“Then he who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours.’
“But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed. So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has ten talents.
‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Matthew 25:24-30
Let me offer an admittedly radical, and maybe even frightening, thought experiment.
What if Orthodox parishes and dioceses in the United States were to surrender their non-profit status and instead incorporate themselves as profit, or at least not for profit, institutions?
This came to my mind as I read an essay by John Médaille an editor at large for the blog the Front Porch Republic. A Roman Catholic, John writes on economic issues from a unique vantage point being both a successful businessman and a theology instructor (he teaches a unique course for business students on papal social encyclicals at my alma mater the University of Dallas). He writes from the perspective of “’Distributism . . . an economic philosophy that arose in response to the poverty of 19th-century England and to the first of the so-called ‘social encyclicals,’ Rerum Novarum, written in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. It was developed by two English thinkers, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.” I would rather leave aside for now a debate about distrubutism and instead ask people to focus on what I think is a most interesting observation in Médaille post.
He asks an interesting question: “Who Owns Our Jobs?” For our purposes here, I am less interested in how the author answers his initial question and more in the secondary points his essay raises for me.
In offering an answer to his, the author looks at the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, “a group of manufacturing, financial and retail companies based in the Basque Country and extended over the rest of Spain and abroad. It is one of the world’s largest worker cooperatives and one important example of workers’ self-management,” he reports that it was
Founded in 1953 by students of a rather remarkable parish priest, Don José Maria Arizmendiarrieta, it has grown from a simple paraffin stove factory into a giant corporate conglomerate with several hundred worker-owned firms involved in the manufacturing of the most sophisticated products, banking, retailing, research, education, construction, business services, and insurance. Today, the Corporation has €33 billion in assets, does €16 in sales, employs 104,000 workers, 81% of whom are worker-owners to whom they distribute 52% of the profits. But Mondragón is more than a mere “corporate success story.” It is a business model that is completely counter to the modern corporation.
He then goes on to describe the internal administrative structure of Mondragón as a volunteer associations of small businesses “ruled by the principle of subsidiarity; that is to say, the higher level exists to serve the lower levels.” As a result, “the individual cooperatives have the right to leave the corporation; participation is voluntary.” For these reasons it is “impossible for a centralized authority to ‘lord it over’ the member cooperatives” and as result the “corporation itself is ruled not by outside investors (there are none) but by the workers themselves. You might call this an inverted model of corporate organization. The firm is built from the ground up rather than the top down.”
When I read this description, I realized that (theological considerations aside for the moment) there is clear parallel between Mondragón and the situation of Orthodoxy in American. In both case (and again let me ask you to put ecclesiology aside for the moment) we are looking at volunteer associations of individuals. But where Mondragón is governed by a clear application of the principle of subsidiarity, this is not necessarily the case with the Orthodox Church here in the States. Rather what we see (at least in America) is a tension (and not always a healthy tension) between diocese and parish, between priest and parish council, between bishops and lower clergy, between clergy and laity, and between a monastic and a non-monastic model of the Church. It is I think the last tension that I think Médaille most illumines for me.
As I rule, I think it is better that we avoid defining things by an act of negation—call it a rejection of the “You throw like a girl” model of social discourse and criticism. While it may be accurate, mere negation is rarely helpful. And yet in the current pastoral situation of the American Orthodox Church, I think the phrase “non-monastic” is accurate. It is not all together clear I think that those who (justly and unjustly) criticize monastic life as the standard of parish life have an alternative model that offers a practical way to structure the life of the Church that is both consonant with the Tradition of the Church and compatible with the pastoral challenges facing the Church in America. Médaille’s comments on Mondragón offers us I think a provocative starting point to help move forward the conversation about how we can structure our life here as Orthodox Christians in an American context.
Médaille’s argues that Mondragón is built on two fundamental principles “subsidiarity and solidarity.” Both of these, he points out, are based in “Catholic social doctrine” and seeks to turn its vision of the relationship between person and society into a living reality. And a successful one at that.” What the company demonstrates is that while many in the business world
fear of implementing a “morality-based” system [because] . . . it might compromise the necessary business goals. . . . the opposite seems to be the case; the cooperative model doesn’t merely work, it works to produce a strong and growing network of firms that are fully profitable and competitive in local and world markets. Moreover, it lessens the need for big government by providing social services from its own resources. But more than these successes, what Mondragón really builds up is community, that sense of mutual caring and obligation that must be the real point of any sane economic system.
This community based on subsidiarity and solidarity make Mondragón
more than just a business enterprise; it is a social one. It is of course a profit-making enterprise, but profit is not an end in itself, it is merely a means to a much broader set of ends. In addition to its normal business enterprises, Mondragón runs an education system, a university, social safety networks, retirement systems, research and training institutes—things normally provided by governments through taxes—and provides all on its own resources, without the help of government. The guiding principle is solidarity, people caring for each other with the help formal structures and institutions.
Reading this the thought I have is this: I wonder if one way to re-organize the inner life of the Church here in America might be to surrender our non-profit status? Granted this is a radical thought experiment, but as Mondragón illustrates, profit making and a social institution that is effective in helping people care for each other are not necessarily opposed. In fact, and again as Mondragón illustrates, profit making and care for others can even be mutually sustaining institutional goals.
In my own pastoral experience I have come to more and more suspect that what trips up the life of the Church is not that we do too little, our vision for ourselves and what Christ has for us is too narrow. While yes, we do engage in outreach and evangelism as well as philanthropic work, these often seem ancillary to the real focus, the Sunday synaxis. While I value the liturgical tradition of the Church, I think our non-profit status has forced us to see ourselves in terms of being merely one more religious community among others. By pursuing non-profit status we have, I think, unintentionally limited ourselves largely to liturgy, catechesis and internal social functions with a food festival through in now and then for good measure.
But what if profit making were added to the mix? What if our goal was not simply to keep the parish open, but actually run the parish and/or the diocese with the idea that we would turn a profit with the goal of re-investing those profits, as Mondragón does, so that the diocese had the resources to run “an education system, a university, social safety networks, retirement systems, research and training institutes”?
Whether or not any of this is possible, to say nothing of desirable or consonant with the Tradition of the Church, is a question I leave to others. But I would simply like to raise the issue that maybe, just maybe, there are better ways to structure the Church in America. And maybe, just maybe, a move from non-profit to profit making (or maybe a not for profit) status might be the starting point for such a restructuring.
As always, you questions, comments and criticisms are not only welcome, they are actively invited.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
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