Managing and Quantifying Grace? Reverend Robert G. Howes, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and the Origins of "Pastoral Planning"

By the mid-1960s, American dioceses were beginning to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the administrative problems facing them as inner cities and suburbs alike transformed under demographic, economic, and political pressures. This essay argues that the development of pastoral planning in the early 1970s emerged from valiant if doomed 1960s attempts to reduce these problems to quantifiable – and therefore manageable – proportions. The term "planning" came to represent the possibility of naming, and therefore potentially solving, the problem. Robert G. Howes, a priest-planner, was one of the key figures in promoting this idea. His work at Catholic University, as an author and speaker, and in the Archdiocese of Baltimore provides a window into the appeal as well as the limitations of "planning" for stressed diocesan administrators.