Contemplating Life – Episode 37 – “Putting the Deux in the Machina”

In this episode, I begin a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. So that time was serving as the parish’s computer consultant setting up a database of parish records. I talked about the ups and downs of automating parish communications.

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Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 37 of Contemplating Life.

Back in episodes 6, 7, and 11 through 15, I told the story of my faith journey as I grew up Catholic, left the church in my late teens, and returned in my late 20s. For over 30 years after that return, I remained extremely active in my local parish. The only reason I’m no longer active is that I simply lack the stamina to get out of the house on a regular basis and contribute my time and talent to the church. My dedication to the church hasn’t wavered much over the years.

I included the word “much” because there have been some challenging times. There were times when the work became emotionally overwhelming. I occasionally disagreed with the clergy and other volunteers about the course we should take in our ministry. There were times when I felt as though the work I did was not appreciated or understood.

I thought we would go over some of those stories in the coming episodes. As always when I discuss my faith journey, I include a disclaimer that I’m not trying to evangelize, proselytize, or convert anyone to my way of thinking or believing. I’m simply telling the stories of my experiences that I hope you will find well… As my closing remarks always say… I hope you find them educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring.

Much of my early ministry in the church revolved around my expertise as a computer programmer and systems analyst. I helped my church and others computerize their operations.

As I mentioned in that earlier series of episodes about my involvement in the Catholic Church, I began volunteering my time and talent to Saint Gabriel Church even before I decided to return to the Church.

In 1978, I had a personal computer that my dad and I had built from kit parts. I have to laugh these days when I hear someone say, “I built a PC.” What they mean is they purchased a motherboard, a CPU, a graphics card, a power supply, and a case. When I say that I built a computer in the late 1970s, I purchased circuit boards and a bag of loose parts in kit form. We had to solder integrated circuit sockets to plug the chips into as well as discrete components like resistors, capacitors, and voltage regulators.

Anyway, I drifted off topic there sorry. Make a note to self… Do a series of episodes about all the computers I’ve owned over the years.

There was a woman named Diane Something who was the parish bookkeeper. She would come over to my house once a month and enter the monthly financial report into a spreadsheet that I designed for her. I believe we were using Borland Quattro spreadsheet software. The name of that software was a joke because the leading spreadsheet at that time was a product called Lotus 1-2-3. The word “Quattro” is Italian for four. The joke was that it was one better than 123.

[Note: My bad. Quattro and Lotus didn’t come along until 16-bit systems under MS-DOS. The story I’m telling was on the 8-bit system under CP/M. It must’ve been VisiCalc or Microsoft Multiplan which I mentioned later.]

My mom heard about a program called Parish Data System or PDS for short. It was written by a Catholic programmer in Arizona in conjunction with his parish priest. It was a database program for keeping track of members. Each family had a family number and the members within the family had a member number. There were screens full of information at both of those levels that included addresses, phone numbers, and so on. It also had the ability to track financial contributions.

You could establish your own lists of keywords to assign to families or individuals. Family keywords would include things like, “school family”, “inactive”, or “out of parish” the latter being for people who attended our church but didn’t live within our boundaries.

Member keywords were usually used for the type of activities a person was involved in such as “parish council”, “board of education”, “maintenance committee, “men’s club”, “women’s club”, “Eucharistic minister”, and so on.

There were a wide variety of ready-made reports built into the system. The most useful one was called “fam-quick” which was a quick report of family information that included family name, address, and phone number. You could also print mailing labels based on keyword searches. So if you wanted to do a mailing to everyone in the men’s club, you would simply specify that keyword and it would spit out labels for everyone who had that keyword.

It also contained some rather useful Catholic-specific features most notably whether or not you had received certain sacraments and the date in which you had received them. So you might search for all children of a certain age who have not yet received First Communion and send them a mailing encouraging them to enroll their kids in sacrament preparation classes.

Someone had donated a personal computer to the parish. It was made by Zenith which was a brand name known mostly for TVs, hi-fi stereos, and other appliances. rather than computers. It was probably made by someone else and they just stuck their name on it. It had a Z80 processor and ran CP/M. It had a pair of 5.25” floppy drives. That wasn’t sufficient to run PDS. You really needed a computer with a hard drive to make good use of it.

I taught our priests how to use WordStar word processing software and I built spreadsheets using either Quattro or Microsoft Multiplan. By the way, Multiplan was the first piece of Microsoft software I ever owned. It had a feature that is still not available on Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet that I know of. It was three-dimensional. Microsoft Excel has the ability to have multiple pages or tabs within the same sheet. And you can reference cells or ranges of cells between pages. But Multiplan would allow you to select a range across pages. Suppose you had 12 sheets in the file, one for each month’s expenses. You could write a formula that would give you the sum of cell G32 from sheet 1 through sheet 12. If there’s a way to do that in Excel, I haven’t figured it out.

A decent personal computer with a hard drive could cost well over $2000 in those days. We then had someone make us the proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse. There was a company that would publish your weekly Sunday bulletin for you. You would send them a typed camera-ready copy by FedEx on a Monday evening. They would print your bulletin for you and FedEx it back to you by Friday afternoon. They made their money by selling ads on the back of the bulletin. If you could get a certain amount of ads sold, they would give you a free computer. I seem to recall the deal also included the Parish Data System program as part of the free bundle. That program alone was worth hundreds of dollars.

My mom told the salesman, “I’ve been lusting for a computer for our parish.” He was happy he could satisfy her lust.

The computer was a Kaypro 10. It was the second major “portable computer” mass-produced. When I say portable computer I’m not talking about a laptop. Those were still some time off. The term “portable computer” meant it folded up into a package about the size of a medium-sized suitcase. I believe the advertised it was capable of being stashed underneath an airline seat.

The first such computer was the Osborne 1 but it had a notoriously small TV screen. Adam Osborne, its inventor, sold them like hotcakes but then made the mistake of announcing more advanced versions with a better screen and a hard drive. Unfortunately, the machines were not nearly ready to ship. His sales dropped to zero because nobody wanted the old version. They were waiting for the new one.

The Kaypro II and Kaypro IV hastened the demise of Osborne Computers. They had better screens and better floppy drives. The Kaypro 10 included a 10 MB hard drive. Yes people that’s megabytes – not gigabytes. Your phone has multiple gigabytes of memory. You can get a flash drive with 256 GB of storage. But in those days, 10 MB was huge.

Whenever we got a new computer at our parish, Father Paul would give it a blessing that we would be able to use it for good purposes. I always warned him not to sprinkle holy water on it lest it short out

I helped them set up the PDS database software and put together a plan for data management. That involved choosing keywords that I thought would be useful such as those I’ve already described. This really helped them to unlock the power of a computer database beyond just printing mailing labels.

PDS report generation also had a bit of a programming language built into it so that you could create sophisticated reports. I did some pretty clever things with it over the years. Rather than just using the standard reports.

One of the limitations of the program in those days was that it would only keep track of monthly totals of contributions. It had the capability of recording donations across 9 different funds. They expected you would set up one fund for ordinary Sunday contributions and the other funds for things like capital campaigns or special fundraising drives, missionary work, etc.

I came up with a clever idea that we should create five funds one for each Sunday of the month because some months have five Sundays. That way we could keep track of weekly contributions even though the system was only designed to keep monthly totals. That still gave us 4 additional funds that we could use for other purposes like special collections or missionary work.

I had to rewrite the financial reports to take advantage of the crazy system I designed. Fortunately, the programming capabilities of the report generator were fairly sophisticated. We would mail everyone a financial statement to families a few times a year to remind them perhaps if they skipped a Sunday. Father would write a topping letter suggesting that if they notice they had missed a Sunday they might consider making it up. We would of course send them a complete report at the end of the calendar year that they could use for tax purposes.

We also had a requirement that if you had kids in our parochial school and wanted a discount on your tuition, you had to be a regular contributor. There were tax regulations that said if we required a certain level of contribution in order to qualify for a Catholic discount on tuition, you couldn’t count that as a charitable contribution. It was just a different way to pay your tuition. So, we had to drop the mandatory contribution requirement so people could still count their donations on their taxes. But still find a way to make sure that if you were going to get the benefit of the lower tuition rate, you had to be an active member of the church. Our school principal came up with a very clever plan even though in some ways it shamed people into paying. Hey, you had to be active in the church to get the church discount anything we could do to coerce you into doing your fair share was okay with me.

We preached the principle of tithing. That is giving 10% of your income to charity. It comes out of some Old Testament Scripture readings. We defined that as 5% to the church and 5% to other charitable endeavors such as United Way, American Cancer Society, etc. But we also said that the other 5% could include your Catholic tuition. I wasn’t so sure that was completely kosher if you pardon my cultural appropriation.

So we couldn’t force people to give 5% but we can use that 5% number as a standard. We participated in a federal school lunch program that would give subsidies for school lunches to low-income families. The principal knew what the income level was to qualify for that program. She took 5% of that and then concluded if you weren’t paying 5% of the poverty level income in your contribution it must be because you were too poor.

She would invite the parents to come in and very gently and discreetly offer them the opportunity to sign up for free or reduced lunch prices. After all, if you’re making more money than the poverty level, then why weren’t you contributing more? Of course, when you filled out the paperwork for the subsidies, you had to reveal your income and that’s when conversation would come about not doing your fair share. So technically we didn’t have a set amount that you HAD to contribute but we made it clear participation was a requirement. The school lunch thing was a ruse to start that conversation. Sneaky, but I liked it.

One of the clever things that we did with the program was to send out these financial statements encouraging people to meet their tithing pledge and we would send a custom letter depending on whether or not they were meeting their pledge, falling short of the pledge, or perhaps giving absolutely zero. This was whether they were making use of the parochial school or not. We wanted people to honor their pledges. But there was a limitation to what PDS could do. You couldn’t say to it, “Print letter version A to people who meet their pledge. Send version B to those who gave zero.” and do it all in the same run. You have to select the people who gave zero, print mailing labels for that group, stuff the right letter in those envelopes, and then do a separate run for the people who really gave something.

Members of the finance committee would get together on a Saturday afternoon for an envelope-stuffing meeting. I had to set things up with four different groups. School families who gave something, school families who gave zero, nonschool people who gave something, and nonschool people who gave zero. They each got a different letter and we had to run them separately.

I would give them names like Group A, B, C, and D so that the people stuffing the envelopes wouldn’t necessarily know that if they were doing Group B it was a deadbeat family with kids in school. We didn’t want them looking at those people sideways when they came to church. We wanted to respect their privacy.

Inevitably, the people stuffing envelopes wanted to know why we had to do all these complicated separate groups of mailings. I just said, “It’s a limitation of the program.” Then they wanted to know what the categories were. I finally just explained to them what the categories were. Afterward, I said, “But I’m trying to be sensitive to people’s privacy and not telling you which group is which. If you want to be really nosy and read the letter you’re stuffing and know who was a deadbeat then do so but it’s on your conscious not mine.”

Computerizing our mailings allowed us to do some really great things. For example, we could create a search of the database for anyone who had children of school age who were not already enrolled in our parochial school. We would invite them to consider coming to our school but if not, please enroll your child in Sunday morning religious education programs which we use the Catholic acronym CCD classes as I explained in an earlier episode.

Sounds like a really their idea doesn’t it? We want our kids to get a Catholic education one way or the other. If not in our parish elementary school then in Sunday school. Nothing wrong with that is there?

Unfortunately, that letter had the potential to cause someone a great deal of emotional upset. There was a man who was a very active and devoted member of our Catholic parish but whose wife was not Catholic. For centuries, Catholics were either forbidden or strongly discouraged from marrying someone non-Catholic. My dad was not Catholic. He had to sign a paper assuring the priest that any children they had would be raised Catholic. Apparently, this particular parishioner who was married to a non-Catholic did not have his wife sign said to paper or didn’t care that she violated it. The wife and kids all attended a Protestant fundamentalist church and were quite disapproving that the husband was Catholic. I can only imagine the emotional pain and marital conflict it would’ve caused if she opened a piece of mail suggesting she should send her kids to Catholic school or Catholic Sunday school. This was decades ago and I don’t recall if we were able to intercept that letter or if it was delivered. I hope we caught it in time but I think perhaps we did not.

In a similar case, a non-Catholic husband was unsupportive of his wife’s faith and didn’t want to see any mailings at all from the church. We had a special family keyword that I think we only attached to very few families that indicated “send no mail”.

One day someone asked me why we have a “send no mail” keyword. I explained that there were just some people who shouldn’t be getting mailings. They asked, “Why?” I got really frustrated And I lost my patience because they wouldn’t take my word we just needed it so I rather angrily explained, “Will if you have to know it’s because we’re trying to keep wives getting beaten by their husbands because they don’t like getting mail from the church!”

I didn’t realize it, but one of the women who had the “send no mail” keyword overheard me. I was about to apologize when she came over, patted me on the back, and said, “Keep up the good work.”

So, even though computerization gave us tremendous new capabilities, we learned very quickly that we could not take the human element out of the equation. In any such customized correspondence we created, we had to make sure we had someone knowledgeable reviewing everything that went out.

Everything I developed using the PDS program I did for free from my own parish. Then, three other parishes hired me to consult with them on the best ways to use the program. I describe those efforts as doing well while doing good.

Parish Data Systems was acquired by another company ACS Technology. It has expanded into a much more sophisticated suite of programs that also include general ledger, payroll, facilities scheduling, and other tools at both the parish and diocesan levels.

In the weeks to come, I will talk more about the eight years I served as a member of the Finance Committee and eventually as its chairman. At one point I think the community was called Ways and Means and it seemed like we always had many more ways than we had means. We’ll talk about those challenges and more in the weeks to come as I continue the story of my volunteer work at Saint Gabriel church.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

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