Bureaucracies are all the same. They seem to thrive on obstructionism—insisting on unnecessary procedures and red tape. 

Regardless of whether they are governmental, business or not-for-profit agencies, bureaucracies stifle innovation, creativity and enthusiasm. They are impersonal and mechanical in their interaction with the individuals and communities they claim to serve.

Church bureaucracies are no different except that they often claim a higher authority for their obstructionism. Ecclesiastical red tape is every bit as frustrating as the secular version, but it can be even more irritating when Church bureaucrats act as if they were God’s emissaries. The reason is that while there is an institutional (incarnational) dimension to the Church’s daily life, her truest nature is personal not institutional. As a result, when people who work for the Church—whether clergy or laity—obstruct the Church’s pastoral mission, the offense given is truly a grave one.

Writing about the Second Vatican Council’s teaching about the Church, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) said this:

Church is not a contrivance or an apparatus, not merely an institution or one of the usual sociological entities—she is a person. She is a woman; she is a mother. She is alive. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most categorical antithesis to a merely organizational or bureaucratic concept of Church. We cannot make Church; we must be Church. And we are Church, and Church is in us only inso far as faith shapes our being, above and beyond anything we do. Only in Marian being do we become Church. At the origins, too, Church was not made but born. She was born when the fiat was awakened in Mary’s soul. This is the most profound desire of the [Second Vatican] Council: that the Church might awaken in our souls. Mary shows us the way. (Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics)

We are urged to take our petitions for spiritual as well as material needs directly to Mary. There is no red tape in her, no roundabout or unnecessary procedures. Mary hears our voices. She responds by interceding for us immediately before the throne of grace.

We can be confident that our Blessed Mother clears away all obstacles to our becoming Church, the People of God, member’s of Christ’s Body, by showing us the way to say “yes” to God’s will for us—even when we are confused, frightened or unsure.

There is no bureaucracy in Mary, no unnecessary procedures or red tape. In her there is only complete openness and the desire to help us become happy, joyous and free.

The Church should be like Mary. We who are the Church should cast aside all pettiness, all rushing to judgment and all rigid interpretation of rules in order to listen to others and respond to their needs. When that happens, the Church will awaken in our souls and we will be free.

Nick Ring’s Madonna and Child

Spartanburg, SC