The headline says that TRECE “improves its accounts.” Anyone who has spent half a lifetime reading that kind of phrase already knows what comes after the verb: the bishops’ network has lost 2.9 million euros. Improving. The previous year it lost three-plus, so the improvement is 7.5 percent, which is like celebrating that the patient is evolving favorably because today he coughed up less blood than yesterday.
The interesting part comes three paragraphs further down, where no one is looking anymore. Since it began broadcasting in 2010, TRECE has lost one hundred eighteen million euros.
One hundred eighteen.
I know what you are doing right now, because I have done the same: translating the figure into something. Into apartments, into scholarships, into rural parish priests’ salaries. Don’t. Those comparisons are a journalistic vice and, besides, they console, which is the worst thing a number can do. I suggest a less friendly translation: one hundred eighteen million is nine and a half years of the network’s own revenue. Nine and a half years. The company has lost almost an entire decade of itself.
And yet I intend to defend them. Someone has to, and today I see no volunteers.
Look, in 2010 everyone was launching a channel. DTT was the gold rush and the bishops, who had spent their whole lives hearing that the Church had missed the communication train—a phrase, by the way, that has not stopped being uttered a single year since Gutenberg—decided that this was their chance. Up to that point, human. One makes mistakes. I have made mistakes with cheaper things and with less excuse.
The problem is not 2010. The problem is the fifteen years that followed. Because the accounts themselves explain, with a serenity that induces vertigo, that advertising investment will continue to flee from television toward the digital, that the duopoly takes ninety percent of the DTT pie and that the sector fell another 4.4 percent last year. An impeccable diagnosis. And the treatment? Contain spending and maintain the programming line. Keep doing the same. That is the plan. They have described the iceberg with notarial precision and have decided not to touch the helm.
Then there is the matter of the credit, which is my favorite part. TRECE has a forty-million line granted by its shareholder, that is, Ábside, that is, the Episcopal Conference, that is—allow me to complete the chain to the end, where it gets amusing—you. It has already drawn 34.7. Last year it drew five. 5.3 remain and there are twenty-eight months until maturity. Do the division. You did it in three seconds and they have gone sixteen years without doing it.
A loan that is never repaid is not a loan, by the way. It is an allowance. We have all had a brother-in-law with a credit line like that.
And this is where one’s charity runs out and anthropology begins. Because clericalism, gentlemen, is not about the cassock or treating the layperson like a gray-haired altar boy. Clericalism is a much finer superstition: the belief that the sacrament of holy orders comes with a master’s degree inside. The laying on of hands confers grace, character and sacred power. That it does, and it is a great deal. It does not confer commercial instinct. I say this with all the solemnity I can muster: it does not come in the ritual. I have checked.
And because it does not come in the ritual but is believed to, what happens is what happens: the man who cannot read a profit-and-loss statement chairs the board of the one who writes it, and the one who can read it stays silent, because his boss was appointed by Rome and he was appointed by his boss.
Canon law, which understood these things when it was written, requires every administrator of ecclesiastical goods to exercise the diligence of a good father of a family. I like the formula because it is cruel without trying to be. What father of a family? Introduce me to him. Show me the father of a family who for sixteen years has been putting money into a business that has never made a euro, who finances it with a loan from his father-in-law that he has no intention of repaying, and whose plan for the coming fiscal year consists literally of continuing to do the same thing. That man is not a good father of a family. That man is a case, and the family should have taken him somewhere a long time ago.
Let it be noted that there is no crime. There is no slush fund, no enrichment, nothing a judge could look at with interest. There is something that is harder to explain and more annoying: a perfectly legal impunity—sixteen years, one hundred eighteen million, zero resignations. The unfaithful steward in the Gospel was praised by his master, and not for being honest, which he was not, but for being clever. Here there has not even been that. The children of the light have achieved a clean sweep.
And now to the other matter, which is what I was getting at from the beginning and you saw coming a while ago.
These same gentlemen appear before the microphones to explain immigration to us.
Let us be clear, because here one must tread carefully and I do not intend to cheat. That the Church has something to say about the stranger is indisputable and I do not dispute it: Matthew 25 was not written by me, nor by Vox, and the bishop who reminds me that the immigrant is my neighbor is within his remit and his office, and can moreover demand it of me. That is doctrine. There he is in charge.
What is not doctrine is how many fit. Nor at what pace. Nor with what budget. Nor what exactly happens to a specific neighborhood in a specific city when it is asked in five years what another was not asked in fifty. That is a matter of prudence, that is, technical, that is, debatable, and the Council stated it with a frankness no one ever cites: the faithful should not expect their pastors to provide concrete solutions to all questions. Vatican II signed it. And John Paul II wrote that the Church has no models to offer. A Pope, not a talk-show guest.
So when a bishop descends from principle to politics—and they descend every fortnight, with the aplomb of someone who has received the data in prayer—he is no longer speaking as a pastor. He is speaking as a citizen with an opinion. Which is legitimate and even charming. But a citizen with an opinion does not have a right to a pulpit on Sundays, and above all does not have a right for his opinion to come wrapped in the gift paper of moral authority.
The symmetry is the serious part of the matter and I say it without any humor: in both cases they administer what is not theirs and someone else pays the bill. The one hundred eighteen million did not come out of their pocket. And neither are the consequences of what they say about immigration charged in the neighborhood where they live, which tends to be quiet and have a doorman. Pronouncing without competence is a minor vice. Pronouncing without competence and without consequence is a system.
I am not asking them to be silent. I am asking the opposite of what is usually asked: that they speak much more, but about their own affairs, which are enormous, urgent and have been utterly neglected. About sin. About hell, which exists. About the seminaries. About catechesis, which is no longer given. And that in everything else they practice that old virtue the scholastics knew how to name and which consists, simply, in distinguishing between what one knows and what one believes.
One hundred eighteen million for a dose of epistemological humility. Expensive, but at least let them make use of it.
Meanwhile, the schedule continues: masses, talk shows and westerns. I have seen almost all of the westerns. And I keep the ones in which someone, around minute eighty, looks around, counts the bullets left and says in a low voice that it is about time to abandon the fort.
Read also: The TRECE bill for the bishops: 118 million in losses since its creation