Propagation of the Faith

From MURRAY KEMPTON NLW YORK

HE American Institute of Management, an ex- pression of the national religion, has pub- lished the latest of its periodic audits of the efficiency of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican attains a rating of 9,010 out of a possible 10,000 points on AIM's management evaluation scale. The American Telephone and

Telegraph Company, as SI111111111111 b07714111 of the Institute's faith, is a mere 510 points higher, an advantage owed in part to the Institute's estimate that the telephone company's earnings are healthier and its prospects for expansion brighter

than the Church's.

The Church is the oldest religion and American efficiency the newest to command a portion of the faith of Western mankind. The AIM's study of the Vatican turns up questions unexpectedly com- forting to those sceptics who might regard both as superstitions and only one as worthy of the re- spect due a superstition which has proved powers of survival.

For example, if the Vatican is divinely in- spired, why isn't it as well run as the telephone company? But, then, if it is not divinely inspired, why is it run, even according to modern pre- judices, almost as well as the telephone company, even though none of its princes is a graduate of an American executive training school?

For the Church turns out to function and well with no regard at all for the prescriptions of modern management analysis.

The Institute points out that the Church has neglected the executive potential of that middle class which rules every other institution in Western civilisation. The bishops and the cardinals are too frequently either prince or pauper in origin.'

The Sacred College is an instrument peculiarly at war with progressive corporate development. 'The present regulations regarding the Cardinal- ate and papal election can elevate rascals in as great number as men of extraordinary spiritual worth. It is shown by the record.'

'What concerns us most is the advanced age of cardinals and the fact that they so largely seem to represent an Italian clique that perhaps thinks more in terms of a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire than a strong episcopate in the provinces. In other words, we wonder if the cardinals some- times do not look backwards more than forwards in business matters that require progressive atti- tudes. Such as depreciation reserves for instance.' The notion that the Lord will provide is an un- sound management principle. The cardinals, from parochialism, invest too much of the property in Italian enterprises. 'Few important corporations, in America or elsewhere, list the Church among their large stockholders.'

The Institute for Pious Works, or Vatican Bank, is large and diversified but does little to attract customers. The Church's public relations would be improved if it would issue financial re- ports. It has not learned, as American corpor- ations have, to avoid doctrinal intrusions into public affairs. Its sales programme shows 'an amazing amount of duplication.'

'It would be the better part of business wisdom to have the organisation familiar with all the various procedures so that advice may be given as to the most effective means. For example, the most important mail-order houses in America ex- change information even though they are com- petitors. How sensible it would be for n11 agencies of the Catholic Church to use the same degree of co-operation.'

But still, 'in all cases, there is no overpayment of personnel and no extravagance.' This could be the heart of the mystery. Abstention from modern management methods means also abstention from expense accounts and credit cards. Jackson Martindell, chairman of the board of the American Institute of Management, ex- pressed the hope that the approaching ecumenical council would consider a pension plan which could encourage the retirement of older cardinals. It seemed to him also hardly sound practice for a Board of Directors to meet just once every hun- dred years.

Martindell's audits are neither commissioned nor solicited by the Church. Still, the first was conducted in the Fifties, and, although protocol would inhibit any public announcement, could easily have had the encouragement both of Pope Pius XII, whose only indisputable superstition was a Roman reverence for the American business mystique, and of Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Church's American vicar, whose touch with real estate is his most impressive evidence of access to revelation.

Pope Pius used an electric razor, installed time clocks in the Vatican and showed himself other- wise appreciative of the American genius. The American Institute of Management, perhaps from that communion, remembers him as 'a man of extraordinary spiritual values' while Pope John XXIII is assessed only as 'practical and know' ledgeable.' Still, Pope John is a figure to be imagined far less than his predecessor in serious

contemplation of an American management audit reporting a slight drop in the prospects for ex- pansion of his enterprise since 1956.

Pope John seems, in fact, a survivor of the late, best period of the Counter-Reformation. Yet, acting from sixteenth-century models, he has, by the standards of American management, im- proved the Church's rating ,210 points since his accession. The game, to our misfortune, seems to be given away.

The American Institute of Management rep- resents a mobilisation of the advanced social sciences for profit. Its audit is full of the preten- sions of those sciences; there is even a graph affecting to measure the zeal of Catholics by cen- turies: it is set at 100 per cent. in the year AD 75, which would have surprised Peter and Paul, stands at 95 under Constantine, and is down to 80 by the year 1225, which would have affronted Blanche of Castille. Martindell offered this sum- mation of his Institute's researches: 'Either Communism will rule the world or the Catholics will prevent it. Who established the Common Market? For my money, the Catholics.'

A group of German Jesuits had conceived the Common Market and persuaded the Catholic politicians of Western Europe to accept it. This was a fact to be taken on faith, because, 'You know, they prefer to work confidentially.' Mar- tindell identified Paul-Henri Spaak, that ornament of the Second International, as one Western politician particularly deferential to the Jesuits. The Vatican, he said, had keyed the ecumenical conference to its particular desire to bring the Anglicans back to its communion.

All this, of course, is poor history and tone-deaf political analysis. The tendency of the advanced social sciences to sound like that is, naturally, the chief penalty of a discipline which abolishes all centuries except its own. Their inevitable tone is .that mixture of awe and condescension which de- fines their final product as ignorance.

To the American Institute of Management, the path to the understanding of Rome is its financial structure and not its doctrine. This approach tells us wonderfully about management, which is more and more a system for improving the dis- tribution of products that are steadily worse pro- duced. American management is about finance and not fabrication, about paper and not sub- stance. Roger Blough is chairman of the board of the United States Steel Corporation not be- cause he understands how steel is made but be- cause he understands how it is sold.

American management is also about the tem- porary and not about the permanent. The American Institute of Management, polite as it is, still feels it imperative to remind the Roman Church that it is the West's great bastion against Communism and must rally its battalions.

'Weterttm Sapientids] statement that the Catholic Church is not to be strictly identified with Western civilisation is cause for concern.'

In the same key. Fidel Castro seems to AIM the greatest single challenge to the Church's survival. It takes so much less to frighten American management than it does to frighten the Vatican. Rome has never excommunicated Castro. He is, one supposes, to Rome merely a wandering child who does not yet know that his real place is not in the history of the modern world but some- where in the hagiography of the pagan Catholics

of Latin America, Castro will go down, as down he must, and a century from now there will be cheap chromos of him, a Neapolitan saint, in the huts on the Amazon. He will belong, as all the talismans of the simple poor end up belonging, to the Church of Rome. Pius IX, from being trivial and stubborn, lost the Church the nineteenth century. But he saved it at the end by clinging to the one great principle of doctrine: the only heresy that can destroy the Church from within is the heresy of modernism.