VATICAN CITY
Crux
John L. Allen Jr. October 7, 2016
EDITOR
Not only are there plenty of politics in the Catholic Church, but for those with eyes to see, there’s often a political dimension to a great deal of ecclesiastical life which, on the surface, might seem fairly neutral and benign.
Take, for instance, the Vatican’s “baby bishops’” school, an intense eight-day training program offered by the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops to newly appointed Catholic prelates from around the world since 2001.
At one level, offering such a course may just seem good business management. Why wouldn’t you want new bishops to be exposed, for instance, to best practices in financial management and the fight against clerical sexual abuse, two chronic sources of headaches?
For once, perhaps, the Church can defuse a few bombs before they go off.
It may also seem like a basic service by the Vatican to local churches – and since, in theory, that’s the primary role the Vatican is supposed to play, why not?
Both of those things may be fully true, but as St. Thomas Aquinas famously put it, grace builds on nature rather than cancelling it out – meaning that other, perfectly valid explanations don’t preclude the idea of there also being a political dimension to the choice to hold such a course.
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