BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

My main objection to this article (and I have quite a few) is that Mr. Oddie - who has reported and commented on Church affairs for decades = has bought totally and uncritically into the media meme of a 'corrupt Roman Curia'. even in the absence of any facts to substantiate this. By constant repetition which no one dares correct, such memes become established as 'media fact', i.e., conjecture and perception raised to the level of 'dogmatic truth', or what passes for it in the world of relativism - where they claim there is no absolute truth, that everything is relative, and yet, they lay down their judgments on the line all the time dogmatically, ex cathedra, as though they represent absolute truth that everyone must adhere to! Go figure...

But this patently fallacious 'dogmatic truth' from relativists has by now become so hardwired into public perception that even a veteran Catholic commentator like Oddie can swallow all that, hook, line and sinker, no questions asked, whatsoever. Of course, he is by no means the only one who regurgitates this poison dutifully for others to feed on, instead of retching it out and abjuring it. Or, at least, ask questions! Like "Name the most scandalous case of corruption and evil in Benedict XVI's Curia - and who exactly were involved in it!" Like I keep saying, if we haven't heard of any specific case, it's most likely because it ain't there at all.

Pope Francis says he is too ‘disorganised’
reform the Roman Curia [by himself]
But the corruption has to be driven out.
What he needs is a Godly hitman as SecState - and
Cardinal Scola seems an obvious candidate
By William Oddie

June 20, 2013

After a meeting earlier this month of the presiding board of the the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women (CLAR), a transcript of the Pope’s words was made by those present; a translation can be found here. [Actually, it was not a transcript - CLAR called it a 'synthesis' of what the Pope said, based on an immediate reconstruction by the six persons to whom he spoke.]

From his remarks, I found myself (as have others) homing in on the following words:

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… it is difficult. In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…

The reform of the Roman Curia is something that almost all Cardinals asked for in the Congregations preceding the Conclave. I also asked for it. I cannot promote the reform myself, these matters of administration… I am very disorganised, I have never been good at this. But the cardinals of the Commission will move it forward. There is Rodríguez Maradiaga, who is Latin American, who is in front of it, there is Errázuriz, they are very organised. The one from Munich is also very organised. They will move it forward.”

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The Munich connection is worth a second look. According to Sandro Magister, as well as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, who is a member of the commission, there is also a certain Thomas von Mitschke-Collande, who was the manager of the Munich branch of what Magister calls “the most famous and mysterious company of managerial consulting in the world” (McKinsey & Company, an American global management consulting firm that “focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management.”)

In matters of the Church, Magister says, this Mitschke-Collande “knows his stuff. Last year he published a book with a title that was hardly reassuring: ‘Does the Church want to destroy itself? Facts and analyses presented by a business consultant.’ The diocese of Berlin turned to him to get its accounts back in order, and the German episcopal conference asked him to draw up a plan to save on costs and personnel. The proposal, which [Pope Francis] welcomed enthusiastically, was made to him by Fr Hans Langerdörfer, the powerful Jesuit secretary of the German episcopal conference, a Jesuit.” So it appears that Mitschke-Collande has in fact been appointed to sort out the Roman Curia’s notorious functional inefficiencies: a good and indispensable thing to do.

But can the Roman Curia actually be reformed (rather than simply reorganised) by a management consultant expert? The problem seems to be more than one of managerial disorganisation, though no doubt it would be helpful to get things moving a little more smoothly. But how will he diagnose and solve the deeper, more spiritual problems of corruption and intrigue that have caused such scandal in recent years? [What scandal, exactly, other than the direst of innuendoes repeated ad nauseam? It's the very hammering on generic 'corruption' to imply SCANDAL in bold capitals, even without stating anything specific that is the scandal otself.] What about that “gay lobby”, which Pope Francis says definitely exists?

And what exactly is the function of the commission of eight cardinals the Pope has appointed to “advise him in the government of the universal Church and to study a plan for revising the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus”?

They are Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who will coordinate the whole operation; Cardinal Guiseppe Bertello, governor of the Vatican City State; Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, the retired Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Bombay, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney. They, says Pope Francis, will also “move it forward”, the reform of the Curia, that is.

But how can they? They don’t meet until October, and they are chosen to represent the whole world, they live at the four corners of the globe: the problem is in Rome. No doubt they will be crucial in revising the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia. But isn’t there a more urgent problem?

What will revising Pastor Bonus do to cure the wicked corruption which undoubtedly helped to overwhelm poor Pope Benedict, bringing his pontificate to a tragically premature end?

[This I object to most of all. and most vehemently. Benedict XVI was not 'overwhelmed' by any 'corruption' - if there had been genuine corruption, does any one who admires him doubt he would have booted out the wrongdoers? For the mere appearance of wrongdoing in the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples during the previous Pontificate, he lost no time in reassigning - it was outright demotion in many ways - the then all-powerful Prefect, Cardinal Crescencio Sepe, to be Archbishop of Naples, instead. Propaganda Fide controls some $9-billion dollars in assets that it uses to finance missions and poor dioceses and parishes around the world, and it was suspected of entering into real estate sweetheart deals with Italian business leaders. It was B16's first major move in the Curia back in 2005, and no one seems to remember it at all. In the same way, he sent off the then president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog to be Nuncio to Cairo and the Holy See observer in the Arab League, not because of corruption, but because Mons. Michael Fitzgerald had appeared to be leaning over backwards to accommodate Muslims in the activities of the Council. Or, in a less dramatic manner, he reassigned Mons. Domenico Sorrentino, who had been secretary of the Cogregation for Divine Worship, to be Bishop of Assisi. Otherwise, Benedict XVI's instinctive sense of delicadeza made him retain the Curial heads named by John Paul II until they reached retirement age,

To postulate moreover that an unmanageable or even corrupt Curia 'overwhelmed' B16 in any way is to ignore all the considerable accomplishments of his Pontificate despite such a Curia, as bad as it has been made out to be. No one in the Curia was able to foil his initiatives to continue to strengthen the Vatican's efforts to correct everything that was wrong about the handling of the priest abuse issue, nor to open Vatican finances to international scrutiny, despite what I can only call token, if fierce, resistance, by elements who were against it.

No less significant, he did foil major maneuvers by Cardinal Bertone to consolidate a power base of his own, starting by trying to lord it over the Italian bishops' conference, or seeking to have the Vatican take over two major health enterprises in Italy, or his various nominations for posts such as the CEI presidency and the Archbishop of Milan and Patriarch of Venice. B16 proved to be defenseless against only one traitor - the man who was his valet for almost seven years and had performed the most intimate personal assistance tasks for him, in a total act of betrayal of the Pope's trust and of his privileged assignment.

But the worst offenders against B16 are to be found among the cardinals (who were also electors in the 2013 Conclave), diocesan bishops and assorted local prelates who, for eight years, openly defied his Magisterium in their respective jurisdictions. most notably in matters of liturgy. and in advocating liberal positions they have falsely attributed to Vatican II.

No, Benedict's decision to renounce the Pontificate was for the pragmatic reason he stated, and truly 'for the good of the Church' in every way. Experiencing the onset of motor disabilities and a possible total loss of eyesight, he was not going to stay on and give the enemies of the Church fresh ammunition to ridicule the Church. I can already imagine the media describing "a superannuated, tottering and blind Pope as the appropriate image of the superannuated, tottering and blind Church he leads", which might be one of the least offensive statements they could make. Realist that he is, he knew they would not spare him from such ridicule the way they spared John Paul II any criticism in his final years. For the good of the Church, he could not possibly let his own personal condition be turned into a matter of indignity for the Church.

The greater perspective, of course, is the magnitude and extent of the urgent tasks facing the Church - such as the new evangelization and all its wide-ranging implications, including the need for vocational recruitment and proper formation of priests; growing persecution of Christians around the world; the threat posed by Islam and global secularization to the faith; the Church's efforts to do what it can to alleviate conditions for the poorest and neediest of the world... Clearly, someone without his physical disadvantages would be in a much better position to carry on these tasks.]

Don’t heads need to roll now? We need these people out, quickly, we need a purge of the guilty men. [If this best of all possible Pontificates has not yet named any names and has not guillotined anyone as an earnest of that much-vaunted Curial reform, should we not presume there really are no heads to roll? That no one in the Curia has behaved so scandalously and criminally as the whole world assumes that Pope Francis could say justly, "Off with his head!" here and now, and then temper his verdict with whatever mercy is within him to grant?

We need, surely, someone who knows the curia but is not of it, preferably an Italian, someone committed to reform who can actually sweep the place clean. [Funny. no one has ever said before that a SecState's primary function is to clean up the Curia. even if there has always been something to clean up to some degree! When Cardinal Bertone was appointed, the expectation was for him to run the Curia in behalf of Benedict XVI - apparently in autumn of 2006, few in the media had yet come upon the meme of a 'corrupt and evil Curia'. Unfortunately for B16, his chosen right-hand man failed to deliver, with all the terrible consequences we now know. As an administrator, he was probably no worse than any of his predecessors, but where he failed his Pope was in playing the power game on his own behalf, an end that somehow spoiled everything else he did, or failed to do.]

We need a Godly hit man. That “gay lobby” for instance: someone must know who these people are: why can’t they simply be fired? The trouble seems to be that there is nobody on the spot with both the authority and the will actually to do the deed. [No, Mr. Oddie, the trouble is even more basic: No one has come out so far with names and specific charges. The Vatican can't go on a lynching spree just because it is expected to do so, on grounds that have not been established factually, much less legally!]

The obvious person to do all this on the Pope’s behalf ought surely to be his secretary of State, his “prime minister”: but if Sandro Magister is right (and he usually is, it seems) the present incumbent, Tarcisio Bertone, is a part of the problem: a year or two after the election of Pope Benedict he wrote an article describing Bertone sardonically as “the man who was supposed to help the Pope”.

It is generally supposed that he is on his way out; it has not gone unnoticed that he was not appointed to Pope Francis’s new commission. [Did anyone really expect Pope Francis to name as one of his advisers the central though unwitting agent provocateur of Vatileaks and the entire mudbath in which media submerged the Vatican? Mr. Oddie fails to note, however, that the one Curial cardinal in the Group of 8 is Cardinal Bertello, who at the time of his appointment as President of the Vatican Governatorate, was widely put down by the Italian media for being 'Bertone's protege'. as if that fact would have made B16 appoint him if Bertello himself wasn't deserving! After all, he was B16's Nuncio to Italy for a few years.]

So, who will replace him? It will be a key decision in all this, perhaps the key decision. The name that keeps on occurring to me is that of Cardinal Angelo Scola, who is supposed to be the papabile the curial Cardinals least wanted to be elected Pope, precisely because of his apparently rather fierce views on curial reform. He sounds ideal: but what do I know?

[IMHO, the cardinal electors went into the 2013 Conclave determined above all to choose a Pope who was not European (knocking out Scola and Ouellet from the running, right away!) - and who better than the Latin American who was the also-ran of the 2005 Conclave, even if he was 76, who had a reputation for holiness and the common touch, and as a Jesuit, would presumably have the requisite discipline more habitual, theoretically at least, in members of religious orders than in diocesan priests?]

The Holy Father is obviously not rushing into the reform of the Roman Curia [If he is in no rush, the situation cannot be as dire as everyone and his grandmother painted it in the days leading to the Conclave! It looks more and more like those oh-so-outraged cardinal electors - including many he made cardinals, such as the younger US cardinals - were simply looking for a pretext to bash Benedict XVI, inexplicably, for general incompetence while feigning concern for the Curia! I have not read of a single cardinal elector even whispering to the media about Curial reform since March 13, 2005. If it was all so bad, why aren't they at St. Peter's Square with placards reading 'RIFORMA SUBITO!' since nothing has been done about it for 3 months and the matter has been assigned to a Group of 8 that will meet for the first time in October.] - and I have no doubt that he is wiser than I am in all this. He is, it seems, getting to know his Curia personally, not least importantly in the Casa Santa Marta.

Perhaps I am being unduly impatient; perhaps, too, there is a touch of culpable vengefulness in my strong desire to see those who betrayed Pope Benedict struck down and sent far away from Rome to desolate parishes in swamps and industrial wastelands where they will have to do some real pastoral work rather than spending their every waking hour plotting against each other before enjoying a leisurely lunch in the Borgo Pio.

The trouble is, of course, that though this might turn some of them into holy priests and save their souls, it would not in the case of others be fair on their people. In those cases, their bishop would need to keep a close eye on the situation. [????]

Either way, the thing has to be done; and it can surely only be done on the spot by a single strong man loyal to the Pope and with his authority to act (rather than by a commission of distant cardinals at the ends of the earth).

I hope and pray it will be done soon, so that the Holy Father does not have this problem on his shoulders as well as all the other cares of his office. He urgently needs it: and he deserves nothing less. [How naïve to think that structural and personnel changes alone will relieve the Pope - or any other Pope, for that matter - of the burdens inherent to being Successor of Peter. There is no rest or respite for 'the servant of the servants of God', unless like Benedict XVI, he decides he can serve better by withdrawing to a life of prayer and meditation.]

This item was posted inadvertently a few hours ago when I had just lifted the article from the Herald, but I took it off so I could rebut some of its assumptions.