When there was gold and silver coinage, people learned that they could “shave” the edges of a coin, and end up with a few grains of precious metal to keep for themselves. Those who shaved the coins promptly passed them on, keeping for themselves maybe a percent or so of the intrinsic value of each coin they handled. Since “unshaved coins” weighed more, they were more valuable. People tended to keep the heavier coins and spend the “shaved” ones. With surprising speed, the “coin of the realm” was debased.
Gresham brilliantly summed up what was happening to the money of a realm by saying “Bad money drives out good money.”
The same thing happens in every area of human life. Bad politicians accumulate enough bribes to keep good politicians from being elected. Bad businesses devalue their goods and services to the detriment and destruction of good businesses. In The Church, those who embrace bad policies and practices drive out good policies, people, and practices.
It is a “good practice” for parish priests to protect their parishes, carefully husband their resources, and do everything they can to pass on a financially sound church to their replacement. It is a “bad practice” for a higher authority to rearrange its corporate structure simply to take over the funds that so many good priests have patiently stored away.
Once a good priest sees that there is no point in being careful and thrifty because that which he accumulates will be stripped away as soon as a higher authority wants his assets badly enough, that “bad practice”, of taking what belongs to someone else, drives out the desire to have a sound, prosperous parish.
Even worse, a “spiritual equivalent” of Gresham’s Law inevitably kicks in. “If those people who think they’re so smart are going to strip my parish of its funds, they may get rid of it, altogether, even if it is a sound, viable parish.”
That makes it hard for a priest to encourage vocations. “What’s the point?”, they may say, even subconsciously. “I have given my whole life to The Church. I have spent decades in my parish, tending the sheep in my particular sheepfold. I, like Christ, have been the living door to my sheepfold, guiding my sheep to safety and salvation. Can I, in good conscience, encourage someone to follow in my footsteps, the very path the Disciples trod, knowing what his superiors will do to him if he is successful?”
This vicariate system is an attack on common sense. It will do more harm than good to The Church, Herself.
