Happy Christmas, you rogues

The Economist - Erasmus
December 23, 2014

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/12/vatican-bureaucracy-and-cuba

POPE Francis is a bag of surprises. When members of the curia, the Vatican's Italian-dominated bureaucracy, gathered this week for a pre-Christmas meeting with the boss, they may have been expecting some emollient words of encouragement and good wishes for the season when their faith's beginnings are enjoyably celebrated. Instead they got a terrible scolding. All manner of pathologies were at work, they were told, in the corridors of ecclesiastical power: ruthless careerism, back-biting, narcissism, complacency. The pope diagnosed no less than 15 specific failings, ranging from "spiritual Alzheimer's"—presumably, a diminishing awareness that the curia's work had a sacred purpose—to delusions of omnipotence and the "terrorism of gossip". Indeed, some Vatican operatives were said to be guilty of "cold-bloodedly killing the reputation of their own colleagues and brothers".

Many people will immediately understand what the pope was talking about. In the weeks and months before the surprise resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, nearly two years ago, the papacy seemed on the verge of paralysis because of the rumours of financial and sexual scandal that were swirling round the Vatican. Ever since then, the new pope has been working hard to get the curia under control. As the first pope from the global south, he has invited a team of non-Italian prelates to advise him on reforming the administration's labyrinthine structures. In recent days his Australian adviser on economic matters, Cardinal George Pell, reported that the financial situation was both better and worse than anybody imagined; he had found that "hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on any balance-sheet."

Strangely enough, the papal scolding comes only days after a historic success for the one department of the Vatican that is widely admired. The historic breakthrough in relations between the United States and Cuba, announced last week, was in large measure orchestrated by the holy see's diplomatic service, and the Vatican was not shy about taking some credit for this. So was the pope being a tad unfair, or inconsistent, in celebrating a diplomatic triumph one day and excoriating his own bureaucrats a few days later? In fact, both initiatives (helping the breakthrough with Cuba, and the drive to clean up the curia) come from places deep inside the pope's complex personality, to judge from the biography which I reviewed in this week’s print edition.

As Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, he maintained, and indeed personified, a vision of global Catholicism in which bishops, and regional groups of bishops, had more authority; and in this vision, the curia should be at bishops’ service, rather than a centralising tool to keep the bishops under control. And among his Latin American group of bishops, America's embargo on Cuba was a long-standing concern. It was seen as perpetuating a mutually reinforcing standoff between two bad things: the heartlessness of the capitalist north, and the authoritarian secularism of the socialist south. In a short book penned in 1998 after Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, the Argentine prelate argued for the need to break this logjam.

Nor is it completely inconsistent to celebrate a Vatican success and argue for deep reform. As presently organised, the holy see’s secretariat of state is a strange beast, combining an admired and over-stretched diplomatic corps with a shadowy bureaucracy that has general authority over the whole papal power structure. It doesn’t take a managerial genius to see the need to separate the two components, and precisely that may well happen next year. Structural change is needed, as well as individual repentance.