BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Since the event is potentially historic, here is how the AP reported Pope Francis's first concrete move towards reforming the Roman Curia...

Pope names cardinals to advise him
on running the Church and reforming
the Vatican bureaucracy
by Nicole Winfield


VATICAN CITY, April 13 (AP) - Pope Francis named eight cardinals from around the globe Saturday to advise him on running the Catholic Church and reforming the Vatican bureaucracy, marking his first month as Pope with a major initiative to reflect the universal nature of the Church in key governing decisions.

The advisory panel includes only one current Vatican official. The rest are cardinals from North, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. Many have been outspoken in calling for a shake-up of the Vatican bureaucracy, which was last reformed 25 years ago, while others have tried to clean up the Church from sexually abusive priests.

In the run-up to the conclave that elected Francis the first Latin American Pope one month ago, many cardinals demanded the Vatican be more responsive to their needs on the ground and said the Holy See bureaucracy itself must be overhauled. Including representatives from each continent in a permanent advisory panel to the Pope would seem to go a long way toward answering those calls.

In its announcement Saturday, the Vatican said Francis got the idea to form the advisory body from the pre-conclave meetings where such complaints were aired. "He has formed a group of cardinals to advise him in the governing of the universal church and to study a revision of the apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus on the Roman Curia," the statement said.

Pope John Paul II issued Pastor Bonus in 1988, and it functions effectively as the blueprint for the administration of the Holy See, known as the Roman Curia, and the Vatican City State. The document metes out the work and jurisdictions of the congregations, pontifical councils and other offices that make up the governance of the Catholic Church.

Pastor Bonus itself was a revision of the 1967 document that marked the last major reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, undertaken by Pope Paul VI.

A reform of the Vatican bureaucracy has been demanded for years, given that both John Paul and Benedict XVI essentially neglected in-house administration of the Holy See in favour of other priorities. But the calls for change grew deafening last year after the leaks of papal documents exposed petty turf battles within the Vatican bureaucracy, allegations of corruption in the running of the Vatican city state, and even a purported plot by senior Vatican officials to out a prominent Catholic as gay. [Please enlighten me as to why this short list of 'petty' concerns triggered such an exaggerated reaction where the serious matter of sex abuses committed by priests and the permissiveness of their bishops hardly received that kind of reaction from the local churches! Where is the sense of proportion here?]

Francis's advisory group will meet in its inaugural session Oct. 1-3, though Francis is already in contact with the group's members, the Vatican said. No other dates were announced, an indication that Francis is in no particular hurry to overhaul things.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, stressed that the cardinals are a consultative body, not a decision-making one, and that they won't take the place of the Vatican bureaucracy.

His comments appeared aimed at reassuring Vatican bureaucrats that they weren't being sidelined by a counterweight advisory body that better reflects the geographic distribution of today's Church.

The Church is growing and counts most of the world's Catholics in the southern hemisphere, while it's shrinking in Europe. Yet the Vatican and the 200-strong College of Cardinals, traditionally the Pope's primary advisers, remain heavily European. [For which there are obvious historical reasons! You cannot expect the Third World countries where Catholic history counts just decades to instantly churn out as many cardinals as the Old World which has been doing that for centuries! In time, and not far off, the Third World will have its due share of eminences, literally and figuratively. And yet, even the present College of Cardinals, so criticized for not having proportional representation - as though it were a political parliament rather than an assembly of men who are supposed to be the best and the brightest in the Church - did decide to elect the first Pope to come from a non-European country.]

Lombardi said the fact that Francis selected cardinals from every continent indicated he wanted to reflect the universal nature of the church in Vatican decision-making.

"The Roman Curia retains all its fundamental functions helping the Pope in the daily governance of the universal Church," Lombardi told Vatican Radio. "The naming of this group adds to this, in a certain sense integrates it, with a universal point of view and voices from different parts of the world."

The members of the panel include Italian Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, president of the Vatican city state administration — a key position that oversees, among other things, the Vatican's profit-making museums. [Yes, but what does the Museums' revenue have to do with the universal Church - it all goes to defray the expenses of running Vatican City State itself. Of course, some Italian media are already saying it means Pope Francis will probably name Cardinal Bertello as Secretary of State. Bertello happens to be among the Curial officials promoted to cardinal by Benedict XVI in the consistory of February 2012, for which he got unanimous flak, as though the persons he named cardinals were unworthy of the dignity and were only named because of the Curial offices they held (and because they were all said to be 'Cardinal Bertone's proteges'). As if Benedict XVI would have appointed them to those positions only on Bertone's say-so, even if they had been incompetent, ignoring better men in the process! No one in media has said that any of those Curial cardinals are incompetent, or that there were others better qualified for the positions they were given. So, could they have been so bad then, if now, the irreproachable Pope Francis is contemplating naming one of them his Secretary of State?]

The non-Vatican officials include Cardinals Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, the retired archbishop of Santiago, Chile; Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai, India; Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany; Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo; Sean Patrick O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston; George Pell, archbishop of Sydney, Australia; and Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who will serve as co-ordinator.

Monsignor Marcello Semeraro, bishop of Albano, Italy. will be the panel secretary.

O'Malley, a Capuchin friar, has spent his career cleaning up churches from sexually abusive priests. [Really, where did he do that outside of Boston????] Pell was outspoken in the run-up to the conclave about the need for reform in the bureaucracy. [Ugh! Remember that stab=in-the-back interview he gave the day Benedict XVI stepped down as Pope?] Maradiaga heads the Church's Caritas International charity federation and is a rare moderate in the College of Cardinals who hasn't shied from criticizing the failings of the Curia.

[For all the ongoing talk in the past year or more about the faults and failings of the Roman Curia, I have yet to read any specific complaint by any of these cardinals - or by anyone else, for that matter - against any specific office or official in the Curia, other than the generic charges directed at Cardinal Bertone, who, of course, has attempted specific foolish things thankfully foiled by Benedict XVI. How can the media just parrot blanket charges that have absolutely no specificity at all? It amounts to trial by lynching of the entire Curia.]

In theory, all popes have cardinals at their disposal to serve as advisers; advising the pope is a cardinal's main job aside from voting in conclaves. But neither John Paul nor Benedict made frequent use of their cardinal advisers, in part because they were so far away and numbered more than 200.

With such a small group of men hand-picked by the pope to specifically advise him in running the church and reforming the Vatican, it appears Francis wants a more collegial type of governance for his papacy. That also would meld with his reluctance to call himself pope in favour of his other main title, bishop of Rome.

That said, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is on record saying that when it comes time to actually making decisions, he is very much a loner.

"One can ask for advice but, in the end, one must decide alone," he said in the 2010 book "The Jesuit" written by his authorized biographer. Doing so means making mistakes, and Bergoglio acknowledged he had made plenty in his lifetime.

"That's why the important thing is to ask God," he said.

[Wasn't that the case with Benedict XVI, who got all sort of relentless missile hits for making final decisions by himself? But what was 'objectionable' in him is seen as a virtue for his successor!]

In the run-up to his election, cardinals were very clear that the status quo of the Vatican was untenable. [Yeah, a conclusion based mostly, it seems, on a totally a-critical acceptance of Vatileaks on the terms defined by Vigano and Gabriele! Simply because the two miscreants provided them the cover to say "Me, too!" without having to go into any specifics![ Naming a commission of advisers including those most critical of the status quo indicates major reform could be on the horizon.

Some cardinals said they wanted term limits on Vatican jobs to prevent priests from becoming career bureaucrats. [But there are no term limits of cardinals who are metropolitan bishops - are they claiming that there wouldn't be any 'bureaucratic risk' with them whereas there would be with Curial cardinals?]

They wanted consolidated financial reports to remove the cloak of secrecy from the Vatican's murky finances. [Excuse me, Benedict XVI, with the assistance of Moneyval, has already done that! Or are they not reading the news at all?]

And they wanted regular Cabinet meetings where department heads actually talk to one another to make the Vatican a help to the Church's evangelizing mission, not a hindrance. [That's sheer baloney! What individual congregations could possibly impact the evangelizing work of the local Churches [other than the yet-to-be-fully-functional Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization], since local churches have total autonomy within their respective dioceses? Did Cardinal Bergoglio, for instance, ever complain that some Curial office was hindering him from carrying out his pastoral work? If so, which one? The Curial offices are all so specifically defined by Pastor bonus that overlapping functions are minimal, so with Curial offices that are autonomous of each other, what is served by 'regular cabinet meetings' other than a chance to clear out communications channels among them? The Curia certainly does not provide any material assistance to the local Churches, only guidelines to implement the Magisterium.]

They also said they wanted the Vatican to serve the bishops in the field, and not the other way around. [Ummm, let's see: The CDF needs the input of the bishops in the field to do what they have to do against abusive priests, for instance, or priests who want to be laicized, or theologians who are out of line. The Congregation for Saints needs local input before it can take a sainthood cause to the Vatican level. Divine Worship provides guidelines to bishops, but the latter are supposed to have local autonomy in terms of liturgy, so they can ignore the Vatican in this respect, as many have ignored Benedict XVI on Summorum Pontificum. The Congregation for the Clergy cannot supervise a bishop's priests for them - it simply provides guidelines. The Congregation for Bishops processes candidates for the episcopacy - they need local input to do that. We can go down the line, and see that bishops are not asked to 'serve' the Curia other than with information they need to provide anyway in order to process their requests to the Vatican, from causes for sainthood to requests for marriage annulments...So you see how easy it is to puncture a generic accusation once you try to reduce it to specifics, which is what accusations must be.]

"It just doesn't work either very quickly or very efficiently," U.S. Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said in an interview soon after Francis was elected. "Take marriage cases: People shouldn't have to be asked to wait three, four, five, six years to get a response" for a request for an annulment. [Ah, so! at last, we have one specific complaint - against the Roman Rota. But how does a delay in granting a marriage annulment hinder evangelization at all? What percentage of the faithful in a diocese are requesting for a marriage annulment anyway????]

Aside from Saturday's announcement, Francis has made one Vatican appointment so far, naming a member of his namesake Franciscan order to the important No. 2 spot at the Vatican's congregation for religious orders.

His most eagerly-watched appointment has yet to come: that of the Vatican secretary of state, who runs the day-to-day administration of the Holy See. Currently, the position is held by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a 78-year-old canon lawyer whose administrative shortcomings have been blamed for many of the Vatican's current problems today.

George Weigel, a papal biographer who interviewed Bergoglio last May for his new book "Evangelical Catholicism," said Francis understands well the problems of the Curia, saying he "displayed a shrewd, but not cynical, grasp of just what was wrong with the church's central bureaucratic machinery, and why."

"I think we can expect the new pope to lead the church in a purification and renewal of the episcopate, the priesthood, the religious life, and the curia, because he understands that scandal, corruption, and incompetence are impediments" to the mission of spreading the faith, Weigel wrote in a recent essay. [And that's supposed to be the sum of Pope Francis's insight into the Curia? Isn't that obvious even to an ordinary person? 'Scandal, corruption and incompetence' need to be documented, however - they cannot just be flung out like cooked pasta to make it stick!]

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has become something of the ringleader of the reform group, said he had high hopes that Francis would turn the Holy See into a model of good governance given his background and no nonsense style.

"Sometimes in the past the curia has been an example of what not to do, instead of what to do," Dolan said in an interview after Francis's installation. "We need to look to the Holy See and the Roman Curia as a model of good governance, of honesty, of simplicity, of frugality, of transparency, of candour, of raw Gospel service, of a lack of careerism, of people who are driven by virtue."
[All very noble sentiments, but isn't it uncharitable of cardinals to make generic statements without substantiating them? At least, Cardinal George gave one example - though it is far from showing careerism or corruption or dishonesty, not even incompetence, because there may be other explanations for delaying a decision on a marriage annulment. How different are these cardinals then from Paolo Gabriele saying 'there is evil and corruption everywhere in the Vatican?]

Dolan suggested that one crucial area of reform would be imposing term limits on Vatican bureaucrats to prevent them from becoming lifers. He said there was also no reason why more laymen and women couldn't be brought into the Vatican bureaucracy, and that the administration itself could shrink.

Archbishop Claudio Mario Celli, who heads the Vatican's social communications office, wants greater communication within the various Vatican departments, including regularly scheduled meetings of department heads. [Great resource person to cite! - considering that, in practical terms, the only thing he appears to have accomplished in his office is to open a Twitter account for the Pope. Even the highly reputed Mons. Foley was unable to do anything in two decades with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications - which appears to have no jurisdiction at all over the actual Vatican media outlets, and whose rationale for being I still do not comprehend.]

"We need a more synergetic activity," Celli said in an interview. "If we want to have a more effective service in the church, we need to have a symphonic approach." [He is, of course, quoting from one of Benedict XVI's last addresses as Pope, but off-context.]

George, the archbishop of Chicago, dismissed speculation that one area of Francis' reforms would involve closing the Vatican bank, the Institute for Works of Religion, which has long been a source of scandal for the Vatican.

Doing so would be financial suicide for the Vatican, since it currently provides the Pope with about 50 million euros ($65 million) a year in investment income. The bank invests assets of its account holders, money that would have to be returned if it were to close.

Lombardi has said any speculation about the IOR's possible closure "is purely hypothetical and isn't based on any believable or concrete facts." [So, the Curia will stay, the bureaucracy will stay, the IOR will stay... i.e., no magic wand, after all, to make all the 'anomalies' under Benedict XVI vanish like a bubble, and make the Church pure and fresh after being so soiled and exhausted! The way the cardinals talked about it after Benedict XVI resigned, you'd think he had left the Church in ruins and was totally clueless about the damage he had done! God forgive them...WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO COMMON SENSE, HONESTY AND DECENCY?]

Now, for some realistic commentary from someone who worked for years in the Roman Curia:

Francis, the G8, and
reform of the Roman Curia:
Some musings
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

April 13, 2013

...I posted (earlier) about the new G8 that Pope Francis will call together in October. They are supposedly to help with alterations to the constitution called Pastor bonus, that governs the Roman Curia.

We all agree that reform of the Curia is necessary. We can all imagine that Francis was elected because the Cardinals thought he could and would do the job.

Let’s think about this.

First, the G8 (the group of 8 Cardinals) won’t meet until October. That means that not much will be done for about a year or so into this Pope’s pontificate. He has been Pope for about a month. The G8 meets for the first time over half a year from now. They won’t be leaping into action on the day after there meeting. They will have to ponder and consult and listen some more. They will have to draft proposals, which will need study and reflection and more consultation. [As the AP report noted, "Francis is in no particular hurry to overhaul things". OK, guys, you will still have the Curia to kick around some more! But can you do that without any ricochet on the Pope?]

A lot can happen in a year of a pontificate. Consider, for example, what happened in Benedict XVI’s first year after the famous Regensburg Address. Benedict was set to launch a reform of the Curia. He had even started in motion the combination of offices into a new location, hoisted the head of the dicastery for inter-religious dialogue, etc. After Regensburg, that crawled to a halt. A lot can happen in a year of a pontificate. Even six months.

[I get the point, but I respectfully disagree that Regensburg caused a 'halt' in the reform of the Curia. Benedict XVI had to wait for the Curial heads appointed by John Paul II to finish their terms. The last but one only retired less than two years ago! His appointments to replace them were a reform in themselves. And no one has accused him of appointing incompetent Curial heads. But once again, we must remember that most of the Curial offices have maybe 15-50 staff members. Only the Secretariat of State and the Governatorate have employees numbering in the hundreds. How much bureaucracy can there be that a competent Curial head could not handle in, say, a 50-man office like the CDF, where virtually every staff member must multi-task to deal with the variety of problems they have to handle?]

Second, when people start talking about structural reformation, they usually think about term limits. Term limits sweep out the undesirable chaff. That’s what we want in curial reform, right? Out with the chaff? The problem with term limits is that the wheat is also term limited. In the Roman Curia clerics are generally given 5 year appointments. They are appointed ad quinquennium, with possibility of renewal…or not. Fine.

The problem with giving pretty much everyone the heave-ho after 5 years is that you lose both institutional memory and you lose competence. If takes about 5 years to learn some of these complicated positions well.

Moreover, it takes a while to get language skill up to speed. If anyone is under the illusion that just because a man studied in Rome he speaks Italian well (much less writes it well), well… get over that. They live and study and work in their own little national ghettos where they don’t have to speak or write in Italian. In most of the universities, profs accept exams and papers in the major languages, since Latin is all but lost.

Furthermore, and this is not a secret, bishops are not always eager to let their brightest and best go: they are needed in the diocese. [Vittorio Messori identified the post-Vatican-II priest shortage as being responsible for the generally poorer quality of Curial staff who make up the 'dreadful bureaucracy'.] There is, therefore, a fairly small pool of men who can fill the jobs competently and they need time to get up to speed. In addition, if they are swept out every few years, it may be hard to motivate them.

Some might accuse me of defending “careerism”, which they will identify as a root of problems in the Curia. Term limits, however, might not produce the desired results: a lean but still competent, well-motivated Curia.

“But Father! But Father!”, some of you are itching to say, “What you are saying is an argument in favor of declericalizing the Curia. We need more lay men! And women! They would never be as incompetent and corrupt as those bad male clerics. And there are more of them, too! It’s a larger pool. There’s your solution!”

Curial reform doesn’t eliminate the effects of original sin.

If you are looking for the real corruption, the deep and serious curial corruption, forget about the clerics. For example, in the scandal about the vast overspending on things like flowers for papal events or the building of the Christmas presepio in St. Peter’s Square, the kickbacks and bribes and the differences in actual costs versus what was paid were not going into the pockets of clerics. Lay people are not the silver bullets for the curial werewolf. And the clerics who could name names were shown the door.

And, frankly, some matters have to be handled by clerics.

I don’t know what the G8 are going to recommend (if they recommend anything at all). Having been on the inside for a while, I can say with confidence that the reform of the Roman Curia won’t be among the easiest of many pending herculean labors.

[I'm trying to imagine how the Throne Council will work. If a bishop in the Philippines, say, had a major problem that was not getting the right attention in Rome, would he then have to call Cardinal Gracias in Bombay to present his problem, so that the good cardinal can present it to the Pope, or at least, to the right Curial authority? In effect, the local bishops would get intermediaries who will help them get heard by the Pope. Well, what about writing the Pope directly, especially since Pope Francis is who he is? (Oh, I forgot - Vatileaks has supposedly made it impossible for a bishop to even think of writing the Pope! How silly of me to forget such poppycock!)

As for the cardinal who represents a continent or major region on the Council, how is he expected to get an overview of the situation in his area of jurisdiction? Make each of the local bishops - and perhaps even the parish priests - of the continent report to him regularly about their problems? But can't they already do that with the Apostolic Nuncio in their country? So, anyway, instead of the local bishops having to report to the Pope once every seven years on their situation, or to the Nuncio when they have an urgent problem, they must now report once a year perhaps to their Council cardinal, who then processes all these hundreds of reports and conveys them directly to the attention of the Pope. The cardinal, of course, no matter how eminent, cannot do all that by himself, so he must hire a staff for the sole purpose of communicating and coordinating regularly with all the bishops in his jurisdiction. Hmmm, do we really think the national bishops' conferences are ready to submit themselves to another layer of bureaucracy - because that's what it is - between them and the Pope? Yup, 'tain't easy...

And yet after all this great and interminable hullaballoo over an 'incompetent, corrupt and burdensome Curia', not a single journalist or commentator has come up with an article to substantiate the generic charges, and that is the most maddeningly frustrating of all. The public has been sold a non-existent, or at least undefined and unspecified, rap sheet against an amorphous Curia, even if its offices are well-known and well-defined, and against anonymous 'criminals' with unspecified crimes or failings, tarring everyone with a broad brush.

My conclusion is that if it hasn't been written, it's because there isn't much to write about, and to try to be specific at all would bring down the whole house of cards. Like delayed marriage annulments could hinder the work of evangelization. Like any pastor in the field would use that as a pretext for failing to do what he ought to do. Just ask Cardinal Bergoglio if any 'Curial hindrance' kept him from doing what he did in Buenos Aires..Pope Francis spoke today about hypocrites in the Church detracting from the credibility of the Church. But men of God who bear false witness against their peers are even worse...WHAT IS THIS GENERAL COLLAPSE OF COMMON SENSE AMONG PEOPLE WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE AMONG THE MOST INTELLIGENT AND HOLIEST PERSONS IN THE WORLD? AND WHY?