VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
John L. Allen Jr. | Jan. 24, 2014 All Things Catholic
Trying to impose order on chaos, I’d like to suggest that recent developments on the Vatican beat are noteworthy not just on their own merits, but because they illustrate a couple of truisms about Catholic life that anyone who wants to “get it” vis-à-vis the church probably should master.
Those truisms are:
Sometimes in the church, restraint is as powerful a tool of reform as action.
There’s a constant back-and-forth in Catholicism between doctrinal clarity and pastoral flexibility, and focusing on one in isolation from the other distorts reality.
Now for developments that put meat on the bone of these maxims.
Restraint as reform
Italians love nothing as much as a good giallo, meaning a mystery story or a scandal, and at the moment, a couple of especially juicy ones with Vatican overtones are coursing through the Italian bloodstream.
One pivots on a shady Italian financier with links to the country’s intelligence services named Paolo Oliverio, who’s currently facing a criminal probe for various forms of financial fraud. Among the claims made by prosecutors is that Oliverio helped engineer a phony police interrogation of two members of the Camillian religious order back in May so they’d miss an election for a new superior, thereby allowing the incumbent, Fr. Renato Salvatore, to stay in office.
Salvatore has also been arrested as an Oliverio crony, among other things allegedly turning a blind eye while he bilked a Camillian hospital in southern Italy out of more than $13 million. (The Camillians, named for St. Camillus de Lellis, were founded in the 16th century with the mission of ministering to the sick and running hospitals.)
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