Without even knowing the circumstances, anyone who has ever served for any length of time as a layperson on the board of any Catholic institution would have easily recognized from the first press release weeks ago that Lou Agnese was a “dead man walking,” from this telling statement: “Our prayers and thoughts are with Dr. Agnese, his family, and the entire university community during this difficult situation.”
When a Catholic priest, nun, or professed religious person tells you to your face that she or he is praying for you, that’s a very, very good thing.
When any of them refer to a third party in a case like this, the person being “prayed for” is finished and has been written off, consigned to the mercy of the Deity – nothing more can be done for the miserable soul who caused them problems. What immediately comes to my mind are the expressions of prayer for someone as portrayed by the character of the venal Archbishop Gilday in the The Godfather: Part III.
Such an expression of praying for any central figure in a Catholic controversy carries just about the same level of care, compassion, and concern as a Southern matriarch saying, “Well, bless his heart.”
Having served on numerous Catholic boards, hospitals, foundations, and other entities, I am confident that the recent incidents were only catalysts and had little connection to the root cause of the downfall of Lou Agnese. Behind the scenes, in the sponsoring religious congregations of UIW, there have probably been several years of conversations regarding, “What are we going to do about Lou?”
Robert Rivard, whose journalism and integrity I trust, nailed several well-founded reasons that could have justified ending Agnese’s reign, and which would have done so in secular entities, but were in no way the cause of Agnese’s presidential termination Monday.
The Cameron Redus shooting? The UIW board and nuns had already closed ranks on that for Agnese.
Agnese had an autocratic leadership approach? Agnese’s failure here was not the exercise of autocracy but the public display of it. Autocratic governance has never been a failing in any Catholic entity. All Catholic religious organizations have that in their structural DNA. It’s the lack of autocratic subtlety that is the political mortal sin in the arenas of Catholic power.
Hiring relatives, cronies, and incompetents? Surrounding one’s self with those who cannot or will not challenge? Not a problem in Catholic church organizations where, obedience, institutional self-protection, selected relationships, and trusted networks are the currency of the realm.
Rivard accurately nailed, but glossed over, the most likely cause of Agnese’s downfall in his article where he described Agnese as “… even taking on the sisters whose order founded the university and are the nominal proprietors.”
I grew up in a Southern culture where there was a despicable racist term for a person who worked as a servant in a plantation house. The contemptible expression was used to put people who attempted to overstep their assigned status in Southern society in their place. It was a reminder that while you may be allowed to work in the owner’s house, and possibly even eat in the house, don’t remotely think for even a moment that you are somehow part of the family. If you do, you’re gone. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But you’re done.
Nowhere is this more true than for a layperson in a Catholic entity.
Most likely, Agnese committed the unpardonable sin in a canonically-sponsored, Catholic organization. He forgot that he was a layman, believing he was something other than temporary hired help in a system that plans in decades and thinks in centuries. He may have thought that he owned the house. Fatal.
Agnese first became identified with the university, but that transitioned to the university being identified with him. UIW is often referred to as “Lou U.” He may have actually believed that he could, as noted by Rivard, take on the sisters. Fatal.
In any heavily Catholic city such as San Antonio or Boston, there exists what is affectionately known as a “Catholic mafia.” These are loose, mutually profitable alliances of ordained hierarchy, professed religious leaders, lay employees and leaders of Catholic organizations, along with Catholic business leaders who commerce with Catholic organizations through preferential, protected relationships. Religious congregations are experts at coalescing that power to their advantage and probably did so to kick Agnese to the curb.
The deed is done. There will be sorrowful sighs, expressions of regret, calls for the ritual healing of damages done and more expressions of prayer for “poor Lou.” The UIW faculty senate will converse in thoughtful, whispered murmurs about how their role was necessary, scarcely understanding that they were pawns in a power game with rules they cannot fathom. They were useful to the real, subtle power, but inconsequential.
Lou, I am not going to join the others in false, pabulum prayers. I simply say: “Vaya con Dios.”
Top image: The Incarnate Word Convent building. Photo by Scott Ball.
Related Stories:
Mixed Reactions on Campus to UIW President Agnese’s Removal
UIW Board Votes to Remove President Agnese
Rivard: UIW Board Faces A Moment of Truth
Branch: On UIW President Lou Agnese Jr.
Agnese’s Leaked Racial Remarks Lead UIW Board to Break Silence
UIW Showdown Between President and Chair Imminent
UIW President on Medical Leave after ‘Uncharacteristic Behavior’
Great “read”. Most of us have served “at the pleasure” one time or another.
As someone who worked at IWC for 20 years , I remain deeply committed to the charism of the CCVI. May it once again become the heart and soul of UIW.
“Our brand is not the bird, our brand is the Incarnate Word.” Sr. Walter Maher
Really appreciate Mr Speed’s insight here. His “grand pretense for why Lou’s gotta go” theory is probably the closest to the truth out of any speculation we outsiders might indulge. This part, though:
Most likely, Agnese committed the unpardonable sin in a canonically-sponsored, Catholic organization. He forgot that he was a layman, believing he was something other than temporary hired help in a system that plans in decades and thinks in centuries.
I mean, I get that and it’s certainly true of the broader church and certainly diocesan structures, but the CCVI order doesn’t have centuries and doesn’t even have decades.
It is toast. Like all the old teaching orders, they ditched their habits and charism and went “groovy”—they opted for the world, but the world they chose to form their charism around with was ’60s- and ’70s-era issues while the world kept on moving. Statistics amply bear out that the young women who might have joined weren’t interested in that.
If Lou were a generation younger, he’d have outlived them and it might actually have become Lou U.
The article y Mr. Speed and the above comment from Jason both hit the nail right on the head. I worked in Catholic education for forty-six years. Both of these gentlemen really “got it.”
Mr Speed’s commentary just scratches the surface. The University is just a mere tenant in the home of an endemic problem in the city’s progress.
A powerful lesson about how pride can make us to full of ourselves.
Sorry, but this is such a juvenile article. The author has a master’s in theology but clearly his theology is outdated and superficial. The president of most Catholic universities serves at the pleasure of the board and the religious order or congregation that founded it. This includes Incarnate Word. It isn’t so much about “challenging” the sisters or a layperson forgetting their lay status. Whenever anyone’s behavior crosses a boundary, their superiors, whether lay or religious, will hold them accountable. Whatever one may speculate about Agnese’s history at UIW, in this specific situation he crossed a line with his various comments. Few university presidents could survive the aftermath of that transgression, especially if they are relatively new or have been there a while. In this case, Lou has a long history, and his public statements did not help his cause. We need a realistic analysis of this situation, not a Da Vinci Code-esque pseudo-theology divorced from reality.
Thank you for the juvenile designation. As I fast approach age 70, I have decided that maturity has been high overrated.
My commentary has nothing to do with Theology, possibly a bit to do with Roman Ecclesiology, and everything to do with my beloved Church’s wonderful, maddening, messy humanity.
Far from being Da Vinci Code-esque [sic], my views of, and opinions about, the internal politics of Catholic institutions are decidedly Greeley-esque, as in the late Father Andrew Greeley.
I am an unapologetic devotee of Greeley’s understanding of the internal politics of Catholic institutions. Lou Agnese, and this drama, could have lept from the pages of a Greeley novel.
Yes, it must be nice to have the privilege of thinking that maturity is overrated. What an abstract concept, this “maturity.” Boys will be boys some say, a phrase which really simply means “rich white men will be rich white men.” Eastwood meets McCombs/Jerry Jones meets Dan Brown. Fr. Greeley’s juvenile attempts to wed his “priest of the people”/academic life with his past life as a pre-Vatican II Catholic are nice but inadequate. Sort of like James Carroll but way more fun (and way more self-deluding). Your Greeley-esque [sic] analysis would be more accurate if it were grounded in a more realistic and mature understanding of San Antonio. Why, even your cute “Vaya con Dios” reference echoes the old Westerns, where good ol’ white boys paternalistically pretended to know some Spanish and love them some tacos (and some señoritas) while stealing the land and making themselves rich. Your commentary has nothing to do with Theology, except ecclesiology and anthropology (there you go, you’re doing Theology). And there it is, you’re stuck in one paradigm of thought that is deader than Greeley and much, much, much more pre-Vatican II than pre-Vatican II Greeley. Read the statements made by Agnese which were documented by a student and authenticated by more than one UIW administrator and faculty member. Those comments, whether caused by a medical problem or one’s own juvenile prejudices, have no place in modern society and the academy. Few can recover from such statements. What blinds people from understanding this basic reality is the juvenile attempt to reinterpret one’s present and one’s past, the failure to grapple maturely with the ongoing and old problem of racial and ethnic discrimination. Vaya con Dios.
Oh my, David, resorting to ad-hominem attacks to advance one’s world view?
Permit me to agree with you and to affirm you in your assertions about the foundations of MY world view, of which you are so self-righteously critical.
Am I white? Guilty. Am I male? Guilty. Am I rich? That’s relative. Let’s just say – comfortable. I often use the response of the character of Hyman Roth in Godfather: Part II: “I’m a retired investor living on a small pension.” I live on the Northside in a gated, protected subdivision.
Am I embedded in the allegories and metaphors of the Western film genre? Yes! Absolutely! I own ranch land in West Texas, once a part of Mexico, in a specific area which that noble country, in your lexicon, “stole” from the first Americas. I even ride horses and have Western-style guns.
See, David, I am exactly what you want – and so very desperately need – me to be in your world, so that you can be affirmed in your paradigm. I accept that role. Truthfully, I like it, and am unapologetic.
Where your response became, let’s say “juvenile,” to use the word YOU used four times, was your assertion regarding my, as you labeled it – cute, use of “Vaya con Dios.”
That, David, was what I heard from my mother, who spoke Spanish before she spoke English, when I would leave for extended periods. I heard “Vaya con Dios” spoken with grace, kindness and love from my relatives on both side of the Texas-Mexico border after visiting with them to return home. And I spoke it in turn. I heard it at funerals of family here and in Mexico.
You have chosen to stereotype me as part of “good ol’ white boy” paternalism and ridicule what you thought was my singularly Anglo heritage because of my use of “Vaya con Dios,” smugly hoping to convict me of the white person’s newest mortal sin, “cultural appropriation.” You labeled me as white; and, therefore, certainly lacking any cultural heritage – except that of oppressor. How very, very sad.
To allay your concerns, I did not steal any senoritas, nor tacos. I got my senorita from the University of the Incarnate Word 47 years ago, and I always pay for my tacos at Jacala on West Ave.
Your writing has unmasked you. (Oops, another Western reference!)
There are not very, very few who understand that eccesliology and anthropology are constituent of Theology. Even fewer would understand, much less be able to accurately state, that Father Andrew Greeley’s descriptions of pre- and post- Vatican II Catholic culture are paradigmatic. I never mentioned that in anything I wrote, yet you knew it. High marks, David!
But what was most telling is your use of the term “the academy” as a reference to those who are employed in post-secondary education. Got ya!
So, stereotyping in turn, my sign off to you will not be with a snide “Vaya con Dios” as you did to me, but with a single word, no doubt most luscious and delectable to you, and even possibly the sum of your highest aspirations. May you have . . . . . . . . tenure.
(Eastwood meets McCombs? Jerry Jones meets Dan Brown? Really?)
Congratulations on flexing your big bulging Catholic muscles, guys, but anyone paying attention lo these many years, wouldn’t have to be a theologian, a tenured or aspiring member of the academy, or even a CATHOLIC to see some very obvious things:
1) For many years, The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word benefitted mightily from their business association with Dr. Louis J. Agnese, Jr.
2) The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, while it suited them, (and it suited them for a very long time) chose to actively ignore, even enable, certain unCONVENTional styles of behavior that you would think were inconsistent with their identity
3) Some people call him a genius. Some people call him a tyrant. I can bear personal witness to his incredible impatience. But Louis J. Agnese, Jr. is the farthest thing from a bigot that you will EVER meet. One stroll around the main campus will prove that. He has spent thirty plus years proving the strength of diversity, recruiting students of color and building international relationships, because he knows that ours is an ever increasingly global world. When he got to UIW (or Incarnate Word College as it was known at the time) enrollment was hovering around 1000 girls-only, most of them white, and fewer every year. Compare that to the student body today and tell me again that Lou Agnese is a bigot. Dr. Agnese’s recent “public distasteful remarks”, are most certainly distasteful, but they are also, as the UIW press release describes them “uncharacteristic” of the man. Hello! That is why he is on MEDICAL leave. Dr. Agnese has been acting and speaking in ways that are inconsistent not only with the Sisters’ values, but with his own. That is a pretty clear indication that there is a mental or physiological pathology at work.
4) Of course, a man like Dr. Agnese has stepped on plenty of toes on his way up. Ok, he was mean to you one time. Or dismissed your idea. Or fired your aunt. Or understood that a football team is a pretty good way to build a big-time, co-ed university brand. But does that give you license to throw him under the UIW shuttle bus?
5) The Sisters of Charity came to the US with 2 missions: Education and Health Care. Now here comes Lou Agnese, who brought their University back from the dead and put it on the map, and whom the Sisters have coddled and enabled, with a health problem of serious proportion and they decide to wipe their hands of him and deny him a graceful exit?
Now I ask you, how CHARITABLE is that??????
I enjoyed reading this article. The writing style is easy to read and exciting. I had to question the generalizations about Catholics though I may not be a ‘typical’Catholic. I tried to imagine the whole scenario as if it involved another type of institution. I came to the conclusion that generalizing about Catholics in a situation that would not be acceptable to any institution is not fair or acceptable. the irony of bigoted commentary in an article about bigoted remarks is not lost on me. Catholics are an easy target but are blameless in regards to their handling Dr. Agnese’s inappropriate and racist rant.
Upon further investigation I learned the full scope of Dr.Agnese’s offensive dialogue. Any institution would have acted similarly or face great public backlash in an indefensible position. imagine the impact that a ‘black lives matter’ style protest might have on any institute of higher learning.
Please don’t fire back using big words. I am humbly offering my impression of your editorial piece. I will keep you in my thoughts and prayers.
Sincerely,
Tomas