Mission

So...I have a fungal/viral infection (prolly caused by a combo of working out too much, not enough washing, and some ass-to-mouth action) and I have cold sores, a painful mouth, and a generally feeling of crappines.  Ugh.  I am on meds, and I am still exercising, but to look like crap for Easter, and to feel like crap for Easter, and to face food issues...well, miserable.

In the meantime, I am reading Render Unto Rome, a book about the finances of the Church; one-third of it discusses our Diocese, and the first part discusses Boston, so we get a double-helping of Bishop Lennon.  It's pretty damning; even if the author relies too much on the FutureChurch and Fr. Begin types, it's pretty obvious the Church needs reform in the financial sense...I more and more tend to believe the issue should be a divorce of the theological side and the temporal side; much like the Protestants, lay people should play a much greater role in the finances/buildings/management, and the rest should be left to the men in black.  (More so if you have the men in brown.)

One thing I do find a little odd, of course, is the running contention in the book that the Church faces a crisis as it retreats from the urban cores...well, its population base has retreated, and in many cases, so is the Church.  The counter is that the old urban parishes -- and this is true -- are the fulcrum of neighborhoods, and that closing the place down shuts down all the social services the place provides.  (There is an irony here, in that most of the FutureChurch are lefty bleeding hearts, so you would think that they would be pleased that the state would have to handle the load.)  However, the problem is -- and if I am sounding like Mitt Romney here, he wasn't wrong -- is that all of these people USE the Church, but they never really give back; it takes money to run soup kitchens, provide places for AA, run ESL programs, operate Catholic schools, etc.; yet the people who use them really don't give back.  No one puts in the collection plate, no one volunteers to handle crap jobs at parish events, no one takes over the janitor gig to save a salary.  Yes, the mission of the Church is one thing, but on the other, the Church -- especially at the parish level -- is a business, and a place that spends more than it takes in has to increase revenues, change its practices, or close.