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The Author Replies: Perhaps we could all agree that bigger is not always better, but sometimes increases in size can bring about economies of scale, though not always. A big size is not always a bad thing; Catholics do, after all, belong to a Church with over a billion members. The goal, is it not, is a unity of mission and purpose within multiple parts. St. Paul's image comes to mind of one body with many members, each with its own power or gift to offer the whole (foot, eye, hand, arm). Bureaucracy can help the various parts coordinate their activities toward a common purpose and a common good, or bureaucracy can decide to think of itself an end unto itself that all the various parts are meant to serve. The Catholic Church (and all sensible people) are in favor of the first and opposed to the second, even though increasingly, modern institutions seem dominated by the second tendency and seem to have forgotten the first. If you want a social cause, "Fight Foolish Bureaucracy" would be a good place to start. As for Nate's question about whether "destroying the middle class and driving more people into the arms of the secular welfare state is truly Catholic?" the answer is no. One would have to distinguish carefully, however, between the Church's actual social teachings with all their openness to prudential judgment and honest disagreement between people of good will, on the one hand, and how those teachings have been interpreted and presented in a very rigid, legalistic manner over the last several decades by various Catholic academics as well as various bureaucrats within the American ecclesiastical hierarchy, on the other. My advice would be: read the encyclicals --- Centesimus Annus, in particular. Don't trust what people "say" about the Church's social teaching. Read the teaching. - Randall B. Smith