When They're Not Listening

Bureaucracy Means Spiritual Death, Even From Those Who are Well-Meaning

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In the film “Up in the Air”, George Clooney plays a transient employee of a firm hired by mega-corporations for the unpleasant task of laying off employees. In the opening scenes, he is enjoying his job, but realizes as the film progresses how isolating and demeaning his work is, both to himself and to the people he is tasked with firing. The film emphasized the need for the messiness of human interactions over the shallowness of transactional relationships. It was designed to be a warning against the indifference and callousness of people who were “just doing business” and the emptiness of a world with no actual connections. It showed how inhuman corporate structures could become without realizing it. Unfortunately, the Church hierarchy took the film as an instruction manual.

Like many Dioceses in the United States, we are looking at mass church closings on the horizon, likely to hit a third of our parishes. Due to the steady drop in mass attendees since the 1970s, the cratering of weddings and baptisms, and the massive drop in vocations, many churches need to close for the Diocese to remain financially sustainable. They are treating it like in most Dioceses in the United States, as a financial and logistics issue that needs to be addressed. The drop in vocations and parish life just happened, like the weather, and the bureaucracy has to ensure its assets are fiscally sound.

When the possible closure of our church was announced, we were told of upcoming “listening sessions” where parishioners can ask questions and make appeals to the Diocese. Like many others, I signed up for one in the evening last week. I already understood the meeting was likely kayfabe. My experience working in corporate America made me cognizant of the playbook. I knew they couldn’t look callous and had to give the impression of listening to the sheep, but I assumed the decision had already been made.

When a manager talks to his employees and assures them no firings are on the horizon, it means you better get your resume up to date. When there is an “open dialogue” session with upper management, it will be used against you. I worked in a corporation with such an “open” dialogue approach, with a question and answer for our new president. An employee asked the reasonable question of how the company expects top talent to stay when they are underpaid based on industry standards. She gave a canned answer and then, behind closed doors, badmouthed the employee and wanted him gone. Even with this typical back-biting and political politicking, there were people in the organization talking to their employees. We weren’t given even that courtesy.

When I arrived, the activities hall was packed, largely with the elderly. Bad optics. The average age of our parish was actually younger than the diocesan average but large families don’t have the bandwidth to attend meetings like this. A woman stood up front I had never seen before, and with good reason. She was a representative of the “Catholic Leadership Institute”, a consulting firm that specializes in assisting Church organizations. She never lived in the Diocese and had nothing to do with the restructuring plans she was presenting. Her sole job was to be flown across the country to facilitate these “listening sessions”. She was literally the George Clooney character.

Even their logo is corporate slop

We were told that the session would comprise of a video from the bishop, then the head of the restructuring, and then a summary of why the changes were necessary. Then we would get the proposals and go into small groups to discuss them. Finally, there would be an opening for questions with a 30-minute hard-stop.

The videos were the typical sanitized pablum that is offensive in its inoffensiveness, the sort of media that goes through five committees and comes out so bereft of human touch it makes technical documents sound outright warm and human by comparison. We spent 45 minutes listening to our Church leaders tell how they heard and understood our concerns while reading from a script they didn’t bother to write. While the videos were real, one got the sort of “uncanny valley” sense you feel with AI where something seems off, when the words don’t match the facial expressions, when you understand something strange and inhuman about the production but can’t pinpoint exactly where. This strange inhumanity is a consequence of our managerial system, and its tentacles have reached every avenue of the Church.