Thomas Reese reports on efforts to reform the Vatican Bank Institute of Religious Works and makes a point that may take away the entire premise of the church’s social teaching:
No one enters the seminary with the desire to someday be in charge of church finances. Rather, seminarians want to become pastors. Seminaries also do not do a good job training their students to handle church finances. Priests who do develop expertise in church finances do so on the job. It would be extremely rare to find a priest who took an accounting course, let alone one who has an MBA.
As a result, most priests do not understand basic financial practices. They don’t know the right questions, let alone the right answers. At the same time, clericalism means that they have to be in charge of everything. Even if they want to delegate these financial responsibilities to laypeople, they do not know enough to appoint competent people. The temptation is to appoint someone who is deferential or appears pious and trustworthy.
Granted their ignorance of finances, it is no surprise that priests do not do a good job managing church finances.
Do seminarians receive training in international relations, political science, or public health? Why draw the line with finances? After all, when Roman Catholics have a health problem, they go to a physician (for the most part — there is Lourdes after all) not to a priest doctor. And if they have a legal problem, they hire an attorney, not a priest or bishop. So why draw the line with priests? And if priests are ill-equipped to teach in an informed way about society’s problem, how about the bishops? Do they have to study for a Ph.D. in world studies before being promoted? So why do church officials feel compelled to speak what seems like all the time about the news? Isn’t the point of modernity and the differentiation of human existence according to diverse spheres of operation that no one has the competence to speak meaningfully about everything (unless you are a modern w-wist)?
Chalk up another one for the spirituality of the church.
Old Life 
Could not all this be applied to the PCA-ish bishopric of Manhattan as well?
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cw, from your modem to the lady with the planet’s biggest b-s detector.
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If there is a master of ecclesiastical weltanschauung would it not be Rome with the addition of seven more “deadly sins” to their list 5-6 years ago (which are more than reinforced by their latest bishop)?
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Good find.
I have long wondered the same thing about the various issues that arise in the Culture Wars. I was looking over the list of speakers at the SBC’s upcoming conference on issues surrounding gender identity. There is a litany of research in the fields of sociology and social psychology related to gender identity. And since the mid-1990s, much of it gives a fair bit of credence to what Christians have traditionally advocated. Still, of the 25-or-so speakers at the event, none are sociologists or social psychologists with an expertise in issues related to gender identity (even though there are a fair number of such people whose views are not hostile to traditional Christian views). In fact, few of the speakers have earned doctorates from explicitly evangelical sectarian institutions.
There are about 5-6 seminarians who attend my PCA church. Despite attending a “top” evangelical seminary, they’re all of fairly middling intellect. A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing the passing of Gary Becker. Not one of these guys had any clue who Gary Becker was. In a way, this is fine: They’re not going to seminary to become economists. But I wonder whether this will stop them from pontificating on things related to economics. Knowing these guys, I doubt it.
A friend of mine, who has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, recently remarked: “I think all of this Christian worldview stuff is nothing more than a kind of affirmative action for intellectually mediocre guys with degrees from otherwise obscure evangelical seminaries.”
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I means to say the following…
Still, of the 25-or-so speakers at the event, none are sociologists or social psychologists with an expertise in issues related to gender identity (even though there are a fair number of people in those fields whose views are not hostile to traditional Christian views). In fact, few of the speakers have earned doctorates from schools that are not explicitly evangelical sectarian institutions.
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Bobby, perhaps, but the OL take seems to have it cornered–intellectual pietism. At least with this there is no judgment about intellectual abilities of worldviewers and paradigmers, just the observation that it’s another instance of religion swallowing up all of life. Even intellectual stalwarts fall for it.
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More evidence that RCCs don’t read their bibles and could use married men in the pasorate:
He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?
1 Tim 3:4-5
Apparently the kind of education the apostle thinks (most) men need who will be running the church is the very education the RCC forbids.
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“I think all of this Christian worldview stuff is nothing more than a kind of affirmative action for intellectually mediocre guys with degrees from otherwise obscure evangelical seminaries.”
As an inauspicious layman who has also never heard of Gary Becker, I’ve wanted to say the same sometimes but I’m unsure it’s really the problem. There’s no solution to be found in prominent, mainline seminaries nor in courting the accomplished intellectuals from the literary world or Silicon Valley or wherever to come save the confessionalists.
Mission creep (per Zrim’s suggestion) still sounds like the best diagnosis. I suspect some of the worldview popularity is also rooted in internet populism. Take an unaccomplished guy with an unremarkable job, add Bahnsen and wikipedia for some technical vocabulary, register a blog or get him behind a pulpit, and you have a superapologist defending the faith from every attack he can imagine in every field he can imagine. It’s kind of like porn for careers.
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Isn’t the point of modernity and the differentiation of human existence according to diverse spheres of operation that no one has the competence to speak meaningfully about everything (unless you are a modern w-wist)?
Chalk up another one for the spirituality of the church.
“Spirituality”[there’s a loaded/empty word]–via Aquinas’ right reason– leaves Catholic social science still standing athwart history yelling “stop.” It just needs a few lessons in natural law, in this case how modern economics works. Arguments from natural law are not solely a priori–they by definition subject themselves to proof in the real world for their validity.
Although your narrative is the usual bleat vs. “Constantinism,” the Church has seldom achieved unity with the state–as often at odds with it [Henry II/Thomas Becket] as in league with it. Indeed, Luther himself was a useful tool for the German princes to confiscate Catholicism and owed much of his success to that politics, not his theology.
As for the “spheres,” in between the church and the state lies the sphere of “society.” In a theocracy, the church dominates it; in modernity, the state does.
Hobby Lobby. R2K.
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@Mike
I’m not sure that anyone’s looking for literary scholars, organizational economists, or lawyers to save the Confessionalist ship. I’d simply be happy if guys who barely passed the Hebrew course in their MDiv program would resist the temptation to presume that their “Christian worldview” allows them to know more about literature than Harold Bloom, more about economics than Oliver Williamson, and more about law than Richard Posner.
Maybe it’s mission creep. But I see a fair bit of intellectual arrogance at play as well.
Who plans an entire multi-day program on homosexuality and forgets to invite a single speaker who has any expertise in gender identity? What’s next? A multi-day seminar on quantum physics that includes no physicists on the speaker list? These folks wonder why the culture mocks them, and presumes that the mockery results from the offense of the gospel. Nothing could be further from the truth. The mockery results from the crass ignorance that, under the aegis or worldviewism, is repackaged as wisdom.
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So how do you tell if the Social Teaching of the Church is what the pope opines or what Christ and the apostles communicated orally to their successors? If priests are not supposed to get personal, where does Francis find within the deposit of the faith anything about global warming?
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