Death of a Company Man

Theodore McCarrick, the erstwhile archbishop of Washington, DC, shuffled off this mortal coil Thursday with little fanfare. The disgraced cardinal’s decease was overshadowed by the global economic chaos following Wednesday’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. 

How do you obituarize a problem like McCarrick? Do you start at the end, with the old man defrocked, silenced, and put in the cupboard following the revelations of sexual misconduct and abuse? Do you start at the beginning, with the young man a protege of the sinister and powerful Francis Cardinal Spellman? The photo-ops with grandees of the American political class? The strange affair of the letter from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the future Pope Benedict XVI? The funeral of Beau Biden?

I met the late cardinal twice, very briefly. The first time, during a visitation to my childhood parish, he asked me whether I had considered becoming a priest—I was 7 or 8. The second time, as my family was hustling to catch up with the main group of marchers at the annual March for Life, we passed McCarrick’s entourage. My toddler brother was pitching a fit (as usual), and McCarrick wryly blessed him personally. Chez Russo opinion on McCarrick was mixed: His affinity for Democratic politicos, especially pro-abortion politicos, was a point against him. On the other hand, he publicly affirmed the teachings of the Church on a variety of increasingly unpopular social issues, he kept the archdiocese solvent and tightly administered, he was strong for the Knights of Columbus, and he was an excellent recruiter for the priesthood in a period of vocations free-fall. The neighboring Archdiocese of Baltimore, by contrast, chronically teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and spread its priests thinner and thinner. (As it still does, on both counts.) On the whole, it was felt, on the balance, that McCarrick was probably more good than bad. He was canny, competent, politic, and agreeable. 

He showed many of the features of a company man—an ancient character in the Church. This was held against him in retrospect; Catholics love nothing more than griping about high-flying clergy. I tend to think this is somewhat misplaced. It’s the sexual misconduct that was the problem. Company men are inevitable; if they’re good at their jobs, assuming you’re on board with the mission of the company itself, they may even be desirable. Not everyone who works for your civilization-spanning organization is going to be a Gregory the Great. You may as well have competence in the inevitable ranks of time-servers.

There is a point here. The Church has spent the past 60 years or so divesting itself of its secular pomps, its conspicuous wealth and its claims to power. These were once attractions that weighed against the somewhat dreary prospect of lifelong celibacy. With these elements gone, smart, ambitious boys have little incentive to go into the Church. The ones who are left are the sincerely pious and the ideologues, who don’t tend to make inspiring administrators as a matter of empirical record; those with sinister motivations, like preying on seminarians; and incompetents, the bottom quintile of nonprofit administrators’ programs. The razing of the bastions has not purified the Church so much as guaranteed a hollowing out of its human capital. The quality of company men is in bad decline.

The crisis of the Catholic Church has been of a piece with the postwar crisis in every other Western institution. Human nature didn’t change in 1945, or 1963, or 1968, or 1974. Wishing pure motivations into the mass of people has not worked terribly well. Monkeying with the usual working of meritocracy to make ideological points has, likewise, not worked terribly well. Nor has disclaiming traditional structures been without its own set of power politics; this papacy’s perpetual disruption of the usual career trajectories at the Curia has concentrated administrative control in the singular, often capricious person of the current pope, a state of affairs that has been the cause of widespread dissatisfaction among churchmen of every ideological bent.

In the world of Western secular politics, desperate reaction against the madness has been ascendant. For Catholics, the question is this: Is it too late for the Church to salvage the stock of its company men? Or will it be incompetents and McCarricks as far as the eye can see?