Best leaders walk with their flocks, feet planted firmly on the ground
If I were conducting a business leadership seminar or a course in how to groom new leaders from within, an idea University of Missouri curators are considering, I could find few cautionary tales more instructive than the sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church.
Last month, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles paid $660 million to settle some 500 sex-abuse claims. The diocesan leader, Cardinal Roger Mahony, said he “didn’t know” that treatment programs where he had sent some predatory priests weren’t working.
Mahony didn’t know because, like so many other church, political and business leaders, he was living in a shell, largely insulated from the lives of his subordinates and followers.
As a lifelong Catholic, I’ve known many church leaders and find in three of them a parable to illustrate a simple truth about how to manage people:
The best leaders are those who walk with their flocks, feet planted firmly on the ground.
Fiery advocate
Last year in the early spring, Ronald Sauer, a 64-year-old homeless man with a penchant for helping around his church, died in a Las Vegas alleyway after a long struggle with alcohol and a brief bout of infection.
Sauer might not have been missed at all if not for his good friend, Father John McShane.
Reading how the 62-year-old McShane planned to honor Sauer with a gold plaque at his parish church, I found myself remembering the Roman Catholic priest whose life and leadership seem as much irony writ large as Sauer’s death was tragedy writ small.
Thirty years ago, I met McShane at a parochial grade school in Carson City, Nev. He was a young, fiery advocate for Christ in a state better known for divorce and gambling than God and salvation.
Until I read about McShane’s work as the leading advocate for the homeless in Las Vegas – Sin City or the city of Our Lady Luck, depending on your perspective – I had been depressed about the state of the priesthood and Catholic leadership generally.
Posthumous sex abuse scandals had recently destroyed two priests I had both known and admired.
White Collar, Dark Side
A few years ago, several women came forward to claim that Reno, Nev., Pastor Robert Bowling – who, with charm and chutzpah, built my hometown’s most architecturally magnificent Roman Catholic Church – had molested them as young girls.
Well-substantiated allegations from several young men wrecked the reputation of Gonzaga University President John “Jack” Leary, a Jesuit priest who, after rebuilding Gonzaga, went on to create two revolutionary educational institutions — New College in San Francisco and Old College at Reno, which I attended one summer.
Leary founded Nevada’s first accredited law school at Old College — almost single-handedly.
Like McShane, Leary and Bowling were charismatic, dynamic leaders who moved their church forward in significant ways and helped lead many people, including me, to better places.
But where McShane stayed true to a fundamental faith in his mission, Bowling and Leary strayed to tragic effect. They ruined lives of and died in well-publicized disgrace, wittingly aided by bishops in mansions who hushed the victims and their allegations — in Leary’s case, for more than 40 years.
The bum’s rush
I was prompted to reflect on McShane after reading another tale of failed leadership, this one supremely ironic.
Las Vegas Bishop Joseph Pepe forced McShane out of his assignment as chaplain for Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada after he had tried to do the right thing.
McShane had criticized church policies he believed were hurting his homeless flock. His bishop told him, in essence, to “get out of town.”
Details of how the story broke read as though top-ranking church officials were fleeing another sex-abuse scandal. Pepe was in Rome and his spokesperson refused comment. One Nevada newspaper ironically called McShane’s fall from Pepe’s grace a case of the “bum’s rush.”
But where accusers surround abusers, supporters surrounded McShane.
Las Vegas homeless advocate Linda Lera-Randle El called Bishop Pepe’s decision to “reassign someone of such truth and faith a travesty.”
Other supporters heralded McShane’s “unique, nonjudgmental, non-threatening style,” saying it was “sad to punish a man” who stood up for those he called “God’s littlest people.”
Renewal of Faith
After reading an SF Weekly article entitled “The Double Life of John Leary,” I wondered how Father McShane was doing. With Google one click away, I got my answer — and experienced something approaching a renewal of faith.
Faith that leaders, or in this case, one leader, will do the right thing, even against significant and discouraging odds.
When I think about the story of John McShane, it sounds like the story of Jesus — the man, not the deity.
It also sounds like the fiery advocate I once knew, whose life decades later resembles the city he and his house-less flock call home: an oasis in a desert that lights the darkness right out of the night.