c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Two of America’s oldest hierarchies, the American Medical Association and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, tottered into Chicago during the same week recently. They shared overlapping interests. Medicine’s goal is health and that of religion is holiness. Along with wholeness that is kindred to both, these come from the same old English root, hal.

The cruel irony is that although these organizations share a calling to make persons whole they are falling apart themselves. Their leaders, who accept seats atop traditional organizational pyramids, experience occupational vertigo from looking down at the near empty paths that were once crowded with followers.

The bishops have watched a steep drop in the number of priests and the physician overseers at the AMA find that less than 30 percent of the country’s doctors now belong to their once powerful organization.

The problem is not with medicine or religion or with the pastors and physicians on the ever shifting front lines of everyday life. Nor is it with their harried leaders. The problem springs from the hierarchical structure and style in which both organizations continue to house themselves.

This top down array does not work well anywhere in the Space/Information Age because it no longer adequately symbolizes or expresses human experience.

In the last century, humankind entered space to rediscover a profound insight into the universe. It is not divided into higher and lower aspects and the Earth is not divided from the heavens but it is in the heavens. If the universe cannot be split up into higher and lower sections neither can human personality.

Any organization clinging to the hierarchical model in the Space/Information Age has enormous difficulties talking to itself and to the world around it. The British monarchy, for example, has become a royalty-lite soap opera that is retained as a tourist attraction for the masses rather than a grandstand for the ruling classes.

Meeting in Chicago the week of June 12, the leaders of the National Conference of Bishops and the AMA acted like Chicago Cubs fans, those masters of keeping up a good front in a losing cause. These leaders are handicapped by the hierarchical systems that, by their nature, make them seem remote and ineffective as they author initiatives that seem irrelevant or trifling in relationship to the great issues of existence.

You can measure how much trouble a hierarchy is in by the size of the projects it undertakes. Protecting itself from the threat of impeachment, Bill Clinton’s top-heavy administration continued to speak of such great issues as education but ended up proposing school uniforms. Under the weight of hierarchy, the AMA speaks of health care but ends up redesigning its traditional logo of the staff of Asclepius, the Greek symbol of medicine, changing its teal backdrop to one of purple.

The hierarchical system keeps bishops on top by letting them exercise only low bureaucratic functions such as discussing whether to retain in the Mass the response “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” It is not really the bishops’ fault that they voted the phrase out before they voted it in again. That is their diminished public function, comparable to royalty’s breaking champagne bottles on battleships.

Hierarchical systems wear good leaders out, isolate them, making them seem out of touch with the modern world and with their people. Hierarchy’s corollaries include:

_ imposing deadening divisions onto whole persons.

_ valuing property and prestige over people.

_ forcing leaders to kill time rather than spend it.

_ invoking cover-ups for higher-ups.

_ placing leaders on great heights that make it impossible for them to see what is going on among the people so far beneath them.

The situation is tragic because both the bishops and the AMA executives are good and conscientious men. Longfellow wrote long ago that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The gods now make them first into hierarchs so that those who live to accomplish great things die doing small things instead.

MO/JL END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Kennedy.