BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

The weekend produced a number of commentaries in the Italian media on recent sensation-mongering stories about infighting and backstabbing in the Vatican - not that this is anything new in Church history, past and recent - but although one of the targets is universally identified (Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone) the other factions are not, other than being the Old Guard in the Curia who were known associates of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, former Secretary of State and current Dean of the College of Cardinals.

There is also the unfortunate tendency in all these reports and commentaries to extrapolate the infighting, backstabbing and treachery to the entire 'Roman Curia'. even if these nefarious activities all seem to be taking place in the Secretariat of State, where the real 'power' resides, because its bureaucracy administers not just the other organisms of the Curia but also the network of Vatican embassies around the world. I doubt that the media will ever get out of the convenient but very fallacious rut of attributing anything negative about the Vatican to 'the Roman Curia' just because this 'entity' has been the favorite whipping-boy of the news media since the Vatican became a regular news beat.

Corriere della Sera today features the following commentary by Vittorio Messori on Page 1, in which the veteran writer places the latest 'scandals' in the right perspective (he too generalizes the malady to the Curia but in this case, the generalization is valid ...

The weakening of faith
in a den of intrigue
by Vittorio Messori
Translated from

February 13, 2012

These days, to follow what is certainly not edifying news about the Vatican can be lip-smacking or saddening, depending on whether the reader is anti-clerical or not.

In fact, it should not be more than usually disconcerting for the Catholic who knows the history of his Church but who also keeps in mind the warnings of the Gospel.

Namely, that the Church is a field where good grain and poisonous weeds are always found together. It is a net cast into the sea in which both good and bad fish are to be found.

These are words from Jesus himself, who calls on us not to be scandalized because of this, nor even to 'divide' the healthy from the rotten, because this will be his task at the Last Judgment.

The prime example of this situation is, obviously the center and motor of the ecclesial 'machinery': the Vatican Curia, which is the central administration of what Tradition calls 'the Church militant'.

In this regard, it was not a heretic or a priest-hater [the Italian word for this is quite colorful: mangiapreti, literally 'priest-eater'] but a saint proclaimed Doctor of the church by Paul VI - Catherine of Siena. co-Patron of Italy - who once observed:"The Court of our Holy Father seems to me at times a nest of angels, at other times a den of vipers".

Good and bad found in the same entity, as they are in everything human. Because the Church is also a human institution - a historical shell (with its corresponding limitations) that guards a meta-historical Mystery.

We will get to the moral aspect later. First, let us consider the 'organizational' aspect. It must be remembered that the Vatican today is not just all about 'scandals' regarding sex crimes, finances or power.

It is the administrative machinery of the Church itself, which for years and years has appeared to stall with disquieting frequency - due to mistakes, distractions, diplomatic gaffes, even errors on official documents in the use of Latin which is still the official language but which is increasingly less and worse known by the people who work there.

Yes, the Curia, like the Church itself, must be semper reformanda. But now it see4ms that even a 'corporate reorganization' is not possible, simply because of a lack of fresh energies and of people of quality.

The infinite number of Vatican offices have been led since the time of the Counter-Reformation by ecclesiastical persons who come from all the dioceses and religious orders of the world. But our world today is one where most dioceses and congregations have closed down their seminaries for lack of attendance, and they certainly can no longer send to Rome their most promising young people in the service of the universal Church.

In fact, there are few such young people, and these few are jealously kept close by their bishops and superiors-general.

And yet, after that Vatican II which was supposed to streamline the ecclesial structure, the Annuario Pontificio [listing all ecclesiastical personnel with official titles] has almost tripled in size. Bureaucratic expansion has proceeded unchecked, as functions, posts, responsibilities have grown, even as qualified human resources have inversely diminished.

And the available personnel seem unable to carry the crushing responsibility of administering God's will on earth!

Therefore, Catholic realism would seem to impose a drastic redimensioning of the structure of a Catholic Church which, for all the numbers it has, is becoming or has already become a minority community in many places.

To maintain the Church's baroque apparatus when her human resources are deficient (and those who0 do run this apparatus are often not up to the task) inevitably leads to the disintegration and errors we find in the management of the Church.

So should we then seriously consider what some propose as a return to the first millennium by turning over the Vatican with all its cultural, artistic and touristic assets to the UNESCO, and for the Pope to return to the 'true' cathedra of the Bishop of Rome at the Lateran Basilica, with an institutional structure reduced to a minimum?

We don't have to resort to such extreme measures, but the problem exists and it must be confronted - but not with a 1960s ideology or a demagoguery to pauperize the Church.

Of course, there seems to be a moral surrender as well in some aspects, not merely sexual (pedophile priests are an example, but not the only kind), but also a seeming return to the Renaissance era when the Vatican consisted of various foci of intrigues and infighting for career advancement, power, money, ideological and political interests.

And in this case, no reform can hold, and there can be no purely human remedy. Every technique of corporate reorganization would be ridiculously impotent.

Which means the situation should open itself up to the 'scandal' of prayer - words used by Benedict XVI, but words that have been used for decades now, by Joseph Ratzinger.

If the Church is in crisis, he has always said, it is the crisis of faith in men of the Church. Including the hierarchy.

He said to me once: "At the point where we are, I must confess that faith - a full faith that does not hesitate - now seems to me so rare that when I encounter it, I am astonished by it more than by unbelief".

And that is why he has gone back to the roots of the faith - with his three volumes on the historical Jesus who is also the Jesus of faith. That is why he has created an organ expressly for the new evangelization. That is why he has proclaimed a Year of Faith.
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"L'inrtendance suivra" {The administrative people will come after), Napoleon used to say, meaning conquer [a territory] first, then bring in the people to run it.

Benedict XVI is certain that the Church needs to conquer - or rather, reconquer - first: to reconquer that faith in the historicity of the Gospels, in God who was incarnated in the womb of a woman, in a Jesus who demonstrated with his resurrection that he is the Christ.

Does the Church now have only a few good men, and among them, many who are not qualified? Well then, a true and proper institutional exfoliation would be assured if those who are still at work 'in the vineyard of the Lord' (as the Pope likes to call it), forget all about working for any human prize but for a divine one.

If faith wavers or is extinguished, if it is no longer their daily reason for existence, the clever laziness of the bureaucrat lies in ambush, and the old monsignor as well as the young religious will both be ready to transform themselves into functionaries of a clerical ministry and therefore, subject to every temptation.


Pray, pray and pray - and do penance! Benedict XVI is almost as insistent on this basic admonition as the Blessed Virgin is in all her apparitions. He says this to the faithful in almost all his homilies and in in his catecheses. Pray daily, regularly, and everything will follow, he says. He says it to priests and bishops at every occasion.

One must wonder how many of the priests and bishops who have become certified bureaucrats in the Vatican ztill remember that they are priests, first of all, that the priesthood should define who they are. and that they should take time off during the day to 'talk to God' regularly. Do they even say daily Mass as they should? I was struck when I read somewhere that as a university professor, Joseph Ratzinger was a rarity because he said daily Mass, whereas most professor-priests no longer do!


Poison in the Curia:
A response to the Pope's
efforts to purify the Church
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from

February 13, 2012


For some time now there has been a new literary genre one might call 'Vatican mystery', but after The Da Vinci Code, the genre has grown in a major way. Many authors and publishers today are hoping for worldwide success with books purporting in various ways to 'uncover profane altars' and thus desanctify the Church, which despite everything, has kept an image of sacredness - or at least, respectability - even in the eyes of non-believers.

It's not difficult to imagine that such readings have inspired the so-called 'crows' who have been instrumental in 'flying out' confidential documents from the highest levels of the Vatican's premier bureaucracy, the Secretariat of State, with the apparent ibtention to discredit the Vatican as a whole.

Even more influenced this way are the assorted Vatican reporters and commentators - many of them authors themselves of similar 'mysteries' in the form of pamphlets purporting to reveal the 'hidden plots' within the Vatican walls.

They are now unleashing a flood of commentary focused on Vatican infighting and power seeking, on opposing vendettas, on the next Conclave. All such commentaries appear to postulate the idea of a good Pope who is nonetheless incapable of dealing with rivalries and hostilities which have somehow managed to overwhelm him.

Perhaps, such an interpretation may also be seen as influenced by the world outside the Vatican, since the Vatican is situated within a far vaster society. One might even say that external forces are moving the chess pieces, with the complicity of some corrupt functionary or prelate within the Vatican.

But to understand something of what is going on, perhaps it is becessary above all to consider the role of the Pope, who in a few days will be marking the 30th anniversary of his joining the Roman Curia as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Thirty years spent at the heart of an institution he loves deeply but one he has not defended at any cost, least of all at the cost of truth. Cardinal Ratzinger came to know the reality of the Church - that is, its most elevated hierarchy - very well in a way he made clear with the meditations he wrote for the Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum in March 2005, just a few weeks before he was elected Pope.

Many were amazed at the courage and passion in his words denouncing 'filth' in the Church [obviously, he was not referring only to pedophile priests], though later many would consider it a sign from him of how he would govern if he were elected Pope. [I am surprised historian Scaraffia would make this statement! Clearly, at the time the cardinal was asked to write the meditations - it would have been at least several weeks before Good Friday - there were very few (him least of all) who thought that he was even papabile in the event that John Paul II passed away!]

It is to the honor of the ecclesial institution that the Conclave elected the man who knew a lot about the Vatican, perhaps everything there is to know [about what was wrong] but which had been unmentionable before then - that they elected a man who openly proclaimed his desire to purify the Church.

By choosing him to the Pope, one presumes that his electors agreed to this work of cleansing, even if some perhaps hoped in their hearts that it would not come soon nor radically. By choosing him, love for the Church - or, if you will, a sense of the institution - appeared to have prevailed among the cardinals.

Of course, Benedict XVI did not take his stand as a harsh judge and prefect of the former Office in charge of the Inquisition, but as a man of God. Now as Pope, he is in a position to realize his desire - and that is, to recover the faith, begin a new process to evangelize countries that had once been strongly Christian but now largely secularized.

But a Church that is not purified, that is encumbered by heavy baggage from the past and the opacities of the present, cannot undertake a new evangelization credibly and effectively.

He made his intentions clear when early in the Pontificate, he disclosed the results of the CDF's investigation of Father Marcial Maciel, who founded the Legionaries of Christ, and opened an investigation into the workings of the congregations Maciel founded with a view of bringing the evil to light and to correct it.

For a change, no cover-up to avoid scandal, but the truth. Not just from the Christian point of view, only the truth allows mortification by those who sinned, and therefore purification.

But there can be no purification without pain, without public acknowledgement of the evil done. So it is for the pedophile priests and complicit bishops, as it is for non-transparent financial dealings that allow lay cronies to make dishonest profits from dealing with the Vatican.

Benedict XVI has courageously chosen this path, and for this, he has chosen for some key positions people who do not belong to established interests within the Vatican and outside its walls, charging them with the mission of bringing out everything in total honesty and transparency.

Was it not therefore likely that his actions would provoke protests and counteractions by any possible means?

Anyone who thinks the Pope is nothing but an aged man who has been reduced to powerlessness, ignores that he undertook this process of purification deliberately and consciously. One cannot possibly think that he himself does not realize how much it would cost him personally. him and his closest associates, in retribution from those who oppose any such cleansing. Nor that he has chosen the harder path of carrying out such work despite its obvious costs instead of constantly evading the issue by using 'diplomatic' means.

Only his way is is it possible to carry out true purification that can produce results. And so, those that are often called 'errors' or 'deficiencies' of governance by the Pope should rather be seen as conscious decisions with the end of bringing conflicts out in the open in order to arrive at the truth.

Having become accustomed to think that the whole world is irremediably nothing more than a 'sea of mud' [I cannot think of an appropriate English equivalent for that metaphor], we can no longer see it as the stage for the eternal battle between good and evil, which also takes place within the Church herself.