UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Phyllis Zagano | Mar. 13, 2013 Just Catholic
The Catholic roulette wheel keeps spinning after the white smoke, the white cassock and the white pallium appear. Even though the new pope is at the center, cardinals in red and black still surround him. Insider horse trading and old-school thinking remain. You may think the new pope will be a surprise reformer, but you can’t win big putting chips on double zero. Only American-style roulette has that bet.
While American-style journalism has been driving the news coming from Rome, they’ll all be home soon enough, carrying their openness and their accents with them. While it might straighten out things, American-style management and transparency will be a hard sell in the new papacy. Curial machinery did, after all, stop the U.S. cardinals’ news conferences. No matter the qualifications of the latest man to climb into Peter’s chair, the Vatican bank and overall curial messes will surely take up enough time and energy to halt any reforms, even reforms requested by both sides of the marbled aisle.
Of course, the elephant in the Sistine Chapel is female, and she’s not leaving. The general consensus from the sidelines is that women in authority would have cleaned up the mess of the sex abuse scandals more quickly and cleanly than the bumbling hierarchs.
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