ROME (ITALY)
Crux
Dec. 10, 2019
By John L. Allen Jr.
In the argot of sociology, some organizations are “high structure,” meaning they rely on rules and procedures to hold things together, and others are “high culture,” meaning it’s much more about informal relationships and personal trust.
The Vatican, both historically and today, is basically a “high culture” outfit disguised as “high structure.”
There’s a cavalcade of norms governing every aspect of the place’s operations, but everyone knows those are more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules, and that who ends up making what decision is usually a lot more about personal ties than flow charts.
For that reason, personnel is always policy in the Eternal City, which makes Pope Francis’s choice Sunday to name the 62-year-old Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila in the Philippines the new prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples a key move indeed.
Tagle replaces the 73-year-old Italian Cardinal Fernando Filoni, the Vatian’s former ambassador in Iraq who refused to vacate Baghdad in 2003 when American bombs began to fall, and who now moves on to become the grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
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