Corporation Sole: The American Catholic Roots of our American Catholic Mess
“Corporation Sole”
The American Catholic Roots of our American Catholic Mess
This began as a sermon I did not want to deliver. I had been debating whether I should talk about the abuse crisis or dodge it somehow. At my age I definitely did not want to talk about it. It’s very painful. And I especially did not want to go into my understanding of where it came and comes from, which I fear could be painfully accurate. But watching the funeral of John McCain I figured that I too, had to go public with my protests. No introverted intellectual wants to do that. But it’s time.
I am a journalist. And an editor. My tendency is to give an editorial. But editorials are just another form of moralizing. And more moralizing about sex is the last thing we need. To begin with it is one of the laziest of human enterprises, and here it is even irrelevant. Because sexual abuse is not about sex. It is about aggression. Even more it is about the culture of aggression – our very American culture of aggression. And it is about a singularly American Catholic control structure that promotes aggression, and in a deceitful way - parading it as proper churchmanship. Note that I say a structure – not an attitude, not a practice. An American legal structure that has become central to the daily life and administration of the church here in the U.S. It comes in two words – “corporation sole.” And it has become at least as central to the administration of the church as the code of canon law, if not even more so.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Back to moralizing for a moment. Religious people moralize endlessly about sex. Those parades and charades are not purposeless. They are a way to avoid dealing with what may well be the worst of our American flaws – our culture of aggression. Talk about sex all the time and you don’t have to deal with the aggressive abuse that is so widespread and which is now on such prominent display right at the very top of American life today.
Just above I said that abuse is about aggression, not sex. That doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t come into play in aggression. It does. Often, and when it does we call it abuse and rape. Abuse and rape are recognized crimes of aggression. Of late we have all become painfully aware how sexual aggression sets the tone at the top of our national life. From the president to the heads of our financial institutions to the world of entertainment and sports and businesses, aggressive men have set a tone of abuse at the top levels of our society.
These problems are not only personal issues. And I emphasis this because our common and narrow moralizing is so individually focused. Moralize about abuse and it gets turned into a personal problem. And that allows us to bypass what we don’t want to talk about – the fact that the aggression is written very profitably right into our institutions’ structures.
Religions have structures. And that is what I want to talk about here – the ways aggression has been written into our American religious structures. For the real problem in the American Catholic Church is not that it is Catholic. It is that it is American. Our problem here is a very home bred, very American Catholic problem. And it has a history – a very American history. The history recounts the origin of the institutional control system that was written into the American dioceses when they were set up in our big immigrant cities starting after the Civil War.
This means going back to our Catholic, immigrant people and their extraordinary linguistic diversity. Starting back in the 1870s and 1880s most Catholic immigrants weren’t English speaking. Most of the parishes that they set up were not English speaking. What were they? Polish, Slovak, German, Italian, Lithuanian, French, Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian, Spanish, Ruthenian, Austrian, Portuguese, Maronite, Ukrainian.
When they got here these different Catholic immigrant peoples established their own national communities and built their own churches. Many brought their own clergy with them. Back in the late 1980’s I actually worked in one of these early immigrant parishes. When Peter Steinfels went from Commonweal to the New York Times, and Peggy Steinfels went from Church Magazine to Commonweal I got a call to come to New York to edit Church. I arrived down in the Lower East Side to find that my office was a small, upstairs room in the old convent of the first Sicilian church in Lower Manhattan – Our Lady of Loreto on the corner of Elizabeth and Bleeker Street. The convent was a converted tenement. It had been Martin Scorsese’s parish – but long since disestablished. The tiny still-used convent chapel had the original Sicilian statues, real clothes, black hair and all.
I mention this because the different immigrants brought very different traditions, and their local, family based, religious traditions with them. Growing up in New Jersey I looked forward to celebrating the ‘feasts’ with Italian friends – they were so festive and such fun. These immigrant communities also brought their own, different, locally bred, and very important systems of authority and control with them. Obviously the adapting and re-adapting that was written right into generations of coping with their often painful histories came with them to America.
When they got here they had to plant legal roots for their local communities. It wasn’t difficult. Churches here could organize legally. In the Eastern states the legal base often was ownership in the hands of a few trustees whom they selected to be in charge. Often three trustees. My Uncle John was a trustee of our New Jersey parish church when it was started back a hundred years ago.
But this local autonomy was a problem for the bishops. The English speaking bishops – mostly Irish – had no control over these foreigners. The bishops saw themselves as bishops the way that bishops were bishops in Ireland. And in Ireland the Catholic bishops had a lot of local power – power that came from their association with the British government. It was all part of a shady deal. The Brits would protect the Roman church from the French. And in return the Roman church would keep its hands off British control of Ireland. In the concrete this meant that the British government got to have a real hand in choosing the Irish bishops.
The America that the Catholic immigrants came to was big city America: New York, Boston, Philadelphia and later on, Chicago. Cities run by machine politics, often Irish Catholic political machines like Tammany Hall in New York. These had perfected the art of strong-handed, top-down control. In that context these Irish bishops fit in comfortably.
So how did they deal with this autonomous, local trustee system? They got rid of it. But that meant coming up with a replacement, obviously one more to their liking. Which they did. And for that they didn’t have to look too far. There was an already-existing, central control system ready and waiting. It was a sort of minor, off-on-the-side system, used sometimes for museums or schools. Some protestant churches already used it. Two words. Corporation sole.
Corporation sole is a single office, and an incorporated office. It is a corporate office that is occupied by a single natural person. That was perfect for total control because, in making that the legal structure for a diocese, it meant that the bishop could be the single person – the ‘sole’ – who “occupied the corporation”. Total control. Total ownership. The bishop, as long as he was the bishop, was the corporation sole. In effect an absolute monarch in his diocese. The diocese and all its church and lands could be incorporated as parts of the corporation sole. So, on paper and in law, he is the owner and controller of everything. And that is the system we have here now. So, who owns the local parish, convent, school? The owner is listed as “the Roman Catholic bishop of wherever, a corporation sole.” That is the form we find everywhere. And this is also why it is the bishops who get sued all the time – they’re the ones with all the money.
Now the rest here is editorial – or at least admittedly editorial. This system does unite administrative authority and financial control in one person. And it can be, and has been, a means for fast and decisive action. And in the past the church in the United States was built large and fast using that structure. You could make a good argument that it was put to work successfully.
But it has also proven to be a recipe for disaster – the disaster we are dealing with now. As in all totalitarian structures there is no accountability required of the people in charge, other than to their own consciences. In the process of protecting the man at the top from any attack on his position or power the system also takes away any real authority of people down the line to address personnel issues they see on the local level. In the process of protecting the absolute power of the ‘corporation sole’ the current American church system denies any possibility of a separate group with the legally stated power – legal power independent of the bishop – to handle serious problems. For if you set one up a system of accountability independent of the man in charge then he, too, could also be accountable to it. And it is to protect the man on top from any real kind of personal accountability to his people that we have the mess we have.
President Trump is being accused these days of wanting to set up a structured system that he, himself, will be able to control. Well, in our diocesan churches we’ve already got it. That old American corporate structure called corporation sole. Our problems of totalitarian control here are not essentially Catholic, they’re American. They don’t exist in Europe, largely because people like Napoleon and Garibaldi and a line of Hapsburgs saw to it. But here, putting St. Francis of Assisi in charge of this system couldn’t make it good. It reflects our very American love of power and control. And it reflects our disdain of accountability. Our system – which is under our American control – has the man in charge accountable only to his own conscience. And that has proven to be a recipe for disaster. At least in the old Soviet system that I came to know so well, the man on top today always knew that he could end up tomorrow in Siberia – or face down on the floor of that single and solitary, dirt-floored cell in the Vilnius KGB prison where I did so much work.
Whatever the psychic or situational forces or histories that led men into abusing children, their actual behavior puts them into a category of American men that is very large. Men with public power and authority and effective freedom from accountability who used that power aggressively to subject people of little or no power to their lusts. I think it is a waste of time to address the problem by psychoanalyzing them, or praying for them, or lapsing into whatever alas, alas, alack is the current, finger-waving spiritual nostrum. Whatever we do we still have to change the system that exempts them and their superiors from accountability. And for us in the church it means at least replacing this corporation sole business with something more rational.
David K. O’Rourke 9-26-18
