Contents
Understanding Leverageable Advantage
Areas Where Centralisation Creates a Leverageable Advantage
Implications for Pastoral Planning
Introduction
Last week’s post examined Christ’s example in adopting subsidiarity-integrated centralisation. Subsidiarity-integrated centralisation enables the Church to leverage coordinated action, maximising pastoral fruitfulness while respecting the competence and responsibility of local ecclesial communities. Today focuses on this leverageable advantage.
Understanding Leverageable Advantage
A leverageable advantage is a strength or position that serves as a springboard for creating capabilities or future gains. In an organisation, it enables it to achieve greater results without a proportional increase in resources. Here, instead of doing more things, the impact of existing people, knowledge, finances, and structures is multiplied beyond their immediate context.
Applied to the Church, a leverageable advantage is an organisational capacity that enables the Church to multiply the fruitfulness of its pastoral capital (financial, human, social, religious, spiritual, cultural, political, intellectual, natural, physical, and reputational) across multiple ecclesial communities. It exists whenever a centrally coordinated structure enables dioceses, parishes, mission schools and hospitals to accomplish more effectively what they could not easily achieve independently.
This post focuses on how subsidiarity-integrated centralisation creates capacities that individual parishes, mission schools and hospitals, and even dioceses cannot generate independently.
Areas Where Centralisation Creates a Leverageable Advantage
The purpose of central coordination is not primarily administrative efficiency but greater participation in Christ’s mission.
In light of a pastoral vision and plan, the question is not whether authority should be centralised or decentralised. Instead, the question should be what should be centralised because it creates a leverageable advantage and maximises pastoral fruitfulness. In the same vein, one asks what should be decentralised and what should remain decentralised, because some form of centralised control undermines, or will undermine, local adaptation and pastoral fruitfulness. Hence, the peculiarities of a pastoral area largely influence the responses (See Post 260: Understanding an area in Pastoral Ministry – 22 June 2026).
The Church requires certain aspects of her life to be coordinated centrally by law. For instance, over thirty functions of central coordination are entrusted to the episcopal conference (See Post 228: Subsidiarity and the Episcopal Conference – 10 November 2025). Since the diocesan bishop exercises vigilance to mitigate abuse in ecclesiastical discipline regarding the ministry of the word, the celebration of the sacraments and sacramentals, the worship of God and the veneration of the saints, and the administration of goods (Can. 392 §2), as well as over the administration of ecclesiastical goods belonging to public juridical persons subject to him (Can. 1276 §1), he establishes centralised frameworks to carry out this function. This may include requiring pastors to obtain permission or dispensation for certain actions.
Apart from doctrinal oversight, sacramental discipline, formation programmes, safeguarding policies, and canonical expertise, which are already centralised by law, statistical systems, digital infrastructure, financial accountability, and major research initiatives can be centralised or coordinated centrally.
Having a centrally coordinated statistical system that collates data helps dioceses identify trends and analyse pastoral realities. For instance, statistical analysis of attendance at diocesan programmes can help revisit the frequency of such programmes or find better ways to encourage greater participation. A centralised statistical system also helps to allocate resources more effectively.
Introducing a central digital infrastructure within a diocese will help improve communication, record-keeping, inventory monitoring, and collaboration among diocesan institutions while subsidising the maintenance costs for each participating institution. Financial accountability systems strengthen transparency and stewardship. Research offices can gather data that individual parishes lack the capacity to collect themselves.
A leverageable advantage is created when one investment benefits many people simultaneously. Rather than each parish, mission school, or mission hospital developing identical systems independently, certain resources can be developed once and shared broadly. Rather than each diocesan hospital making independent purchases, diocesan hospitals could aggregate their requests and make a single purchase at a significant discount. Rather than each school subscribing to an international journal database that they cannot afford independently, schools can centralise and register as a single group. This reduces the cost per school. A form of central financial system helps promote equitable remuneration for priests in poorer parishes and poorly populated schools, and reduces sycophancy, which greatly undermines pastoral fruitfulness (cf. Can. 1274 §1).
Pastoral fruitfulness is the yardstick to evaluate leverage in pastoral planning. If central coordination enables more people to encounter Christ, receive better pastoral care, ensure equitable remuneration, participate more fully in the life of the Church, improve the quality of education and healthcare, and better manage resources, it has fulfilled its purpose.
Implications for Pastoral Planning
Subsidiarity-integrated centralisation that creates a leverageable advantage is essential in pastoral planning for various reasons.
First, it encourages effective stewardship of limited ecclesial resources. Since pastoral planning is fundamentally the stewardship of pastoral capital, subsidiarity-integrated centralisation entails building centrally coordinated capacities that integrate subsidiarity, with the purpose of bringing together all available forms of pastoral capital to help achieve the pastoral plan.
Second, it reduces unnecessary duplication among dioceses, parishes, mission schools and hospitals. Avoiding this saves time, money, energy, and expertise, channelling them toward a greater pastoral good.
Third, it strengthens collaboration across ecclesial structures, thereby safeguarding human dignity and combating rivalry, as they share the same mission of holistic salvation. Moreover, this collaboration strengthens co-responsibility, especially among the laity, and helps leverage diverse individual gifts to maximise pastoral fruitfulness. As Pope Benedict XVI maintains, subsidiarity and solidarity work together for the common good (Address to the Participants in the 14th session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 3 May 2008).
Fourth, subsidiarity-integrated centralisation enables evidence-based pastoral planning through shared statistical systems and research. As noted in the past, Statistical data is an indispensable tool for pastoral planning because it helps identify trends in a pastoral area, which enables pastors to make informed decisions. Nevertheless, accompanied by prayer and discernment, numbers must always be interpreted prudently alongside qualitative indicators, such as social, economic, political, religious, cultural, and ecclesial realities.
Fifth, it allows pastors and their local collaborators to devote more attention to the spiritual well-being of the faithful by centrally providing specialised services. Finally, it reinforces ecclesial communion by recognising that unity and diversity are mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive.
Leverageable liability
Although the benefits of a leverageable advantage for pastoral fruitfulness are enormous, there is also the danger of a leverageable liability, which occurs when central structures begin to preserve themselves rather than serve local communities, or when subsidiarity is discarded. Here, central coordination increases bureaucracy, suppresses legitimate local adaptation, slows down pastoral responsiveness, thereby undermining pastoral fruitfulness. Such mentality is why the fifth principle that led to the 1983 Code specifically called for decentralisation in line with subsidiarity (See Post 225 – The Fifth Principle: The Principle of Subsidiarity – 20 October 2025).
Hence, to avoid leverageable liability, any form of central coordination must integrate subsidiarity because structures exist for mission and not vice versa. In line with the Church’s teaching and praxis, authority must be exercised at the lowest competent level because the Church emphasises that “no matter that can properly be dealt with at a lower level should be taken to a higher one” (Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in the Ecumenical Dialogues and in the Responses to the Encyclical Ut Unum Sint, 2024, n.176).
Conclusion
It is important to recognise that centralisation does not, by itself, produce pastoral fruitfulness. Instead, it helps the Church remove unnecessary obstacles to carrying out its mission. Therefore, subsidiarity-integrated centralisation should never be viewed as an end in itself but as an instrument at the service of the Church’s mission. Hence, while centralisation creates leverageable advantages, subsidiarity ensures those advantages are implemented in line with local needs. The measure of every ecclesial structure is therefore not how much authority it possesses but how much pastoral fruitfulness it enables.
May God continue to help us🙏🏾
K’ọdị🙋🏾♂️
