UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast
by Robert Shrum
Mar 8, 2013
The bureaucracy of the Catholic Church is more maladroit than managerial. And the cardinals fear change. Is there any hope for a reformer as pope?
It was so like the Curia: distressed by leaks to the Italian press from Italian cardinals about the machinations of electing a new pope, the hierarchy muzzled the Americans. U.S. cardinals were ordered to stop holding press conferences every day, in which no secrets were revealed but prelates at least talked openly about the needs of the church. Simultaneously, Vatican insiders were alleged to be cassock-rushing the conclave with the aim of holding on to both the papacy and their own power. Cardinals not permanently ensconced in Rome were pushing for more time to take a broader measure of each other.
I hope that when the Cardinals finally enter the Sistine Chapel to choose a successor to Benedict XVI, they will comprehend that nothing so became his papacy as the manner of leaving it. I’m not referring to the helicopter that whisked him away—an image so at odds with his richly venerable Renaissance appearance after he took the Medici vestments out of 16th-century mothballs. At least the Pope, with a measure of genuine humility, at the end affirmed that the papal office is just that—-the position, not a person anointed permanently through debility and even unto death. It was the most striking, uncharacteristically progressive decision of his reign.
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