Pope and Curia
December 16, 2017
In a recent interview, Cardinal Mueller said:
"As the first and the last, the highest most important interpreter of that revelation of God in Christ Jesus, [the pope] is not an isolated person, but head of the Roman Church ... and, therefore, he is reliant on the qualified and engaged cooperation of that Roman Church in the form of the Cardinals and the dicasteries of the Roman Curia".
[Not that the good cardinal ever had the good sense, if not the courage, to point this out to the pope, be it ever by a humble note or letter destined to be forever unacknowledged. Might have hastened his dismissal from the Curia, of course, but surely , he had no illusions Bergoglio would keep him on and was just waiting for the first likely pretext to do so.]
Obvious stuff ... but perhaps not so obvious in this ultrahyperueberpapalist age, in which PF shows himself impatient of the more intelligent and theologically formed members of his Curia; and happily depeneant upon questionable collaborators. I wrote about this not very long ago; I venture to repeat my earlier pieces below. As Cardinal M emphasises, the Curia has a theological status.
The ff is Fr. H's 3-part series then:
The Curia Romana (1)
Jorge Bergoglio has no Magisterial authority whatsoever. The Bishop of Rome does. But, of course, Jorge Bergoglio is Bishop of Rome; and so, qua Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis possesses the very considerable authority defined dogmatically by the First Vatican Council and expressed legally in the two Codices Iuris Canonici.
Being Bishop of Rome is what counts. And being Bishop of Rome, like being Bishop of Anywhere, means being Bishop of Somewhere. And being Bishop of Somewhere means being Bishop of certain people ... of certain living and breathing Christian humans.
What is "a Bishop"? There is a (largely Anglophone) ecclesiastical underworld populated by what are often called
episcopi vagantes, "wandering bishops". These are persons who have privately secured for themselves technically 'valid' episcopal orders.
Many people suspect that their motive for doing this has been personal vanity, because these are 'bishops' who are not surrounded by the serried and serious ranks of their presbyterium, nor ministered to
ad altare by their cheerful bustling Deacons, and who lack the boisterous, sometimes disorderly, mob of 'their' Laity,
laos. And they are not, these
episcopi vagantes, in peace and communion with the Apostolic, or indeed with any other, See. Far from it.
Per contra,
in Catholic (and Orthodox) ecclesiology, a Bishop is a man who discharges the functions of the high Episcopal office in the context of the structured Church life of People, Deacons, and Presbyters. A gathering of Christians so structured is known as a "Particular Church".
Like any other Diocesan Bishop, the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is a Bishop with a Presbyterium, a Diakonia, a Laos. He is not a lonely isolated individual with technically valid orders and a technically valid
Electio in Summum Pontificem tucked into his back pocket.
He is not, that is to say, a Papa vagans.
With his usual acuity, Blessed John Henry Newman argued,
in the case of some early popes who showed signs of doctrinal wobble, that, since this happened after they had been beaten up in Byzantine prisons, it had no bearing on the Papal Office, since they were acting as individuals in physical and moral isolation from their Ecclesia.
In the Particular, local Church of Rome, the "Cardinal Presbyters" are the Pope's presbyterium, which is why they have "titular" churches assigned to them of which they are the titular parish priests.
Mutatis mutandis, the Cardinal Deacons. You will see where this is leading.
[Betcha Bergoglio has never thought about this at all. In fact, one doubts he realized all these necessary implications and consequences when on March 13, 2013, he so arrogantly disdained the word 'pope' in his first appearance as such to the world, disdained it ostentatiously and in more ways than one, presenting himself only as 'the Bishop of Rome'.
Perhaps his seemingly 'willful ignorance' of his duty as Bishop of Rome, in particular - the title that makes him pope, to begin with is why he could not even give the DUBIA cardinals the courtesy at least of acknowledging their letter - "Thank you, but I have decided and written what I did in AL. I am the pope and do not have to explain myself to anyone." (The second sentence was what he replied to Cardinal Mueller when the latter asked him about why he dismissed three of his staff members at CDF without cause.)
Of course, he must also have thought, "But I can't go on the record writing down anything like that. Best to just ignore them". Yet hasn't he been lecturing other bishops that they ought always to think of their priests as their own children? Perhaps he thinks the Bishop of Rome is exempt from this duty because his priests are cardinals who pledge their loyalty to him at the time they are made cardinals.]
The 'Cardinalate', if that is the right word, is not without theological significance. It is part of the organic structure of the very important Particular (i.e.local) Church of which the Successor of St Peter is the Bishop. This is seen most easily and most visibly in the persons of the curial Cardinals who permanently work in Rome. But it applies also to the other Cardinals throughout the world, who qua Roman Presbyters have their titular churches and are distributed among the boards of the Roman dicasteries.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Timbuctoo wears red and is addressed as 'Eminence' not because he is the important local 'Primate' of a big 'National Church', but because he is Cardinal Presbyter of the Titular Church of SS Promiscuus and Miscellaneus
[I owe this intriguing duo, and their Feast Day (a semidouble), to the fertile imagination of the late Rt Rev Mgr Ronald Knox, Protonotary Apostolic and Master of Arts (Oxon.)] which, until the Risorgimento, the Pontiff used to visit for the Stational Mass on February 31.
There has sometimes been a tendency, which I very strongly condemn,
to want to separate the notion of the Pope from that of the Curia. The Pope, it is sometimes said, is the Pope and has his highly significant dogmatically based prerogatives which we can't really avoid fessing up to because they were dogmatically defined at Vatican I.
But the Curia ... that is nothing more than a civil service, and a rather unattractive one to boot ( ... er ... ). Not only is it without doctrinal significance, but its members get in the way; they behave in a bossy fashion in their dealings with the Churches throughout the world. Perhaps they should be cut down. Perhaps they should be put in their place. Might we not be happier without them?
Liberal journalists are programmed to cheer any pope whose sycophants put it about that he intends to savage the Curia.
In my view, this is not merely humanly unfair but is also extremely flawed theologically.
- It is a direct assault upon that structure, the structure of the Particular local Church of Rome, within which the Supreme Pontiff necessarily discharges his unique and indispensible role.
- It is a solvent which, because it seeks to split off the Pope from the structures of his Particular local Church, has the potential to leave the Roman Pontiff as a lonely and decontextualised figure; in effect, a very powerful
Episcopus vagans. And that sounds to me very much like saying 'a theologically dubious Absolute Monarch'.
The Curia Romana (2)
It is well-known that in the early centuries of the Church, the Bishop was the Sacramental centre of his Particular Church, and its Teacher who, assisted by the Holy Spirit, preserved and articulated the authentic teaching which that Church had received.
But it seems that the presbyterium [the priests) was the administrative body, the committee which took decisions, the body of men to whom the bishop turned for their consent before he even felt free to absolve a penitent or ordain a subdeacon. And this seems to have been very true in Rome.
There are historians who believe that the Roman Church was, for centuries, governed by its presbyters and entirely lacked a 'monarchical Bishop'. I do not believe this theory, but the evidence upon which it is based does indicate the significance of the Roman presbyters.
When a letter had to be sent to Corinth to sort out the disorders in the Church there, the earliest document we have of the exercise of a disciplinary Primacy by Rome, it was not sent in the name of the Bishop. Indeed, it has been argued that St Clement was not so much the Bishop/Pope, but just the presbyter in charge of correspondence!
Again, I do not accept this, but, again, the fact that such an argument has been deployed does indicate the significance of the
Presbyteratus Romanus.
A little later, we have the account by Pope Cornelius of how a previous pope had begged for the favour of being allowed to ordain a particular presbyter who had been vetoed by the clergy and many of the laity. Also, Tertullian's (imaginative and scathing) account of Pope Callistus imploring the consent of the
fraternitas to be allowed to absolve an adulterer.
The Church of those centuries saw itself as corporate in a way that we find hard to imagine. Take the earliest letter to the Roman Church after St Paul's, the letter of St Ignatius of Antioch: it does not actually mention a bishop; it is the Church which is said to preside (
Kathemene).
Nor does the passage in St Irenaeus which is our earliest evidence for the idea of
the Roman Church as the locus par excellence of authentic doctrinal teaching contra haereses, locate that role specifically in the Pope, but in the Church.
It all amounts, of course, to the precisely same thing;
if Rome teaches authentic doctrine, and if its bishop is the ecclesiatical organ which enunciates that authentic teaching of the Roman Church ... well, Bob's your uncle. But these facts do bring me back to my initial point:
Jorge Bergoglio is nothing; the Bishop of Rome is everything. Papa Bergoglio is Episcopus Romanus in et cum Ecclesia Romana. He is not a vagans.
My conclusion is the same as it was at the end of my first part. The Curia Romana is a body of theological significance. If I wished, in the time-honoured style of this University, to set a spoof quotation as an essay question, "
Papa sine Curia Papa nullus: discuss" (a pope without the Roman Curia is no pope) might occur to me ... and I would give deltas to those who argued in favour of or against the tag ... and better marks to those who subdivided their propositions and came out somewhere in the middle.
The Curia Romana (3)
It is against the background I have tried to sketch out that I find myself wondering about the attitude of the present pope towards the Curia. Of course, like every institution insecurely placed in Time, it needs to be reformed from time to time. The question that worries me is
whether the present pope is drawing the Curia closer in fidelity to its true ecclesial calling; or pushing it further away.
Commentators have not been slow to remark that, to the outside observer,
it looks as if the current pope is attempting to prevent or eliminate the existence of strong foci within the Curia. He seems to be incapable of working with any Head of Dicastery who is not a yes-man. It is a sign, not of the Holy Father's strength, but of his weakness, that he cannot collaborate with as gentle yet principled a man as Robert Sarah, without deeming it necessary to humiliate him before the world. And Sarah was one of his own appointments.
And he also appointed Raymond Burke to be Patron of the Order of Malta. But as soon as a problem arose in the Order, he humiliated and sidelined him. When you appoint people, you should either back them up when the going gets rough, or confess that you yourself erred in making the appointment.
Gerhard Mueller was inherited, not appointed, by Papa Bergoglio. But he confirmed him in office, and the position is a highly significant one. The current pope is neither learned nor intelligent. To run the CDF he needed someone who was each of these things. Mueller was and is.
First he humiliated him by sending Schoenborn to front the Amoris laetitia news conference; then by sacking three of his collaborators without even telling him; lastly, he has humiliated him yet again by dumping him with a minute's notice and invoking a principle he had not mentioned either to Mueller or the World before: that Heads of Dicasteries will not be continued in post beyond their first quinquennium.
(Incidentally, it will be interesting to see whether this principle really does get applied as all the Cardinals come to the ends of their terms. The Franciscans of the Immaculate must be puzzled to find that their tormenter Bras de Aviz is still around. Cardinal Parolin must be starting to get demob-happy. There are going to be quite a lot of underemployed 'young' cardinals swilling around, with the Vatican Press Corps hovering hungrily above them like seagulls round a trawler.)
[Not that Bergoglio was serious at all about the principle of not extending any Curial head of office beyond their first five-year term, because he would have had to dismiss by now more than half of the current Curial heads of office who have been holding their positions for as long as more than a decade (two quinquennia). Of course, he thinks that he can always get away with lying - which the mainstream media do let him get away with a ALL OF THE TIME!]]]
If the Curia really is in want of radical reform, what it needs is more strong and principled and able workers and fewer unprincipled yes-men. The Press reports suggest that this is not the way our Holy Father appears to see things. But his idiosyncrasies have been obvious since his election.
For the first few years he made a daily exhibition of himself by that constant stream of obscure abuse ... butterflies, pelagians ... which seemed to be directed at clergy. He is the pope who considers that a most natural Christmas present to give his curial collaborators is a torrent of invective. He sneers at grandmothers for their infertility and describes journalists as shit-eaters.
Given a world so sadly unappreciative of eccentricity, in most other organisations this side of North Korea the Men in White Coats would have been sent in to hustle such a CEO out of public view.
The commentators seem to think that Archbishop Ladaria, in his new chair at the CDF, is unlikely to put up much resistance to Bergoglian tantrums. They may very well be very wrong. I pray they are; because the Archbishop has some very precious institutions under his protection: the Ordinariates and Ecclesia Dei.
But we can be sure of one thing: if Ladaria does turn out to have both principles and guts, Pope Francis, if this pontificate continues along its established lines, will either humiliate him or sack him or both.
[I thought I read somewhere recently that Abp. Ladaria has published a new book in praise of the church of Bergoglio. That's not really going to help him when push comes to shove, because look at Mueller who published a pre-emptive book in 2016 entitled BENEDETTO E FRANCESCO: Successori di Pietro al servizio della Chiesa - which offends me in that to even think of writing a book placing the two popes on the same plane was a) dishonest and b) misleading. If that was ass-licking, fat lot of good it did for Mueller.]