign that our Lord's return is imminent...!
How did you sneak into our parish and meet our parish secretary?? There are some slight divergences in my experiences and your story, but it is the same story. The personal preferences and random whims of the secretary inflicted on generations of volunteers. That is, until they give up and leave. Beneficial organizations living in limbo, on edge, or just kicked out of spaces meant for the purpose because the secretary seems to be intent on turning the parish into a tomb. Who knows who lost out on sacraments due to disorganization or favoritism?
Priests come and go, but the parish secretary is forever in 2026. If she not a natural born nun, she very well maybe some strange narcissist type who will actively impede the life of the parish for decades. Parish secretary truly involves vocation. If we need ordinations to call it a vocation, then let's open it up to the permanent deaconate as first and main priority. At least it would give us a way to pay the deaconate and suits their role. Men can do administrative stuff, women only have a strange knack for it.
Meanwhile, our clerics never say a word or seemingly object to the obvious running of parishes by The Woman We Pray Should Have Been a Nun(TM). It appears clerics with degrees, the backing of the Church and the power of confecting a Eucharist are actively intimidated by the Parish Secretary that Must Be Obeyed. That I have no idea what to do with. I understand why they don't tackle it, but it's very frustrating from a lay view.
A maybe-related anecdote: I live in a city of 25,000 that's part of a large metro area. Some of the city staff have been working for many years on a bike trail extension, and they have been just wedded to an incredibly stupid design that will cost $20+ million and cut down several hundred old growth trees, for about a mile of trail. My hunch is that this design is appealing mostly because it allows lots of different people to pad their CVs: Parks gets a new recreational facility, and Transportation gets a higher multimodal score (and the residents get something to feel smug about, assuming they're not bothered by the cost).
Thankfully, we were able to persuade a majority of our city council to vote to kill the project, but there's so much bellyaching now that "we won't be regarded as a trusted regional partner anymore", "we've already spent $3 million on design", "we're going to lose our outside funding".
>There’s the realization that if those with responsibilities don’t do their job, someone else can.
Sometimes. Maybe. The problem is that what you're doing is inherently, and unavoidably, subversive. You certainly can "just do things" within an existing institution/organization, but only to a certain point. Beyond that, you're no longer really acting as part of the institution/organization anymore.
In many circumstances, this is fine. I have a long-standing (though good-natured!) disagreement with one of my relatives about reforming/improving government agencies that runs along these lines. His position is that if you try to change an agency too quickly, you wind up alienating people critical to the agency's operations, making it even less efficient and effective than it already his. The point is a valid one, it must be said. But my position is that a lot of agencies are doing things that are net negatives for society, so making them less efficient/effective is no bad thing.
But now you're talking about the church. The Roman Catholic Church, no less. I'm a magisterial Protestant myself (Presbyterian), but I have enough respect for church tradition and authority to recognize that there are plenty of things that can only happen under the auspices of church authority. The Sacraments are an obvious example, but the whole panoply of church discipleship and discipline is very much in view. Like it or not, this woman is part of how your church operates. If you work around her, rather than with/through her, you're ultimately working around the church rather than with/through it.
You have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem here. It's not the secretary. Not really. Your archetypical "church secretary" takes many forms, obviously. But the real problem here is not that people with soft power are abusing it. It's that the people with "hard," i.e., explicit, formal, hierarchical authority, are asleep at the switch. All of the institutional/organizational power this woman has over you is, in effect, borrowed/delegated from your parish priest. If he isn't satisfied with her performance, he has the ability to do something about it.
After all, there is an obvious solution to this problem: your priest, who presumably has more-or-less unilateral hiring/firing authority over parish staff, can tell this woman to cut out the passive-aggressive bullshit on pain of getting fired.
That he hasn't, and almost certainly won't, tells you most of what you need to know about the situation here. Indeed, you hint at it yourself towards the beginning of the post
>Young families have been streaming in because the priest is solidly orthodox, some unfortunately refugees from other parishes the archdiocese laid the hammer down on.
The real problem here isn't that this progressive harridan is a progressive harridan, though that's obviously not great. Her power isn't really soft at all. It's hard power, though it's borrowed from men higher up the hierarchy. The real problem is that the bishop/archbishop/whoever would take her side in any dispute with your parish priest. Which both you and your priest are presumably aware of.
Ultimately, those invested with hard power are either too afraid/lazy to wield that power for your good and the good of the church, or they are actively, whether covertly or overtly, using that power against you. Your troubles with the church secretary are just secondary-order effects caused by the real elephant in the room: most of the men holding formal leadership positions in the Roman Catholic Church (Just like most other institutions and organizations these days! Including most Protestant denominations!) are cowards.
"It's hard power, though it's borrowed from men higher up the hierarchy. The real problem is that the bishop/archbishop/whoever would take her side in any dispute with your parish priest. Which both you and your priest are presumably aware of."
This is the ultimate problem and it does exist in any organization.
Except those in which the authorities are still willing to use their authority.
Most such organizations these days are small businesses.
I wonder to what degree secretaries should just be wives? Like, I made a note joking about how I would hire my wife to be my secretary in order to have an affair with her; but considering how historical this trope is, I wonder if your secretary should actually be your own wife, lest you be tempted. I was also thinking about the "work wife" phenomenon, and honestly if you don't count sleep, you spend more time at work then you do at home. I know the husband being a breadwinner and the wife being a homemaker is trad, but the trad before that was the husband working in the fields right outside your own house while the wife milks the cows and takes care of the chickens.
That was basically what my Girlboss essay stated.
I’ve been blessed with Church secretaries who were good, and it’s a wonderful gift when they are. I try to go out of my way to appreciate them.
The amount of soft power these women wield is immense.
I had a very similar experience with a church secretary in a liberal parish who took an immediate dislike to me because of my conservative views. Once, in small group, we were being urged to donate for the homeless. I impetuously quipped, "you can't help the homeless by giving them stuff." My name was mud from that point onward. This is in Portland Oregon, mind you, where "homelessness" has long been a euphemism for drugs, crime, and social disorder. She made things very difficult for me. Once I made the mistake of trusting her (reasoning, apparently incorrectly, that as Christians, we could put aside or political differences), and she inflicted a serious harm on me. I had to leave that parish. Never trust a church bureaucrat, perhaps especially not the female ones. This experience of Catholic bureaucracy made me appreciate my Protestant friends a little more. I was like, okay, now I get it...
I watched a community get rid of such a person by having a groundswell effort to give her a great retirement with honours. It was all dressed up as "it's unkind to work this person so hard, especially when she is clearly in mental decline + How can we reward her properly for those long years of service." An enormous amount of passive-aggressive behaviour can be usefully reframed as cognitive decline. Forgetfulness. Willfully misunderstanding others (so you do not have to do what they want). Now the problem here wasn't that the secretary had support over the head of the pastor, but that the pastor was too kind-hearted to exercise his authority. But worth considering ....
Bravo! Your pithy (relatively), poignant, and profound essay is precisely why I come to Substack. (And I could tell a few stories myself ... ) Pax Christi
This also applies to local civic organizations/non-profits these days...sigh
"We're dying, let's try this new thing."
"WELL IT'S NOT THAT BAD!"
Isn’t that special?
I have wanted to write this article for years. Thanks for doing it better than I could have. No, you're not imagining this. In my adult life I have moved 5 times and each parish I've been part of is ruled over by these petty church ladies. The pastors all seemed to be cucked and just let them do whatever they want. One of them told me that they do so much of the work that he would be overwhelmed of they left. So what? Cut all the extraneous bullshit committees, make every mass use Missa de Angelis VII, and focus on Mass, confessions, and last rites. Hiring some mature, orthodox charismatic men(!) of action to get shit done who will carry out your orders instead of playing henhouse pecking order status games. Not sure why this doesn't happen.
This has been my experience at many parishes in the Midatlantic, Pacific Northwest, the Southeast, and the Intermountain West. So many genuinely terrible church secretaries and/or staff. I don’t think people understand how terrible it is for a parish to have the person with some of the highest degree of contact with the outer world (e.g. people who don’t normally go to Mass trying to get married in the Church or their kids baptized) — be some combination of incompetent and/or malevolent. Not to mention the damage to regular parishioners trying to make things happen.
This intersects with two things I've been thinking about lately.
The first is the ancient tension between witness and institution - any organization will behave like an organization even if it is a church. It will necessarily include both good and bad people. If you ever had a clandestine service, like during Covid, you'll feel that spiritual awakening of the first Christians. However, rebellion isn't scalable or durable. Religious that survive get organized, and that means secretaries.
Which brings me to the other thing I've been thinking about: petty tyrants. They thrive in environments of low accountability. Documentation and consequences are their kryptonite. I wrote a post about them here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cosmonaut/p/petty-tyrants?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=qazlr
Gluestick Mechahitler is gold!
"With time, it has gone from an older, more moderate parish to becoming younger and more traditionally minded."
Ah, my brother...remember when that was the other way around? God is on His throne and He will win.
I'm a Protestant myself, but it seems that young Christians of all denominations hunger for God's truth over empty rhetoric and going through the motions. Hopefully a sign that our Lord's return is imminent...!
How did you sneak into our parish and meet our parish secretary?? There are some slight divergences in my experiences and your story, but it is the same story. The personal preferences and random whims of the secretary inflicted on generations of volunteers. That is, until they give up and leave. Beneficial organizations living in limbo, on edge, or just kicked out of spaces meant for the purpose because the secretary seems to be intent on turning the parish into a tomb. Who knows who lost out on sacraments due to disorganization or favoritism?
Priests come and go, but the parish secretary is forever in 2026. If she not a natural born nun, she very well maybe some strange narcissist type who will actively impede the life of the parish for decades. Parish secretary truly involves vocation. If we need ordinations to call it a vocation, then let's open it up to the permanent deaconate as first and main priority. At least it would give us a way to pay the deaconate and suits their role. Men can do administrative stuff, women only have a strange knack for it.
Meanwhile, our clerics never say a word or seemingly object to the obvious running of parishes by The Woman We Pray Should Have Been a Nun(TM). It appears clerics with degrees, the backing of the Church and the power of confecting a Eucharist are actively intimidated by the Parish Secretary that Must Be Obeyed. That I have no idea what to do with. I understand why they don't tackle it, but it's very frustrating from a lay view.
The Fix Everything switch. (I think it was El Gato Malo who referenced this first)
https://i.redd.it/0gkf4l4g5cxf1.jpeg (clean link even if it's reddit, I'm so old I remember when google was a useful search engine)
Thank you for writing this, Alan.
A maybe-related anecdote: I live in a city of 25,000 that's part of a large metro area. Some of the city staff have been working for many years on a bike trail extension, and they have been just wedded to an incredibly stupid design that will cost $20+ million and cut down several hundred old growth trees, for about a mile of trail. My hunch is that this design is appealing mostly because it allows lots of different people to pad their CVs: Parks gets a new recreational facility, and Transportation gets a higher multimodal score (and the residents get something to feel smug about, assuming they're not bothered by the cost).
Thankfully, we were able to persuade a majority of our city council to vote to kill the project, but there's so much bellyaching now that "we won't be regarded as a trusted regional partner anymore", "we've already spent $3 million on design", "we're going to lose our outside funding".