Some church personnel react to the breakdown with pain, anguish, and fright. Some make heroic efforts and tragic sacrifices to prevent it. Some, regretfully or joyfully, interpret the phenomenon as a sign of the disappearance of the Roman Church itself. I would like to suggest that we welcome the disappearance of institutional bureaucracy in a spirit of deep joy. In this essay, I shall describe some aspects of what is taking place in the Church, and suggest ways in which the Church could seek a radical reorganization in some of its structures. I am not recommending essential changes in the Church; even less do I suggest its dissolution. The complete disappearance of its visible structure would contradict sociological law and divine mandate. But change does entail much more than drastic amendment or updating reform if the Church is to respond to God’s call and contemporary man. I shall outline certain possible changes, solidly rooted in the origins of the Church, and boldly reaching out to the necessities of tomorrow’s society. Acceptance of this kind of reform will require the Church to live the evangelical poverty of Christ. At the same time, the Church, sensitive to the process of the world’s progressive socialization, will come to have a deep respect for, and joyful acceptance of, this phenomenon.

The institutional Church is in trouble. The very persons on whose loyalty and obedience the efficiency structure depends increasingly abandon it. Until the early sixties, the “defections” were relatively rare. Now they are common. Tomorrow they may be the pattern. After a personal drama played out in the intimacy of conscience, more and more ecclesiastical employees will decide to sacrifice the emotional, spiritual, and financial security which the system benevolently provided for them. I suspect that within this generation these persons will have become a majority of the Church’s personnel.

The problem lies not with the “spirit” of the world, nor with any failure in generosity among the “defectors,” but rather with the structure itself. This can be taken as an almost aprioristic conclusion, since the present structures developed as a response to past situations vastly different from our own. Further, our world continually accelerates its rapid changes of societal structures, in the context of which the Church must carry out its real functions. To see the situation more clearly, I shall focus my attention on the nature and function of ministry, the complex channel through which the Church touches the world. We can thus gain some insight into the Church of tomorrow.

It seems evident that basic and accepted concepts of ministry in the Church are clearly inadequate. Quantitatively, for example, the Church really does not need the present number of full-time employees who work in its operational structure. More fundamentally, the situation suggests the need for a deep reappraisal of the elements which make up. the current idea of the priest as the Church’s basic representative in the world—a concept still maintained in the conciliar decrees. Specifically there is need for a re-examination of the relation between sacramental ministry and full-time personnel, between ministry and celibacy, and between ministry and theological education.

Today it is assumed that most if not all of the Church’s ministerial operations must be carried out by full-time underpaid employees who possess a kind of theological education and who accept an ecclesiastical law of celibacy. In order to begin a search for new directions which are more evangelically and sociologically relevant, I shall discuss separately four aspects of the problem: the radical reduction in the number of persons dependent on the Church for their livelihood; the ordination to sacramental ministry of men independently employed in the world; the special and unique renunciation implied in perpetual celibacy; the relation between sacramental ministry and theological education.

Ecclesiastical employees live in comfortable Church-owned housing, are assured preferential treatment in Church-owned and operated health services, are mostly trained in ecclesiastical educational institutions, and are buried in hallowed ground—after which they are prayed for. The habit or collar, not competent productivity, assures one’s status and living. An employment market, more diversified than any existing corporation, caters to the employee, discriminating against laymen who do not share his ritual initiation. Laymen who work in the ecclesiastical structure are recognized as possessing some few “civil rights,” but their careers depend principally on their ability to play the role of Uncle Toms.

Recently the Roman Church has followed the example of some Protestant churches in shifting more of its employees from parish work to paper pushing. At the same time, the traditional demand for increased personnel at the parish level and the simultaneously burgeoning process of overinflated bureaucratic machinery masks the increasing irrelevance of both these aspects of the structure. Organizational explosion results in a feverish search for more personnel and money. We are urged to beg God to send more employees into the bureaucratic system and to inspire the faithful to pay the cost. Personally, I cannot ask God for these “benefits.” The inherently self-perpetuating expansion of Church personnel operates well enough without additional help, and only serves to make an already overstaffed Church more priest-ridden, thereby debilitating the Church’s mission in today’s world.

The Vatican itself best illustrates the complex problem. Post-conciliar administrative growth supersedes and supplants the old machinery. Since the end of the Council, the twelve venerable curial congregations have been increased by the addition of numerous intermeshing and overlapping post-conciliar organs—commissions, councils, consultative bodies, committees, assemblies, synods. This bureaucratic maze becomes ungovernable. Good. Perhaps this will help us to see that principles of corporate government are not applicable to the Body of Christ. It is even less appropriate to see His Vicar as the chief executive of a corporation than as a Byzantine king. Clerical technocracy is even further from the gospel than priestly aristocracy. And we may come to recognize that efficiency corrupts Christian testimony more subtly than power.

At a time when even the Pentagon seeks to reduce its manpower pool by contracting specific jobs in the open market of industry and research, the Vatican launches a drive toward greater self-contained institutional diversification and proliferation. The central administration of this top-heavy organizational giant passes out of the hands of the “venerable congregations” staffed by Italian career priests into those of clerical specialists recruited from all over the world. The Pontifical Curia of the Middle Ages becomes a contemporary corporation’s planning and administrative headquarters.

One of the paradoxical aspects of today’s structure is that the organization priest is also a member of the aristocracy of the only feudal power left in the Western world—a power whose sovereign status was recognized in the Lateran conventions. Further, this same power increasingly uses a diplomatic structure—one originally developed to represent the Church’s interests vis-à-vis other sovereign states—in order to offer services to the emerging international agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF, UNESCO, and to the United Nations itself. This development demands more and more employees for a wider range of jobs, requiring even more specialized education for the recruits. The hierarchy, accustomed to absolute control over its employees, seeks to staff these positions with captive clergy. But the big push on more intensive recruitment runs head-on into a strong and contrary trend: yearly almost as many trained personnel leave as are recruited. Hence we see the reluctant acceptance of submissive and obedient laymen to fill the gap.

Some individuals explain clerical “defections” as the elimination of undesirable elements. Others blame the various contemporary mystiques of the world. The institution instinctively attempts to explain this loss and the concomitant vocation “crisis” in terms flattering to itself. Then too one needs strong justification for the enthusiastic and emotional drives for more “vocations.” Few wish to admit that the collapse of an overextended and disproportionate clerical framework is a clear sign of its irrelevance. Fewer see that the Pope himself would grow in evangelical stature and fidelity in proportion as his power to affect social issues in the world and his administrative command in the Church decline.

Changes on the institutional periphery are as faithful to “Parkinson’s L...