All the Pope's Men (17 page)

Moreover, the Holy See is capable of rapid response when the situation calls for it. This was clear in the American sex abuse crisis of 2002. Perhaps it’s a fair criticism that the Holy See was slow to grasp the depth of the crisis, but once that message was received, it moved beyond business as usual. When the U.S. bishops took their first stab at adopting a new set of sex abuse norms in Dallas in June, the Vatican had its response ready by mid-October—which may not seem remarkable by conventional business standards, but is certainly an accelerated reaction in ecclesiastical terms. Even more remarkable, however, was the Vatican’s offer to create a mixed commission, four officials from the Holy See and four bishops from the United States, that would produce a revised set of norms in advance of the November meeting of the U.S. bishops in Washington, D.C. The commission met over just two days in Rome, October 28 and 29, and was ready to present its results to the public November 4. Before the meeting, I had been asked for comment by several broadcast media outlets in the United States, and I expressed skepticism that the commission could really accomplish anything in such a short period. “Around the Vatican, it takes two days to open the mail," I joked. In fact, however, the commission was equal to the task. The norms it produced were then adopted by the U.S. bishops and formally approved by the Vatican. The point is that when the chips are down, and, perhaps equally important, are understood to be down, the Holy See can move fast.

Tradition

The Vatican is one of the few places remaining on earth where the argument “we’ve always done it this way" is vigorously defended from a philosophical point of view. If one accepts Christ’s promise that the Holy Spirit would always be with his Church, this means the Spirit has been guiding the growth and development of the Roman Catholic Church over two thousand years of history, and its structures and practices are not the product of chance or human invention. They represent where the Spirit was calling the Church in a particular moment in its history. Of course, it’s always possible that the Church misread the Spirit’s intentions, or that in changed times the Spirit may be eliciting a new response. But an extra degree of caution comes into play in evaluating any proposal for reform, because there is a presumption in favor of the wisdom of tradition that is difficult to override.

Can this insistence on tradition be stifling? Yes, especially to Western sensibilities accustomed to the constant arrival of new and improved versions of everything. Sometimes the presumption in favor of how things have always been done sits in the Curia like a lead weight, making even the simplest and most obvious changes in customs difficult to execute. When John Paul II received twenty-three thousand e-mails for his eighty-third birthday in May 2003, for example, every one of them had to be printed out on paper and boxed for shipping up to the Secretariat of State, where they were distributed to the language desks, considered, and given a response. Obviously, the purpose of e-mail is precisely to avoid the need for paper in such a situation. The Secretariat of State has a computer system, and the e-mails could easily have been forwarded with a tap of a keyboard button. But tradition dictated that incoming correspondence to the Holy Father be processed on paper. So it was written, and so it was done.

The Vatican’s emphasis on tradition is not, however, merely an excuse for sloughing off new ideas out of laziness or indifference. It is also a recognition that an institution with two thousand years of history has its reasons for doing things a certain way, and caution is in order before one starts cutting through all that to solve today’s particular problem. In a sense, it is rather a democratic instinct, a belief that the preferences and insights of all those who have come before ought to have weight in the deliberations.

G. K. Chesterton expressed this view in his book Orthodoxy, and it’s worth quoting him at length.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been
able to understand. I have never been able to understand where
people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended
through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices
rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who
quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic
Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority
of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to
be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is
generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are
sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village
who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past
were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with
the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for
us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in
great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no
reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history
or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our
ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen
to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified
by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified
by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good
man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate,
cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems
evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at
our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote
by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

This emphasis on tradition also informs the Vatican’s sense of accountability. Critics sometimes complain that the Vatican does not regard itself as accountable to the people of the Church, and there’s a sense in which this is true. Leadership in the Church, from the Vatican point of view, is accountable primarily to the tradition, and ultimately to God, who is its author. Policy is based on theological and philosophical principles derived from the tradition, the deposit of faith, entrusted by Christ to the apostles. Vatican officials believe the defense and transmission of the tradition is the highest service Church leaders can offer to their people. In that sense, they do not perceive themselves to be unconcerned or unaccountable to the people. Indeed, as discussed above, there is a sense in which they actually see themselves as populists. At the same time, it is certainly true that opinion polls, ballot boxes, and the other instruments of democratic government are not part of the accountability mechanisms within the curial world.

Truth to be told, most people who work in the Curia have a pet reform they’d like to push through, some area where they sincerely believe tradition has become dysfunctional or oppressive or simply outdated. An official I know in the Congregation for Saints, for example, thinks the time has come to do away with the penultimate step of beatification before canonization. Originally, beatification was designed to approve local veneration of a holy person, while canonization approved that person’s cult for the universal Church. In a globalized world in which the distinction between local and universal is increasingly relative, however, this official believes beatification no longer makes sense. Yet he’s not rattling cages to put this issue on the fast track. Why not? In part, because most Vatican officials also have a story of a time when they challenged a tradition only later to appreciate its wisdom. A German priest, for example, began working some years ago in a dicastery and was assigned an office whose window faced in the direction of St. Peter’s Square. When he moved in, he found the window had been painted shut. He inquired with his superior why this was so, and was informed, “It was like that when I got here." This German, a moderate-to-progressive who grew up on the Second Vatican Council, regarded this restriction not merely as silly, but a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the contemporary Church and its failure to live up to Pope John XXIII’s spirit of “throwing open the windows" of the Church. One day he brought a chisel and a small knife and knocked out the paint, opening up his window. He regarded this as a small but symbolic victory for the postconciliar church. Business called him out of the office for several hours, and when he returned he discovered the logic for the tradition—a gaggle of pigeons had settled down on his desk, his filing cabinet, and everywhere else in the office. After spending a clumsy, and messy, afternoon getting rid of the pigeons, the paint went back on the window. The priest has not stopped pressing gently for reform, but he also moves with a more modest appreciation that sometimes there are reasons things are the way they are.

This core belief in the wisdom of tradition also means that most Vatican officials would be considered, by the standards of the total spectrum of opinion in the Catholic Church, conservatives. By no means should this suggest that the men and women of the Roman Curia are narrow-minded traditionalists. A surprising number of curial officials might vote in favor of married priests in a secret ballot and some would support a relaxation in the teaching on birth control. A handful might be open to the eventual ordination of women as priests. Yet even those leaning toward the reform position on these issues typically also see the wisdom in contrary views, since the benefit of the doubt would go to the tradition, and they would regard compromise and patience as the best strategy. In classifying Vatican personnel, in fact, I have found it relatively unhelpful to think in terms of liberal and conservative, since most people in the Curia would be by conventional standards moderate-to-conservative. The more illuminating category is open and closed, that is, those whose regard for tradition does not inhibit them from entertaining criticism, and those inaccessible to any critique.

Finally, it should be noted that at times the Holy See’s reverence for tradition can shade off into arrogance toward those who are not comparably grounded in the fine points of Roman Catholic history, theology, spirituality, and law. Vatican officials rightfully insist that the Catholic Church is the product of a two-thousand-year history, which has given it a rich and multifaceted culture. They can become impatient with reformers demanding that this culture be stood on its head in response to a challenge that, in the context of two thousand years, just arose yesterday. They have every reason to demand that people who want to make proposals for change in the tradition at least master it first, so they’ll know what they’re talking about. At the same time, it is unreasonable to expect that average lay Catholics must become professional theologians or canon lawyers before their experience and insight counts. Vatican officials thus face the challenge of fostering an appreciation for tradition, so that proposals for change can be evaluated in the proper ecclesiological context, and yet not setting the bar so high that they rule out of bounds all views but their own.

THREE VATICAN OFFICIALS

The relationship between officials of the Roman Curia and their environment is even more complex than sketched above, because the layers of environment are not the only variables. Each person in the Holy See is also unique, bringing a distinctive background and point of view to his or her encounter with the Vatican, Rome, Italy, and Europe. Recall what was said in chapter 2 about the myth that there is such a creature as “the Vatican." It is just as much a piece of mythology that there is a typical Vatican official. Few bureaucracies gather under one roof a group of people whose interests and work assignments are so strikingly different. Before we can consider what Vatican officials have in common, we first need to record how diversified their personal situations actually are. To make this point, we’ll consider the following three officials in three different offices: the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees. These three positions are fairly representative of the various kinds of jobs officials in the different dicasteries hold. There are real individuals who hold the jobs described below, but the details of their work offered here are not based on their personal experiences; they are the product of my own imagination.

The Council for Promoting Christian Unity is divided into desks covering the different branches of Christianity with which the Catholic Church has an official dialogue. The dicastery also has responsibility for the dialogue with Judaism, so there is also a full-time official assigned to this relationship. There is someone responsible for the Lutherans, for example, someone for the Baptists, and so on. Let’s take as an example the official responsible for relations with the Anglicans, who also covers the Methodists, since historically Methodism is a reform out of the Anglican tradition. Each day he reads the press from traditionally Anglican regions, above all England, scanning for news or commentary about the Anglican Communion. He also reads carefully the sermons, pronouncements, and interviews given by the Archbishop of Canterbury. If there is a major story breaking in the Anglican world, such as the crisis in 2003 concerning homosexual bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions, he will spend long hours tracking it—reading position papers, talking to friends and contacts, keeping his superiors informed. He studies the resolutions adopted by Anglican synods around the world, as well as all the documents produced by official Catholic/Anglican dialogues. He might be involved in helping prepare the next round of talks for the official Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). Whenever officials from the Anglican world come to Rome, he is a primary point of contact, helping to arrange meetings with other Vatican officials, and taking his Anglican counterparts to lunch or dinner in order to swap information and talk about the future of the relationship. Whenever the cardinal who heads his dicastery is invited to speak to a group of Anglicans or Methodists, this official helps prepare his remarks and briefs the cardinal on what he should expect.

Given the nature of his work, it’s likely that this official may be more plugged into the politics of Canterbury than those of Rome. On at least some issues he may be able to speak more knowledgeably about the positions of the last Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade gathering of all the Anglican bishops of the world, than he could of the acts of some Roman Catholic ecumenical councils. He may have almost as many friends in the ranks of Anglican clergy as he does on the Catholic side. The same thing goes for his relations with Methodism and Methodist clergy. Despite the fact that this person is a Vatican official, he does not pass most days thinking about the internal dynamics of the Vatican. Due to the nature of his job, he is far more directed at the world outside the walls of the Holy See.

The official at the Congregation for Worship has a more intra-Catholic frame of reference, but not necessarily more intra-Vatican. This dicastery is divided into two sections, one dealing with liturgical principles, the other with sacramental discipline, especially valid marriages and the sacrament of Holy Orders. The liturgical side is further divided by language, so if our official is a German, he’s working on questions of liturgical practice and texts that arise in the German language. He spends a great deal of time reading proposed liturgical translations from Latin into German—the order for funerals, the rite of baptism, the lectionary (a collection of readings for the Mass), and all the other liturgical books necessary to carry out the approved rites of the Catholic Church. In the process as currently envisioned in Rome, the German bishops have the responsibility for arranging for translations of these texts, which since the Second Vatican Council has largely been entrusted to the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Liturgischen Kommissionen im deutschen Sprachgebiet (IAG), housed at the Deutsches Liturgisches Institut in Trier. Member countries include Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein, along with a handful of other German-speaking dioceses. After IAG completes its work, the German bishops must review and approve it, and then it must go to the Vatican for final promulgation.

One primary task of this Vatican official is to coordinate this Vatican review, bringing in consultors and experts as needed to ensure that the text is consistent with the principles of the May 2001 Vatican document,
Liturgiam Authenticam
, which calls for the most faithful translation possible to the original Latin. Given the nature of his work, our official likely has some background in Scripture and ancient languages. By its nature, this kind of analysis is slow and painstaking, and the devil is always in the details. The official would thus spend much of his time in conversation with experts in linguistics, languages, and liturgical history. When liturgical officials from German-speaking regions come to Rome, he would be their primary contact. He would be in contact with colleagues in the German, Austrian, and Swiss bishops’ conferences, and professors of liturgy on Catholic theological faculties in those countries. When German-speaking bishops arrive in Rome, he quite often would go out to lunch or dinner with them or at least meet with them in the office to chat about the current state of affairs. This official will brief the rest of the staff in the dicastery, and especially his superiors, about what’s happening in the German-speaking liturgical world.

Finally, consider an official in the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees. This dicastery is organized based on the particular set of issues handled: migrants, the apostolate of the sea, airports, refugees, and so on. Our official has the desk for refugees, and his responsibility is to track the global situation, to monitor the Catholic response to refugee issues, and to be ready to intervene in moments of crisis. He spends a great deal of time each day reading reports from various United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups on the refugee situation in Africa, or in Asia, or Latin America, or wherever war or natural disaster has produced a significant flow of people. In 2002, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported that there were 19.8 million people “of concern" to the agency, roughly one out of every three hundred people on earth. He also monitors reports from Catholic aid agencies, especially Caritas and Catholic Relief Services, about their contact with refugees and the services these agencies offer. When officials of various humanitarian groups looking for support from the Catholic Church come through Rome, he is a primary contact, often trying to arrange hearings for them with Vatican officials higher up the chain of command. He sometimes attends international meetings on refugee issues to represent the position of the Holy See, which is generally an uncontroversial stance in favor of human dignity, but can involve controversial debates over whether birth control devices ought to be distributed along with food and medicine in refugee camps. On these trips, the official will sometimes visit refugee camps in particularly afflicted parts of the world, which cannot help but form a visceral emotional attachment to these suffering people. When bishops from various parts of the world come to Rome, he will brief them on the refugee situation, help them develop response strategies, and ask them about what the Catholic Church in their diocese or country is already doing. This official’s horizons are focused well beyond Vatican walls, to one of the great humanitarian concerns of the day.

All three of the above are Vatican officials. All three have offices in Rome, two just off St. Peter’s Square and the third in the nearby neighborhood of Trastevere, in the Piazza San Calisto. All three go to work wearing a clerical shirt and Roman collar and carrying a briefcase. To see them in a lineup, one could easily assume they’re almost interchangeable. Yet they have radically different backgrounds, interests, and areas of professional competence. They could go years in curial service without ever meeting one another. If they do happen to rub shoulders, they would probably have no idea the other worked in the Vatican. As a journalist, I am more likely to know people in different dicasteries than most curial personnel, even after many years of service. Such is the nature of the Vatican, where each dicastery tends to be highly compartmentalized and where many officials spend most of their time dealing with people on the outside. Someone who works in the Council for Justice and Peace rarely has occasion to meet people who work in the Congregation for Bishops, who in turn spend little time with staffers of the Apostolic Signatura. These officials all work in the Roman Curia, but their experience of what that means differs radically. This point must be borne in mind as we examine the layers of culture that encircle the Holy See. Each Vatican official interacts with these layers, and is affected by them, but the nature of the impact will vary. We’ll be using formulae such as “Vatican officials" and “the men and women of the Roman Curia," but this is a shorthand device that glosses over enormous diversity.

Layer One: The Vatican

One thing all Vatican employees share is the bureaucratic system that shapes their work environment. Every curial employee, no matter what they do, is assigned a number on the Vatican’s scale of employee status, everyone is subject to the Vatican’s salary and pension system, everyone faces challenges with housing and personal finance. Since how an organization handles such matters says a great deal about its values, the experience of navigating this system cannot help but shape the attitudes of curial personnel to their work and the institution they serve.

According to the
Regolamento generale
, or employee handbook of the Holy See, issued June 7, 1992, every dicastery is led by a cardinal prefect or president, or by an archbishop president, nominated directly by the Pope. This top official is assisted by a prelate superior, also nominated by the Pope. This is normally the secretary of the dicastery, but several other officials are also considered to be at the prelate superior level: the
sostituto
and the secretary for Relations with States, both in the Secretariat of State; the regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary; the secretary of the Apostolic Signatura; the dean of the Roman Rota; the prefect of the papal household; and the papal Master of Ceremonies. Prelate superiors are also appointed directly by the Pope, and although it’s understood that they are to work in close cooperation with the prefect, the
Regolamento
recognizes a kind of independent responsibility. Depending on the relationship between these two figures, in some dicasteries the secretary may be the real authority, or even at times a rival authority. A prefect does not always get the man he wants as his secretary. Then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, for example, succeeded in picking his own replacement as secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone was transferred in December 2002 to Genoa. The person who took over, Salesian theologian Angelo Amato, was a longtime consultor for the congregation who shares Benedict XVI’s theological concerns. Cardinal Walter Kasper in the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, on the other hand, did not have such a role in picking his new secretary when the man who had held the job, Marc Ouellet, became archbishop of Quebec. In January 2003 Kasper was assigned Bishop Brian Farrell, a longtime official of the Secretariat of State. Many felt this was a stratagem on the part of the Secretariat of State to plant a spy in Kasper’s office, but if so, things do not seem to have worked out that way. Kasper and Farrell seem to have developed a good working relationship.

The number-three officials in most dicasteries are the undersecretaries, who likewise are also “superiors." Also considered to be at undersecretary level are: the promoter of justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; the prelate-theologian and the relators in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints; the promoter of justice and the defender of the bond in the Apostolic Signatura; the promoter of justice and the defender of the bond of the Roman Rota; the general accountant of the Prefecture of the Economic Affairs of the Holy See; the regent of the papal household; and the director of the Press Office of the Holy See. Below the level of superiors come the mid-level officials in each dicastery. The most significant would be the
capi uffici
, who direct the work of a section or department within a dicastery. Only the larger dicasteries with multiple sections have a
capo ufficio
. Then come the
aiutanti di studio
and the
addetti di segreteria
, the desk officers who do most of the day-to-day work of handling correspondence, processing case files, preparing meetings. Each office will also have a support staff of receptionists, people to do the typing and filing, and so on.

Under the Holy See’s salary system, every employee is assigned a number from one to ten, representing the lowest to the highest grade on the pay scale. Which number a particular employee holds, and why, can be among the great mysteries of Vatican life. Roughly speaking, the numbers correspond to competence, but in Vatican-speak this does not mean one’s ability. It refers instead to the nature of the job one holds—the more complex and the more authority it entails, the higher up the scale. In terms of paychecks, the Vatican is definitely not a meritocracy. The numbers to some extent reflect seniority, so it’s possible for an official to be at level nine, yet doing the same job he began with twenty years ago at level six. Certain jobs cap out at a given number because of the nature of the position. An
addetto tecnico
, for example, is classified at a lower level, usually referring to people who type and file, and the maximum pay grade is typically six. A
monsignore
in one dicastery is regarded as among the world’s leading experts in his field, he lectures widely and is quoted as the voice of the Holy See, and yet for quirky reasons is classified as an
addetto
tecnico
and is stuck at level five. Several times over the years he has tried to get cardinals to intervene on his behalf, but to no avail.