BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I think the curia needs a much more diverse spread of nationalities.
This might sound strange (or even arrogant) coming from a German, but I do believe that the lack of loyalty, obedience, prudence, work-ethics and resistance to careerism and the non-application of rationality during difficult situations will not change if the majority of employees (clerics and laymen) will remain as it is now.
Good luck to whoever is going to tackle that organically grown problem.



Mr. Allen never understood Joseph Ratzinger, and he never will. Besides, he seems to carry a few grudges from before Papal times.
I don't even think he understands what the Church actually is. Generally he gives me the creeps.





Dear Heike...

Sorry for the delayed reaction. About John Allen: He is even more insidious than his finding-fault-with-Benedict articles suggest. Going by what he says about his frequent speaking engagements everywhere, the man is venerated in many Catholic quarters almost like a modern prophet! And when even persons like Cardinal Dolan cite him in their writings as 'the number one American expert in Vatican affairs' or some such encomium, it raises serious concern. Intelligent people buy into him, and his 'reputation' somehow keeps them from considering what he says with the requisite critical eye.

He is an excellent, ever-resourceful reporter and more diligent than the run of the mill, but he is a terrible analyst because he lets his biases take the lead. And he seems to plunge ahead fearlessly without really thinking through his glib and smug assertions (in the same way he is mindlessly careless about some of the words he flings about with abandon, instead of using the right word in the right way). If he thought through his premises and conclusions (and favorite buzz words) more carefully, he wouldn't be so easy to fisk! It's gotten to a point where almost every sentence in his opinion pieces is disputable on a point of fact or a point of logic.

But when will someone have the courage to say the emperor is naked???? Or, at best, clad mostly in cliches and flaunting his banality?

As for the Curia, someone observed recently that there are far less foreign priests coming to work at the Vatican now because of the priest shortage everywhere - and dioceses are far less wiling now to allow their best young minds to serve in Rome when they are much more needed at home. That may be.

In any case, overhauling the entire Curial bureaucracy is like cleaning out the Augean stables or any of the other legendary labors of Hercules. If Bertone were Hercules, he would have started laboring six years ago! For now, it seems like the Holy Father has been careful to make sure that the prefect or president of a dicastery and his number 2 man (the secretary of the dicastery) are of different nationalities to set a basic check-and-balance.

As I had occasion to remark earlier, the Curial offices other than the Secretariat of State would seem to be far more manageable since they do not have large staffs. For example, if the CDF has about 50 personnel, how likely is it that other dicasteries with far more limited functions would have more? SecState is really the bureaucratic monster here, and to a lesser extent, the Governatorate, which, after all, has to keep the entire Vatican machinery physically running, and includes everyone down to the lowliest janitor at the Vatican and the most junior gardener in Castel Gandolfo.

In fact, none of the 20 other Curial offices, besides SecState and the Governatorate, have been implicated in the current round of 'scandal' - so it is unfair and wrong when 'the Roman Curia' is routinely crucified in general, but particularly so, in this case. Each office should be held accountable for what it actually does wrong, not discredited indiscriminately along with the rest of the Curia for what the Secretariat of State does wrong.

TERESA