Holy Ghost in the Catholic Machine: Spirit–Structure Tensions in Parish Preaching Work

By J. E. Sigler

Books on Catholic preaching from theological, biblical, rhetorical, and mechanical angles abound. This book is nothing like those.

Using interviews with thirty-nine parish priests, Sigler exposes the deep roots of the Catholic preaching problem in the church's own organizational structures, revealing how seminary education, working conditions, parish norms, and even beliefs about God constrain priests from preaching well. Along the way, three preacher profiles emerge, capturing the array of preaching-related ambivalence, exhaustion, frustration, and anxiety that plague the vast majority of priests.

Thankfully, not every priest suffers. Through the example of one preacher profile, Sigler shows how priests who fully embrace their cooperation with the Spirit in preaching steer clear of the preaching-related pressures and tensions that grind so many of their brother preachers down. Exploring these priests' exceptional approaches to their vocational identities, day-to-day parish work, and relationships with the Spirit provides every other priest with surprisingly practical guidance for finding peace in preaching.

In the voices of priests that fill these pages, a rare conversation about the cold, hard realities of preaching in the Catholic Church begins. Out of their vast experience, intriguing disagreements, and profound insights, Holy Ghost in the Catholic Machine draws hope for better preaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385200054

J. E. Sigler

J. E. Sigler earned her PhD in Organizational Communication from Purdue University, specializing in work and vocation, particularly how organizational structures influence people's experience of work. Her research has been published in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, the Journal of Communication and Religion, and the Journal of Media and Religion. She currently lives in Falls Church, Virginia, where she conducts research on employees' experience of work and organizations' efforts to improve that experience. To view a 1-hour webinar summarizing her book Holy Ghost in the Catholic Machine, click here. Her work on vocational discernment was featured at the Virginia Tech TEDx conference in 2013. View her talk here. For a more in-depth discussion of further research from her interviews with nuns, view her 2016 webinar for the Christianity & Communication Studies Network here.

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Introduction

Sometime in the spring of 2011, I showed up for Mass one Sunday at a Catholic Church on the East Coast of the United States. Not being Catholic, not much struck me, because everything was new. In the months that followed, however, as I grew familiar with the order of the Mass, one thing began to stand out to me: the preaching. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that, in August of that year, I began teaching public speaking at a university. I still remember one of my mentors, a veteran public speaking teacher who was also Catholic, saying to me that first semester, I can’t help but grade preachers—and I rarely give a priest higher than a ‘C’. I recall drawing two lessons from this comment at the time: First, that eventually, I wouldn’t be able to turn off the public speaking teacher inside me; second, that Catholic preaching really was as bad as I thought it was.

A year later, when I converted to Catholicism, my mentor’s unintended prophecy had already come true: I couldn’t turn it off anymore. Listening to Catholic preaching grated on me. It was unbearable. It was shameful. It made one question whether God was actually speaking to these people. And in a Church I had just embraced as my new home, that really hurt. So I started to think about why Catholic preaching was so bad, and if there was anything I could do to make it better. Over the next few years, as I proceeded to a doctoral program and began considering dissertation topics, Catholic preaching kept coming back to mind. I was, after all, now a daily Mass-goer, more familiar than even most cradle Catholics

¹

with the depth and breadth of the badness of Catholic preaching. But I still didn’t know quite how to approach the problem academically.

Then, in the summer of 2015, I had a phone conversation with my friend T. who, at the time, worked in a Catholic diocesan office

²

in the Midwest. When I mentioned that several priests I’d emailed had never responded, she went on a twenty-five-minute rant about how the men applying for seminary today (through her diocesan office) have no regard for deadlines, no sense of responsibility, no concept of basic professional courtesy. We agreed that if either of us, in our previous professional jobs, had behaved as irresponsibly as some of these men do, there would have been serious negative professional consequences for us. But these men expected—and experienced—none.

When I reflected on that conversation, however, I was less impressed by the details of the various frustrating behaviors of aspiring seminary students and priests than I was by the assumptions that T. and I made: We, lay Catholics, expect Catholic priests to behave like professionals. Why do we do that? Are we right to think of priests as essentially duty-bound office-holders rather than in some more spiritual way? How do priests think of themselves?

Having chosen as my doctoral specialty the sub-fields of work and vocation, there suddenly occurred to me an angle on the preaching problem that, to my knowledge, nobody had ever explored: preaching not as rhetorical artifact or communicative encounter between speaker and listener, but as work. As it seemed to me, lightbulbs went off and angels sang because, after all, what had I been doing silently in my pew for the last four years but thinking, "What the hell did he do to prepare?!" I had, without realizing it over the years, collected a thousand answers to that question—all mere guesses that I now saw opportunity to test empirically.

Of course, having been in the Church four years at this point, I was intimately familiar with the consequences of the Catholic priest shortage from the laity’s side, and I could imagine what it must mean on the priest’s side. So I knew that there must be some structural constraints on the priest’s preaching work, and being interested in structuration theory (ST),

³

I thought that perhaps might help me to explore the problem. But what structures would I talk about?

Around this time I took a course in the philosophy and theology of work and vocation with the eminently open-minded Dr. Thomas Ryba, who permitted me to read sociologists like Durkheim and Weber. I liked Durkheim, but I loved Weber, and I found in his encyclopedic Economy and Society (E&S) frequent reference to the Catholic Church. More importantly, I found reference to the Church not just in one section, but in almost every section: on charisma, both pure and office; on patriarchalism and patrimonialism; and on bureaucracy. I understood very quickly from these references that the Catholic Church, on account of its unusual age, endurance, and commitment to tradition, is almost unique in the way it has accumulated structures over the centuries, simply adding new ones onto old ones without ever really cleaning house.

This means that, in the modern Catholic Church, multiple—and potentially conflicting—structures all co-exist in the same organization. Specifically, as Weber defines them, there are three distinct ideal types of structures, based on three distinct types of authority: the charismatic, the traditional, and the rational-legal.

⁴

Charismatic authority, which is based upon the personal charisma or character of an individual, is very unstable and so resistant to institutionalization. When charismatic authority does institutionalize, it typically (or at least, historically) morphs into traditional authority, which is based upon traditional beliefs and customs, such as in patrimonialism (exemplified in medieval feudalism). Rational-legal authority, on the other hand, is founded upon a large and well-developed body of legal (or organizational) rules, and is exemplified by modern bureaucracy.

⁵

Of course, Weber’s ideal types are just that: ideal, not likely to ever be found in their pure forms in the real world. They are, as Weber says, a scientifically formulated pure type. . . of a common phenomenon,

⁶

an abstract methodological construct without which theoretical differentiation is impossible, even though it is probably seldom if ever that a real phenomenon can be found which corresponds exactly to one of these ideally constructed pure types.

⁷

Indeed, as Weber points out, the more perfect the ideal type becomes as a theoretical construct—that is, the more useful it is to theorists—the more unlikely it is to ever exist in reality.

⁸

But mixtures of these forms, says Weber, are exceedingly common. And the Catholic Church, much as it may appear from its official hierarchy to be purely bureaucratic, is in fact itself a complex blend of all three types of authority. Certainly the Church has, like all bureaucracies, official jurisdictional areas

⁹

in the form of dioceses. It assigns official duties to bishops, priests, deacons, and other diocesan and parish staff, and [t]he authority to give commands required for the discharge of these duties is distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules

¹⁰

written in the Church’s Code of Canon Law (CCL). Canon law also makes clear the Church’s rigid hierarchy, entrance into which requires thorough training in a field of specialization

¹¹

—four to eight years for a priest, depending on whether he entered seminary with or without previous education in philosophy.

But in addition to these bureaucratic features, the Church calls its head pope or papa—father, as in the head of a giant, universal patrimonial household. Indeed, the appointed servants in that household—bishops, priests, and deacons—do not exhibit an impersonal commitment to impersonal tasks, as does the bureaucrat, but rather a servant’s loyalty based on a strictly personal relationship to the ruler and on an obligation of fealty.

¹²

The most numerous and visible of these personal papal servants, the parish priest, does not specialize in some area of knowledge or competence, but is rather a generalist with basic knowledge and skill in all things Church: from parish administration to administration of the sacraments, from public teaching and preaching of the Gospel to one-on-one private pastoral counseling. In all these tasks, the good parish priest is guided not just by bureaucratic rules and procedures, but by centuries of Church tradition.

Then again, the spirit inspiring the priest’s work—and the whole Church throughout the world—is neither bureaucratic nor patrimonial, but distinctly charismatic. Many clerics will never have a personal relationship with the pope, but will base their patrimonial-esque loyalty instead on their intensely personal relationship with the Church’s original charismatic founder: Jesus Christ Himself. Like other charismatic followers, they will offer up their personal will and right to direct their own lives, their opportunity to marry and have children, all for the sake of following Him. As a result of their choice, they will acquire a magical ability to make Heaven forget sins and to turn bread and wine into flesh and blood, even to stand in persona Christi—that is, as Christ Himself here on Earth. And like Christ Himself, they will preach a revolutionary message in an attempt to overthrow the dominant world order one human heart at a time.

These charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic organizational structures function according to extremely different logics or rationalities, as Weber calls them. Charismaticism tends to function according to affectual rationality, in which action is determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states.

¹³

Action in a patrimonial organization is typically determined by ingrained habituation,

¹⁴

that is, according to traditional rationality. In a bureaucracy, action is most often instrumentally rational, meaning it’s determined by a purely pragmatic calculation of the chances of success or benefit for the organization. These different rationalities, like the structures in which they manifest, may also be mixed. Indeed, Weber argues that not just organizations but even an individual decision or action may draw upon more than one of these rationalities at the same time.

So what does one in a mixed organization do when one’s personal feelings incline one to do x, tradition suggests that y is the only option, and a pragmatic calculation says z is really the optimal course of action? In the Catholic Church, where the charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic all exist together with their sharply divergent rationalities, such a quandary seems distinctly possible. In fact, Church members may find themselves in quite regular tension about which structure or rationality to draw upon at any given time—just as T. and I did in our conversation of priests as bureaucratic professionals . . . or personal papal servants . . . or are they Christ Himself on Earth?

Surely T. and I are not the only Catholics who feel caught between our bureaucratic expectations of service and professionalism and our more-patrimonial/-charismatic understandings of priests’ role. In fact, such tensions may exist in any organization with mixed structures which, as Weber says, is all organizations.

¹⁵

And they may exist not just between an organization’s internal and external stakeholders, but especially for the internal stakeholders themselves as they seek to organize their work at the nexus

¹⁶

of seemingly contradictory organizational structures.

As soon as I realized that the Church is less of a perfectly, intentionally, logically organized single structure and more of a historic patchwork of structures that might be a bit of a mess, I saw how structuration theory (ST)

¹⁷

might come back into play. After all, structuration theorists have a name for conflicting structures: structurational divergence (SD).

¹⁸

SD is a widespread organizational problem, manifesting as recurrent cycles of unresolved conflict rooted in incompatible meaning structures.

¹⁹

As a concept, it’s divisible into two distinct components: (1) an invisible SD nexus,

²⁰

created by the conflicting structures themselves, and (2) a visible SD cycle, which is a downward communication spiral stemming from the SD nexus.

²¹

Though the concept of SD is founded upon ST, it extends that theory’s focus on the relationship between structures and individuals by highlighting one way in which individuals’ agency can be usurped by structures: by causing a kind of chronic paralysis in organizational members ruled by multiple competing structures. In so doing, SD research responds to decades of scholarly charges that ST overemphasizes individual agency and downplays structural power.

²²

At the same time, it potentially provides a more meaningful explanation for surface-level

²³

phenomena that have been much studied, but which are often merely symptoms of deeper problems in organizations. For example, SD research has posited that role conflict, dialectical tensions, and even interpersonal and organizational conflict are distinct from, but common outcomes of SD that may often be better understood—and more thoroughly resolved—if looked at through the lens of SD.

²⁴

So I wondered: Could bad preaching be a symptom of SD? It seemed likely, and it was certainly a more interesting hypothesis than, Priests preach badly because they’re so pressed for time. After four years of daily Mass, I was quite certain there was more to the Catholic preaching problem than that. And so I made the goal of this study to explore SD in the Catholic Church’s charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic structures, particularly as these manifest (and maybe diverge) in preaching.

I began as we begin now, with a thorough review of the three Weberian structures, including the process by which charisma becomes institutionalized. I then move to describe these same structures first in the Catholic Church in general and then in the Catholic priesthood specifically, focusing on the priest’s seminary education, orientation to his priestly office, institutional position between bishop and laity, and his preaching work. On this latter subject I delve into its relationship with study and prayer, as well as the accountability structures priests face in preaching and common teachings they imbibe about ethos in preaching—an important subject because it concerns the personal, which is embraced by charismatic and to some degree even patrimonial structures but thoroughly rejected by bureaucratic ones. I then overview the concept of SD more thoroughly and provide evidence from empirical studies of the Church that SD is a likely problem not just in the Church in general but in the priesthood and even preaching specifically. I close chapter 1 with a review of what we learn from existing literature.

In chapter 2, I pose three research questions, then describe the methods that I used to select and recruit participants, to design and conduct the interviews I held with them, and to analyze the data generated. Thereafter I present a very brief overview of this study’s thirty-eight findings, beginning with three preacher profiles—two ideal types and one real, more average type—to help familiarize you with the various ways priests do preaching work before launching into more-complex discussion of these practices.

The more-complex discussion spans chapters 3 through 7 and covers nine major themes, twenty-two categories, and four threads that touch multiple themes and categories.

In chapter 8, I revisit the three research questions presented previously to provide a more-succinct and -direct overview of how my findings answer them. I also draw some general conclusions about how SD does in fact appear to manifest in Catholic preaching and which specific preaching practices seem to exacerbate and mitigate it. Finally, I state the limitations of my study.

In chapter 9, I turn to a discussion of some very practical suggestions for the Church on how to go about improving preaching, advice I address specifically to seminaries, bishops, preachers, listeners, and creators of Catholic preaching content. I end with my study’s theoretical contributions and suggestions for where other scholars may fill in the gaps I unintentionally left as well as how they might extend my work in the realms of SD research, Catholic studies, and preaching scholarship—after all of which I conclude very briefly, thanks be to God.

1

. A colloquial phrase for Catholics who were born in the Church—or more accurately, who were baptized as babies and raised in Catholic families, in contradistinction to converts to the Faith.

2

. The central office of a Catholic diocese, where the bishop and his staff conduct their operations.

3

. See Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory; Giddens, The Constitution of Society.

4

. Weber, E&S,

9

.

5

. See Lounsbury and Carberry, From King to Court Jester.

6

. Weber, E&S,

9

.

7

. Weber, E&S,

20

.

8

. Weber, E&S,

21

.

9

. Weber, E&S,

956

10

. Weber, E&S,

956

.

11

. Weber, E&S,

958

.

12

. Weber, E&S,

1030

.

13

. Weber, E&S,

25

.

14

. Weber, E&S,

25

.

15

. See Weber, E&S.

16

. Nicotera et al., Conceptualization and Measurement,

362

.

17

. See Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory; Giddens, The Constitution of Society.

18

. See Nicotera, Damned If I Do; Nicotera and Clinkscales, Understanding Organization; Nicotera and Clinkscales, Nurses at the Nexus; Nicotera and Mahon, Between Rocks and Hard Places; Nicotera et al., Communication that Builds Teams; Nicotera et al., Conceptualization and Measurement.

19

. Nicotera et al., Conceptualization and Measurement,

362

.

20

. Nicotera et al., Conceptualization and Measurement,

362

.

21

. Nicotera et al., Conceptualization and Measurement,

363

.

22

. See Poole and McPhee, Structuration Theory.

23

. Nicotera and Clinkscales, Nurses at the Nexus,

33

.

24

. See Nicotera and Clinkscales, Nurses at the Nexus.

1

The Ghost and the Machine

This chapter begins with an overview of the three Weberian structures central to this study—the (pure) charismatic, the patrimonial, and the bureaucratic—followed by an explanation of how pure charisma is transformed into office charisma via institutionalization. Thereafter I discuss these same structures as they exist in the Catholic Church, namely as a dominant patrimonial bureaucracy and a blend of pure and office charismas. I then discuss how these structures manifest in the priesthood, particularly in the priest’s seminary education, orientation to his priestly role, and institutional position between the bishop and the people. Turning to preaching specifically, I explain the relationships between study, prayer, and preaching, as well as who the priest is (and is not) accountable to for his preaching, and how the Church talks about ethos and the priest’s person versus his office in preaching. I then explain the concept of structurational divergence (SD) in general as well as in the Catholic Church, the priesthood, and Catholic preaching. Finally, I close with a very brief chapter summary.

Charisma, Patrimony, and Bureaucracy According to Max Weber

In his classic work Economy and Society (E&S), Max Weber discusses domination.

¹

In its Weberian sense, this concept does not have the negative connotation it does in common parlance, but refers simply to the authoritarian power of command

²

of those in charge, that is, to their ability to give orders and be obeyed. Weberian domination is manifest not only in simple, direct relationships of ruler to ruled but also in larger organizational or societal structures in which these persons are embedded. Because such structures exist to administer power and to regulate power relationships in general, their particular configurations—i.e., the specific way of distributing the powers of command

³

in them—both reveal and reinforce the bases of legitimacy on which rulers justify their rule. In other words, the ultimate grounds of the validity of a domination

⁴

are built into organizational structures themselves.

Weber identifies three pure ultimate grounds of validity for domination, or three ways by which authority figures justify their authority to those they rule. These are (1) personal charisma or heroic deeds of an individual; (2) community tradition; and (3) rational rules. These justifications of authority manifest in three pure types

⁵

of organizational structure: (1) the charismatic, (2) the patrimonial

⁶

, and (3) the bureaucratic. (See Table 1.) Within each of these structures, relationships are configured differently between the three primary parties to any domination: (1) the rulers or masters; (2) the apparatus,

⁷

being those who collaborate with rulers in administering power; and (3) the ruled masses, who wield no power themselves but simply obey rulers and their apparatus. Let’s look now in more detail at the relationships between these parties in each of the three pure types of domination.

Table 1: Weberian Structures and Their Grounds of Validity and Typical Rationalities

The Charismatic Structure

In a charismatic structure, the ruler is a single individual who is followed and obeyed because of some extraordinary personal charisma (gift) or past heroic deeds. Christ was a charismatic figure, as were Ghandi, the rulers of many primitive warrior tribes, modern cult leaders like Jim Jones, etc.

⁸

In such a configuration of power, all authority is strictly personal (as opposed to impersonal) and irrational (arising out of affect, religious or magical belief, etc., rather than human reason).

Because the charismatic ruler is himself the bearer of the base of authority (i.e., of the charismatic gift), no distinction is possible between him as a person and his role or office. He is not simply the holder of authority; he is authority. As the very embodiment of power, charismatic rulers are well situated to buck tradition and overthrow status quos (e.g., Christ), and they are often revolutionary:

[C]harisma, in its most potent forms, disrupts rational rule as well as tradition altogether and overturns all notions of sanctity. Instead of reverence for customs that are ancient and hence sacred, it enforces the inner subjection to the unprecedented and absolutely unique and therefore Divine.

⁹

Indeed, the charismatic authority of the individual is an inherently magico-religious phenomenon: [E]very charisma is akin to religious powers in that it claims at least some remnant of supernatural derivation . . .

¹⁰

That being said, precisely because the charismatic ruler cannot fall back upon reason or tradition to justify his authority, he must prove his charismatic powers again and again, as these are the sole legitimation of his rule. Since he is entirely without institution, he cannot make institutional explanations for failure, but is directly, personally responsible to the ruled masses for the successes he promises them. If he fails to deliver, the ruled often simply desert him. In this sense, the total lack of institutional support for the charismatic ruler is exceptionally demanding. But on the other hand, it is also freeing, for it implies that the mission and the power of [charisma’s] bearer is qualitatively delimited from within, not by an external order.

¹¹

Put another way, charismatic leaders are beholden to no one—but only because they are beholden to everyone.

The charismatic apparatus consists of the ruler’s closest disciples (e.g., Christ and His apostles), who are qualified for their positions of power by their personal loyalty to the ruler (rather than by some external credentials) and who rule according to the leader’s whim (as opposed to by some agreed-upon norm). These disciples often express their total dedication to the ruler’s personal mission by abandoning their livelihoods and families, often becoming celibate. In exchange for their personal loyalty and role in the ruler’s apparatus, these close disciples are supported financially out of the donations that the ruler receives from the ruled masses, on an as-needed basis (as opposed to being supported by a regular income).

The charismatic community rejects as undignified all methodical rational acquisition, in fact, all rational economic conduct.

¹²

It shuns formal education as institutional. In fact, the charismatic shuns the everyday in general, laying claim to and ruling over not the ordinary, banal events of life, but the extraordinary ones.

It is this hostility toward the quotidian that is ultimately the charismatic structure’s undoing. According to Weber, the charismatic organization is the least structured and the least stable of all—barely an organization at all in the sense we normally mean it. It is a fragile, fleeting web of relationships that is constantly in danger of hardening into one of the more stable structures (see below), which, eventually, it always does. The primary catalyst in this transformation is the tyranny of the mundane:

When the tide that lifted a charismatically led group out of everyday life flows back into the channels of workaday routines, at least the pure form of charismatic domination will wane and turn into an institution; it is then either mechanized, as it were, or imperceptibly displaced by other structures, or fused with them in the most diverse forms, so that it becomes a mere component of a concrete historical structure. In this case it is often transformed beyond recognition, and identifiable only on an analytical level.

¹³

Crystallization into a more stable organizational form begins with the satisfaction of the community’s desire for everyday access to their charismatic ruler: Recurrent incarnation depersonalizes charisma.

¹⁴

Then, eventually, he’s replaced by a successor, who must be chosen according to some logic of succession or appointment, adding rationalization to depersonalization. Once this happens, the justification for the authority of the ruler is no longer his own personal charisma or heroic deeds; rather, it is now whatever underlies the logic of his selection as successor. Most often, this underlying justification is tradition, which transforms the charismatic structure into a patrimonial one.

The Patrimonial Structure

As in charismatic structures, the patrimonial ruler is a single individual, but in this case, he’s followed and obeyed not because of his personal qualities or deeds but because of tradition. Tribal patriarchs, kings by divine right, and nobles by blood lineage are all examples of patrimonial rulers.

¹⁵

Patrimonial authority, again like the charismatic, is strictly personal (as opposed to impersonal), but unlike the charismatic, it’s rational rather than irrational, because it’s based on the application of tradition as a sort of rule or logic for the organization of power.

Thus, the patrimonial ruler personally holds authority because he’s in a position that traditionally has authority. Theoretically, then, his person and his office can be distinguished—one is strictly individual, the other a function of communal history—but the personal nature of his specific power relationships with the ruled means there is de facto no distinction between him and his position. Since his power is legitimated entirely by tradition, he differs from his charismatic forebear in two important ways: (1) He tends to be a staunch supporter of tradition, rather than a revolutionary or reformer, and (2) he may rely upon tradition to justify his authority if questioned, and thus has no need to prove himself again and again to those he rules. He is therefore, in a sense, less accountable to the masses than the charismatic ruler. However, because he’s inseparable from his office, he may still be personally blamed for failures. And he’s beholden to the traditional structure itself, which is not the case for his charismatic counterpart.

The apparatus in a patrimonial structure consists of officers that the ruler himself appoints, who are qualified for their positions of power by their personal loyalty to the ruler, just as in the charismatic structure. These officials do not rule according to the ruler’s whim, however, but according to tradition or their own personal discretion, and they are not supported by sporadic donations from the ruled masses but by a prebend

¹⁶

or benefice provided directly by the ruler.

Weber states that [b]oth charisma and tradition rest on a sense of loyalty and obligation which always has a religious aura and that [t]he external forms of the two structures of domination are also often similar to the point of being identical.

¹⁷

But they differ substantially in their orientation to the everyday: Because the patrimonial is the status quo, it doesn’t pretend to govern the extraordinary events of life, but rather the ordinary, workaday tasks and relationships of a community. Thus the officers of a patrimonial ruler’s apparatus don’t often go to extraordinary lengths—abandonment of occupation and family, embrace of celibacy, etc.—to break their ties with the material world. They are the material world: Patrimonialism, as its name suggests, has its origins in the mundane daily activities of the strong pater familias maintaining an orderly household.

¹⁸

It is fundamentally rooted in the need to meet ongoing, routine demands

¹⁹

and is therefore an extremely stable and enduring structure.

This pragmatic orientation to the everyday results in the patrimonial community embracing, rather than shunning, economic activity. Its educational system, too, provides some administrative training to those destined for the apparatus. But patrimonial education remains primarily personal, emphasizing broad, humanistic learning in culture and refined things—in other words, emphasizing tradition, to which it owes its very existence. As the administrative apparatus grows, however, so does the need for more developed, specialized administrative training for officeholders. Accordingly, the balance of traditional and administrative training in the patrimonial education system shifts to meet the need, while at the same time the growth of the apparatus itself depersonalizes the relationships of rule. Thus does a patrimonial structure gradually morph into a bureaucratic one.

The Bureaucratic Structure

Bureaucratic structures are unlike both charismatic and patrimonial structures in that their rulers are not a single individual, nor any individual at all, but rather a system of rules that’s followed and obeyed because it is rational. Modern bureaucracies are well known to us today in the form of national governments, for-profit corporations, school systems, etc.

²⁰

Bureaucratic authority is unlike either of the other two structures in that it’s strictly impersonal (as opposed to personal), but it does share its rational nature with patrimonialism, albeit in a much more highly developed and pervasive form.

Because ultimate authority in bureaucracies rests impersonally in the rules themselves, the human ruler and his apparatus are collapsed in this structure: They are one and the same. This apparatus consists of officials appointed according to impersonal procedures, who are qualified for their positions of power by their specialized knowledge or competencies, which they’ve proven by exams and presented as written credentials. Bureaucratic officials only hold authority because of their office: The person and the office are in no way conflatable, and the bureaucratic official makes quite a point of separating his private from his official life. Accordingly, he does not make great personal sacrifices (e.g., occupation, family, celibacy) for the sake of his ruler (i.e., the rules).

The bureaucratic official is granted authority solely because he has the credentials required for his office by the system of rules. So long as he has these credentials and the rules remain the same, he has no need to justify his authority to anyone. He need not prove himself again and again to the masses he rules, and his failures will not be accounted to him personally but to his office, from which he personally is separate. Indeed, he is accountable only to the institution whose rules deem him qualified to hold authority in the first place, and so long as he upholds these rules his authority—and his regular salary—is secure. When it comes to tradition, he has little regard for it as such, but he won’t overturn it unless such revolution seems to be the most rational, expedient means to some institutional end, and then only if it can be accomplished within the rules.

Bureaucracy differs from patrimonialism only in (1) its impersonalness (Obedience is . . . given to the norms rather than to the person

²¹

), (2) its origin in conscious rationalization, as opposed to unthinking rationalization by tradition, and (3) the degree to which it carries rationalization. Thus Weber says that patrimonialism and bureaucracy may appear similar on the surface. Indeed, they are both unapologetically grounded in the practical governance of the everyday, making bureaucracy as stable and enduring as patrimonialism. The bureaucratic status quo likewise embraces all manner of (rule-abiding) economic activity. And the bureaucratic educational system exists according to an equally pragmatic rationale: It teaches only the specialized, utilitarian skills needed to maintain the bureaucratic apparatus, and it provides written credentials to those passing its tests so that they may prove their qualification for office according to the rules.

The Institutionalization of Charisma

Weber insists that it is not possible to argue that the three pure organizational structures always or inevitably follow one another historically or chronologically, because they almost always occur together in impure, or mixed, forms.

²²

He does admit, however, that charisma is regularly overshadowed by the other two structures. This phenomenon—the depersonalization, or institutionalization, of charisma—results in what Weber refers to as office charisma, which he defines as the belief in the specific state of grace of a social institution.

²³

Since this idea will be central to our later discussion of the Catholic Church, I’ll explain here the basic trajectory of this common transformation of charisma.

Recall that charisma is distinct from both patrimonialism and bureaucracy in eight primary ways:

(1) It’s justified by a power internal, as opposed to external, to an individual.

(2) It’s inherently irrational.

(3) Its ruler is intensely accountable to the ruled masses, but not to any institution.

(4) Its apparatus is accountable only to the ruler, and rules according to his whim exclusively.

(5) It’s financially very insecure.

(6) It’s anti-traditionalist and revolutionary.

(7) It governs extraordinary, not ordinary, events.

(8) It’s extremely unstable, not enduring.

With the patrimonial, the charismatic shares the personal nature of authority; the rule of a single individual; the staffing of the apparatus with individuals personally loyal to the ruler; the indistinguishability of the person (ruler or officer) from his office; the personal accountability of the apparatus to the ruler; and the aura of religion that cloaks all claims to authority. With the bureaucratic, the charismatic shares nothing. (See Table 2.)

It should make sense, then, that the institutionalization of charisma begins with a transition into the patrimonial, as already mentioned above. This process is typically kickstarted in the manner Weber explains: First, the charismatic followers are overcome by an intense desire to turn charisma from an extraordinary event into an everyday one. They seek to gain control over and stabilize it, to hold onto it. To achieve this, they demand regular, daily access to the charismatic leader—even after he dies. This leads to the institutionalization of some logic of succession (e.g., by blood lineage or appointment by predecessor). Soon enough, daily contact with the extraordinary renders it ordinary, and the irrational, strongly affective, revolutionary spirit of charisma begins to morph into rational, pragmatic preservationism.

Having turned charisma into an everyday phenomenon, the once-charismatics must now manage charisma’s encounters with the mundane: that is, with the need to earn a living, maintain shelters, raise children, prepare food, defend territories, etc. According to Weber, a decisive turning point is reached when, rather than all band together voluntarily to meet these needs, the charismatic community instead selects employees to carry out the necessary tasks of the community. At this point, he says, the closest disciples to the ruler become officials, and the ruled masses become tax- or dues-paying members of the organization. At the same time, the whim of the ruler is transformed into dogma, doctrine, theory, reglement, law, or petrified tradition,

²⁴

and charisma itself recedes as a creative force and erupts only in short-lived mass emotions with unpredictable effect.

²⁵

But the idea of charisma—of a divinely granted personal gift that imbues one person with authority over others—is not lost altogether. On the contrary:

[C]harisma is captured by the interest of all economic and social power holders in the legitimation of their possessions by a charismatic, and thus sacred, source of authority. Instead of upsetting everything that is traditional or based on legal acquisition (in the modern sense), as it does in statu nascendi, charisma becomes a legitimation for acquired rights.

²⁶

In other words: Depersonalized, transmittable, everyday, institutionalized office charisma is completely uncoupled from the concept of the personal gift and tied instead to the official right to rule. Charisma is no longer a personal gift that can be tested and proven but not transmitted and acquired, [but rather] a capacity that, in principle, can be taught and learned.

²⁷

It’s now wholly controlled by the new institution and may be distributed as it sees fit—typically in educational institutions that credential individuals for service in the institutional apparatus.

What does remain of pure charisma in this institutionalized office charisma is the magico-religious mystique surrounding it, the extraordinary quality which is not accessible to everyone and which typically overshadows the charismatic subjects.

²⁸

Still armed with the air of exclusiveness, charisma—even caged—continues to function as an authority-legitimating power. It’s simply tied now to an office rather than to an individual, and is bestowed by the human powers-that-be rather than by some divine power.

In a sense, then, the ghost of pure charisma remains present in all real (as opposed to ideal) institutional structures, even modern bureaucratic ones. Weber himself notes that, in the West, reason was given charisma by the Enlightenment, and only then did Western societies undertake widespread, systematic rational bureaucratization of their institutions. In a similar way, one might argue that patrimonial societies merely transferred charisma from individuals to communal tradition. In any case, because pure charisma is so unstable as a structure, [o]nly extraordinary conditions can bring about the triumph of charisma over the organization.

²⁹

In ordinary conditions, charisma is eventually depersonalized, routinized, mechanized, and institutionalized, rendering it invisible—until an organization is scrutinized. Thus, that is what I will now do to the Catholic Church.

Table 2: Weberian Structures and Their Most Common Features

Charisma, Patrimony, and Bureaucracy in the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is, as Weber himself acknowledges, a typical case of a mixed or impure

³⁰

organizational form. Specifically, it is a patrimonial bureaucracy

³¹

with office charisma residing in its clerical hierarchy of pope, bishops, priests, and deacons. Since charisma was absorbed into and transformed by the more visible, more concrete patrimonial–bureaucratic structure, I begin by discussing the latter rather than the former.

The Catholic Patrimonial Bureaucracy

Since the Ascension of Christ, the Catholic Church has been patrimonial, and for most of that time also at least somewhat bureaucratic, but the balance of tradition to rational rules has shifted over the centuries. As in any former charismatic community, development of the Church’s doctrinal system (theology, canon law, etc.) advanced bureaucratization, as did development of the formal theological training that entrenched the new doctrinal system. Weber posits that the greatest leaps in Church centralization and rationalization occurred during the Middle Ages (especially after the 1200s, a century that saw many Church councils) and were carried out primarily by monks (the Church’s first professionals and founders of the first rational enterprises

³²

) and by Jesuits (a military order with a strongly centralized, rationalized organization itself).

As Weber points out:

Bureaucracy and patriarchalism are antagonistic in many respects, but they share continuity as one of their most important characteristics. In this sense both are structures of everyday life. Patriarchalism, in particular, is rooted in the need to meet ongoing, routine demands. . . . Bureaucracy, too, is a permanent structure and, with its system of rational rules, oriented toward the satisfaction of calculable needs with ordinary, everyday means.

³³

In fact, the only real practical differences between patrimonialism and bureaucracy are the degree to which (1) administrative processes are rationalized, and so depersonalized, and the degree to which (2) knowledge and skill have become specialized. All other differences between the two flow out from these, and so one might say that patrimonialism and bureaucracy themselves exist on a continuum, with no clear line distinguishing between them.

The Catholic Church today is unquestionably a structure. . . of everyday life. . . . rooted in the need to meet ongoing, routine demands. . . . a permanent structure. . . with its system of rational rules, oriented toward the satisfaction of calculable needs with ordinary, everyday means.

³⁴

It is a financial institution as much as a spiritual one, a corporation that sells goods and services (behold the parish gift shop, the Catholic thrift store, the Catholic hospital, etc.) and pays bills like any for-profit. It runs not merely a host of institutions of clerical education, but also a vast network of primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. There is no doubt, then, that the Catholic Church is deeply rooted in the everyday, mired in a wide variety of mundane, ordinary activities like administration, healthcare, and education.

This global giant is led by a single, personal figure, who himself manifests the mixed nature of the Church’s rationalized structure. Although technically just one more bishop, as the bishop of Rome the pope is considered the Church’s (human) ruler on Earth.

³⁵

Or more accurately: The Church thinks of the pope like a personal patriarch, the word pope itself deriving from the Latin papa meaning father, and the pope being commonly referred to as the Holy Father. Yet despite what many people mistakenly believe, ultimate authority in the Catholic Church has never resided patrimonially in the pope. He cannot simply change Church tradition or law, because his power is bureaucratically subordinate to theirs. They are the ultimate authority, impersonally invoked and applied by Church officials around the world every day as theological dogma, doctrine, and both the natural and canon laws, not to mention parish, diocesan, and Vatican administrative procedures and regulations. Even so, this panoply of rational bureaucratic fodder that supersedes the pope and guides the faithful is mostly, if not entirely, patrimonially based upon Church tradition.

Similarly, although the pope is, like a patriarch, considered qualified to rule by divine right, he acquires that divine right by a defined bureaucratic procedure: a conclave (i.e., meeting) of cardinals who ask God to guide them as they vote for a new pope. In a sense, too, the pope is personally distinguishable from his office, as in a bureaucracy, but for the most part, he and his office are one and the same, as in patrimonialism. Catholics talk about each new pope’s personality and differences from his predecessor, but they also talk about popes violating the dignity of their office. And if one is ever canonized, he will not be called simply Saint John Paul or Saint John Paul, Pope or even Saint Pope John Paul, but rather "Pope Saint John Paul," the designation of his office preceding even that of his personal sainthood—as if his official role in service of the Church is even more important than his attainment of personal religious and moral perfection.

The deacons, priests, and bishops who cooperate in the administration of Church authority are the pope’s curial apparatus. These are salaried officials appointed according to a procedure rather than directly by the pope himself, as in a bureaucracy, although the pope’s representatives, the bishops, do play a key role in the certification and qualification of new officials, as in patrimonialism. The apparatus is qualified by two criteria: (1) specialized knowledge of the Church’s traditions and rules, which they have proven by exams, as in a bureaucracy, and (2) faithfulness to these traditions and rules, as well as personal loyalty to the pope himself and, for deacons and priests, also to the local patriarch (the bishop), all of which they have proven by their personal conduct, as in patrimonialism. Deacons, priests, and bishops share the ambiguity of the pope’s separation of the individual from his office: On one hand, even at a baseball game Catholics will call their priest Father John, but on the other hand, if he is ever canonized, he will not be called Father Saint John Vianney but simply Saint John Vianney.

The apparatus is again both patrimonial and bureaucratic in that it is as accountable to tradition, law, and the status quo institution as the pope himself, but they are also accountable to one another in a clear hierarchy: Technically, both deacons and priests answer to the bishop, but in practice, deacons usually answer to priests and bishops, and priests only to bishops, who answer only to the pope. In the exercise of their authority, the apparatus must therefore consider the impersonal will of tradition and law as well as the personal will of their superiors.

It probably goes without saying that the Catholic Church is unusually conservative (patrimonial) and preservationist (both patrimonial and bureaucratic), and it of course has religious overtones (patrimonial). As an established church, it governs the everyday: baptisms, marriages, deaths, communion, confession, etc. Accordingly, beside the Eastern Orthodox churches, it is the most stable and enduring Christian church in existence which, again, is due to both its patrimonial and bureaucratic structures.

In sum, the Catholic Church is awash in highly rationalized, impersonal traditions, norms, rules, laws, doctrines, dogmas, and administrative regulations and procedures, but within this intensely bureaucratic structure, the particular distribution of authority among offices and the relationships between officeholders still seem strongly patrimonial and personal. Related to both structures—one might even say justifying them—is the charismatic structure of the Church, to which we now turn.

The Catholic Institutionalization of Charisma

Historic Development

Perhaps obviously, before the Church was patrimonial and bureaucratic, it was charismatic. As the Church tells its own origin story, it was founded by Jesus Christ Himself, who was possibly the greatest charismatic leader of all time. His own rule over the church during His time on earth displays all of the features of the pure-charismatic structure: For His followers, He was the ultimate authority during His human lifetime (All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me

³⁶

). His authority was intensely personal and unrationalized (witness His compassionate interactions with those He spontaneously healed). Again and again, He proved His authority to His followers by miraculous deeds (changing water into wine, walking on water, multiplying loaves and fishes, resurrecting the dead). He held no office, and His apparatus consisted of the twelve men He trusted most. These were personally accountable to Him and Him only (He who is not with Me is against Me

³⁷

), ruling as He instructed them and supported out of what His followers offered Him ([Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna] provided [financial support] for them out of their means

³⁸

). Their personal lives and identities—as well as their hope of eternal salvation—were indistinguishable from their role in His entourage (Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life

³⁹

). Both Christ and His followers were a revolutionary force (It is written. . . But I say unto you. . .

⁴⁰

) with strong religious overtones that laid claim to the extraordinary events of life, not the ordinary ones (Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s

⁴¹

).

But as is also typical for a charismatic community, Christ’s early church was unstable and fleeting, quick to crystallize into a patrimonial structure bent on preserving—and charismaticizing—tradition. The depersonalization of the charisma embodied in Christ began just as Weber describes it, with the institution of a logic of succession:

I tell you, you are Peter [Greek for rock], and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

⁴²

These words of Christ Himself to Saint Peter, the first pope, are today the justification for what the Church calls apostolic succession, the rationale by which authority to rule is passed from one individual to another in the Church via ordination to the priesthood and episcopate, in a direct line back to Saint Peter and Christ Himself. The logic of apostolic succession turns the spontaneous, divinely granted personal gift that legitimated Christ’s authority into a rationalized, institutionally granted right of office that legitimates the authority of officeholders. In other words, it depersonalizes and institutionalizes Christ’s pure charisma, transforming it into controllable, transmittable office charisma.

As Weber describes this advancing process, the followers of the original charismatic leader’s first successor must soon find a way to manage depersonalized charisma’s encounters with the mundane. Already in the Book of Acts we see the early Christian community managing finances,

⁴³

assigning men to offices,

⁴⁴

and convening a deliberative council.

⁴⁵

Chapter 5 of Acts is particularly striking in that it suggests that the early Christian church had already advanced from an unstable, charismatic system of support by voluntary donations of the ruled masses to a stable, patrimonial/bureaucratic system of mandatory dues. It’s well known that the Apostles all worked in a secular occupation of some sort, but with the institution of the diaconate and the priesthood proper, the early Church took a further step in the institutionalization of charisma by appointing officers as employees. And the deliberative council of Acts chapter 15 (convened to rule on the necessity of circumcision for Gentiles) was perhaps the first step towards doctrinalization of the now-(physically) absent charismatic leader’s will. So begins the shift from the extraordinary, unstable rule of a revolutionary figure to the ordinary, enduring rule of an apparatus upholding tradition.

However, not until the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century—the height of Church bureaucratization

⁴⁶

—did the Church found official educational institutions to control the distribution of charisma and to vet candidates for office.

⁴⁷

As Weber points out, charisma that can be transmitted and acquired can also be taught and learned,

⁴⁸

and so further institutionalized. How is charisma taught and learned? Weber explains:

The elements of [depersonalized] charismatic education are: Isolation from the familiar environment and from all family ties . . . ; invariably entrance into an exclusive educational community; complete transformation of personal conduct; asceticism; physical and psychic exercises of the most diverse forms to awaken the capacity for ecstasy and regeneration; continuous testing of the level of charismatic perfection through shock, torture and mutilation . . . ; finally, graduated ceremonious reception into the circle of those who have proven their charisma.

Today’s Catholic seminaries bear a striking resemblance to this description. Isolation from home; entrance into an exclusive educational community; transformation of personal conduct; celibacy, solitude, and personal penances; prayer, meditation, study, reception of the sacraments and spiritual direction; and a graduated ceremonious reception into the priesthood are all part of the modern seminary experience.

⁴⁹

In fact, the only feature of Weber’s description that is not part of Catholic seminary education is