VATICAN CITY
euronews
By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican’s top administrators would have been expecting an exchange of pleasantries at their annual Christmas meeting with Pope Francis on Monday.
Instead, he chose the occasion to issue a stinging critique, telling the priests, bishops and cardinals who run the Curia, the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church, that careerism, scheming and greed had infected them with “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.
Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, has refused many of the trappings of office and made plain his determination to bring the Church’s hierarchy closer to its 1.2 billion members.
To that end, he has set out to reform the Italian-dominated Curia, whose power struggles and leaks were widely held responsible for Benedict XVI’s decision last year to become the first pope in six centuries to resign.
“The Curia needs to change, to improve … a Curia that does not criticise itself, that does not bring itself up to date, that does not try to improve, is a sick body,” he said in a sombre address.
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