On January 14, 2021 at 4pm CET (7am PT, 10am ET) we hosted a webinar on Creating a Transparent Culture in the Catholic Church. The webinar was part of the series of webinars Building a Transparent & Accountable Church.
The Catholic Church has repeatedly and rightfully been accused of a lack of transparency. As the world’s oldest non-profit organization, indeed, the world’s oldest institution, she faces many challenges to adapt to current professional standards of financial transparency. This webinar defined what a transparent culture in the Church is, discussed the challenges, and considered specific environments in the Church.
Our guest was Cardinal George Pell, Prefect Emeritus, Secretariat for the Economy; Former Member, Council of Cardinal Advisers; Archbishop Emeritus, Sydney, Australia (Photo credit: Alexey Gotovskiy, CNA).
Fr. Robert Gahl (Vice Chair, Program of Church Management) and Pia de Solenni (President & Executive Director, Global Institute of Church Management) moderated the webinar.
Fr. Joel Pacquiao Agad and Chrisma Bangaoil, who participated in the second edition of the Program of Church Management (PCM) in Rome, developed and implemented with PCM’s support the Love the Poor Program, that feeds the poor both materially and spiritually. In fact, in many rural areas of the Diocese of Dipolog in the Philippines poor people work every day of the week to feed their families, including Sundays. This extreme material indigence is linked to spiritual poverty, as people are unable to access any form of spiritual nurturance or assistance.
Fr. Joel and Chrisma decided that “If the people can’t go to Church, we bring the Church to the people” and developed Love the Poor, which won first prize in the 2020 Capstone Projects Award. Capstone Projects are developed with the support of members of the faculty of the Program of Church Management, and are intended to help each participant address a particular problem related to his/her community of origin. Fr. Joel and Chrisma’s Love the Poor Program reaches out to every corner of the parish by bringing the Eucharist and the sacraments, by teaching children to make the sign of the cross and pray, and by feeding the poor. As Covid-19 protocols forbid public gatherings, Fr. Joel and Chrisma, along with all the volunteers, decided to organize street catechesis, because
“the Church cannot be asleep during a pandemic:
She needs to be all the more embracing, nurturing and available.”
Lately, the Philippines have not only been struck by the Covid-19 threat, but also by a deadly typhoon. Love the Poor is doing its best to help rebuild what was destroyed and bring hope to those who suffer, because, as Fr. Joel says,
“In our mission the Father has been our provider,
the Holy Spirit our strategist, and Jesus our model,
the blessed Virgin Mary, the saints and the angels our companions.”
This video gathers the testimony of many who benefitted from the project. The Program of Church Management is grateful to have had the occasion to help implementing this project, and hopes to inspire and support many similar projects within the Church in the future.
On October 8, 2020 we hosted a webinar on Recovering our Mission, in partnership with the Global Institute of Church Management. The webinar is part of a series of webinars on Building a Transparent & Accountable Church.
Many parishes have lost their missionary orientation and are no longer structured to meet the needs of the faithful. In light of the recently distributed instruction from the Congregation for Clergy, this webinar looks at movements like focolarini, charismatic, and others for inspiration. These movements are at the forefront of evangelizing the faithful and currently live and thrive across parish territories. In this webinar, we discussed:
What can we learn from these movements?
How can we transform parishes into “communities of communities”?
What is the new role of pastors in guiding the people of God in its entirety (priests, deacons, consecrated men and women, and the lay faithful) as the driving force of evangelization?
Our guests were:
Rev. Fr. Anthony Stoeppel
Vice-Rector and Director of Pastoral Year
St. Patrick's Seminary & University, CA
Formerly, Rev. Fr. Anthony Stoeppel served as Vicar General of the Diocese of Tyler and also as Chairman of the Parish & Mission Assistance Program and President of Bishop Thomas K. Gorman Catholic Schools, as well as pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish, a largely Spanish-speaking parish in the Diocese of Tyler. Fr. Stoeppel attended Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, and holds a Doctorate of Sacred Theology in the field of bioethics from Pontifical University of Santa Croce.
Michel Therrien
President and CEO
Preambula Group
Michel Therrien is President and CEO of Preambula Group, a lay apostolate serving the work of the New Evangelization in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He served as the President of the Institute for Pastoral Leadership in the Diocese of Pittsburgh as well as the Director of Evangelization. Prior to this, he served as a professor moral theology at the Augustine Institute in Denver, CO. He taught for seven years at St. Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, PA, also serving as Academic Dean from 2008-2012. He holds a B.A. in Theology from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, an M.A. in Theology and Christian Ministry from Franciscan University of Steubenville, a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, and a Doctorate in Fundamental Moral Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
Pia de Solenni
President and Executive Director
Global Institute of Church Management
Pia de Solenni, SThD, is a theologian, ethicist, and cultural analyst. She recently served as Chancellor of the Diocese of Orange, California, and Theological Advisor to the Bishop. Her work has appeared in various publications including The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Washington Post, National Catholic Reporter, Our Sunday Visitor, and National Review Online. She is also a consultant member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
On February 2020, Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr., Vice-Chair of the Program of Church Management, held a Lectio Magistralis on The Theological Foundations of Church Management. Here you may find a short summary and the full video of the Lectio.
Lectio Magistralis
Inaugural Lecture PCM 3rd Cohort
Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr.
February 10, 2020
The Program of Church Management offers at once a theological framework and the necessary skills to manage the Church – including the people, with their immortal souls, so as to most effectively achieve the Church’s aim: that Christ might rule in and through all things, to direct them to God the Father.
The Church is the longest standing business enterprise in history. The Mystical Body of Christ is a corporation, composed of the faithful of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the Church is a for-profit corporation that aims to win souls for Christ by means of wisely employing her temporal resources. The Church’s mission to save souls and to strive for sanctity, although supernatural and therefore to some extent intangible, may be measured through quantifiable indicators of spiritual goods: for example, baptisms, weddings, reception of Holy Communion, intensity of belief, witness of virtue and even processes of beatification. By measuring select indicators and standards, we can make interventions and verify before and after, so as to determine performance, always in view of making the most of the talents the Lord has given us.
The main objective of PCM is not to make managers out of those who participate, but to free up the participants, especially the clergy, from their time spent in the office so as to dedicate more time to the sacramental ministry, on account of being able to more effectively entrust and delegate to the lay faithful.
Another aim of the Program is that the Church might be exemplary for the implementation of Catholic Social Teaching: just wages, transparency, subsidiarity, solidarity, competence, overcoming corruption, freedom and autonomy of workers. All of these principles need to be implemented in an exemplary fashion and through a spiritual perspective while at once elevated by grace in Christ.
Pope Francis teaches that we are living an historical moment of epochal change. To achieve the reform of holiness, each of us baptized must tell the story of Christ with our lives so that the Church may eloquently express the divine comedy by all of her daughters and sons living together the mystery of Christ as characters in a story on the stage of the world performing anew the divine comedy that is the Paschal mystery. Pope Francis challenges us by explaining that “the Gospel, the living book of God’s mercy... must be continually read and reread.” Even though the Gospel still has “many blank pages left. It remains an open book that we are called to write in the same style, by the works of mercy we practice. … What are the pages of your books like? Are they blank? May the Mother of God help us in this. May she… give us the grace to be living writers of the Gospel.”
Now, if this is true of us individually – that each of us are characters in a great story and that we’ve been chosen by God to write the Book of life – it’s also true of us as a community, as an organization, as a Church. Our mission and identity should be a story which indicates that we’re on a journey enlightened by the Gospel.
Saint John Paul II drew some implications for Church governance from Vatican II to emphasize that clergy are ordained to serve and thereby proposed what I like to call “inversion of hierarchy”. While still Archbishop of Krakow, John Paul wrote that “kingship, whether natural or supernatural, are comprised in human and Christian morality. Both of them constitute the very root of that morality” (Sources of Renewal.) John Paul elucidated Vatican II’s powerful proposal to overcome clericalism by turning upside down the worn out idea that laity are called to serve the hierarchy. Consequently, the Program of Church Management proposes to offer effective skills to live one’s vocation with accountability to the whole Church and the spirit of poverty so that we should all make the best use of the limited resources and the unlimited, supernatural resources, in order to achieve the unlimited aim of the Church. If we’re looking for an ethics of Church management it should be an ethics of kingship. Such kingship requires three components: 1) zeal and hunger for the kingdom, 2) a personal life of authenticity by living out the life of Christ in our personal situation, and 3) enacting the kingship of Christ through our lives by letting Him rule in and through us and our institutions.
Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John reports the following words of Jesus that are crucial for implementing best management practices in Church affairs: “The light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.” We must counteract the sad rejection of the light. We want to accept Jesus and His light in the most exemplary and paradigmatic way in and through Church institutions, so that nothing is hidden with respect to the Church’s management of her temporal goods.
In Christ, with our love for the Church, we want the Church to be resplendent with beauty and to be the paragon of justice and transparency which lets the light of Christ shine, as actively and heroically portrayed by Our Blessed Mother, Mary.
