VATICAN CITY
The Economist – Erasmus
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.
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