All the Pope's Men (11 page)

MYTH FIVE: CLIMBING THE CAREER LADDER

An entire corpus of popular entertainment, from Otto Preminger’s
The
Cardinal
to the Colleen McCullough classic
The Thorn Birds
, have taught outsiders to regard the conflict between career and personal integrity as the essential drama of the clerical life. Ambition in the clerical world tends to create a special sense of scandal, since priests are supposed to be, in a famous phrase of the former Jesuit General Fr. Pedro Arrupe, “men for others." The idea of a priest calculating his climb up the career ladder—first to monsignor, then bishop, then archbishop, then a cardinal’s red hat, finally the papacy itself—rankles, since it appears contradictory to Christ’s injunction that “the last among you shall be first."

Given that context, it’s understandable why some Catholics approach Vatican personnel with suspicion. These are, after all, clerics who by most standards have “moved up" and may be destined for even higher office. The Villa Stritch, where American diocesan priests working in curial service live, is something of an incubator for bishops. Three current American archbishops are former residents: Edward Egan of New York, Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, and William Levada of San Francisco. Moreover, whenever there is a bishop’s opening in their diocese, men who serve in the Roman Curia from that diocese will generally be considered candidates.

In the popular mind there’s often a de facto assumption that a priest in the Roman Curia is probably a careerist, unless it’s proven otherwise. Frequently bundled with that assumption is the suspicion that the priest is capable of doing some shady things—undercutting rivals, for example, or taking positions based on convenience and popularity rather than conscience—if necessary in order to secure his own advancement. This explains the popular belief that the Vatican is a hornet’s nest of cutthroat competition. St. Augustine once cautioned that, “Whoever looks in the Church for something other than Christ is a mercenary," and by that standard, popular mythology seems convinced that there are an awful lot of mercenaries in the Holy See.

To call this perception a myth is not to deny that it possesses elements of truth. Are there clerics in the Roman Curia who want to move up the ladder and organize their lives and work accordingly? Yes. Most people who work in the Vatican, in fact, can point them out. Are there episodes, sometimes quite infamous, in which personnel inside the Vatican have engaged in outrageous conduct in order to smear the reputation of a rival or otherwise enhance their own prospects for a promotion? Again, yes. One doesn’t have to resort to Monsignor Luigi Marinelli’s
Gone With the Wind in the Vatican
, a kiss-and-tell classic by a former Vatican official, to find such tales. Sit down over coffee with anyone who works in the Holy See, and they’ll be able to tell terrific anecdotes to illustrate the point.

However, careerism is a case in which reality has become mythologized in terms of quantity rather than quality.

First, it would contravene the laws of human nature were there not some careerism in the Vatican. This is a hierarchical system, and promotion is the primary way the system expresses approval of someone’s work. To complain that curial personnel like to be rewarded for a job well done is a bit like complaining that they’re human beings. Moreover, some degree of ambition is no bad thing, because it usually means that the person is willing to work hard. This double standard, in fact, offers a classic example of how the Roman Curia can’t win. One bank of critics calls them lazy, pointing out how long it takes to get things done; another faction faults them for possessing any drive at all. In other walks of life, we applaud ambition, since it is often the motor fuel of success. Only in the Roman Catholic priesthood do we expect people to turn in consistently excellent work with no thought of personal affirmation. That’s a noble ideal, but it is also to some extent unrealistic.

Second, simply as a matter of accurate observation, it is not true that ambition and careerism are the dominant psychological traits of the men and women in the Holy See. Most officials who clock in each morning do not spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to move up. In many cases, in fact, officials in the Roman Curia never even applied for their job, and after several years have only vague suspicions of how they got there. Dicasteries of the Roman Curia do not place classified ads in a help wanted column in L’Osservatore Romano. When there is an opening, a superior of the dicastery will usually ask around, quietly, among friends and colleagues, looking for qualified personnel. Sometimes the dicastery will reach out to a trusted bishop or the head of a religious order to suggest someone. In some cases a potential Vatican official is not aware he or she is under consideration until the decision has already been made. In almost no case does the official apply for the job. There are no applications to fill out, no curriculum vitae to send in. It is, literally, a case of “don’t call us, we’ll call you."

In some cases when a candidate is approached, the first response (and sometimes the second and third) is no. The person may have a promising academic career, may prefer not to live in Rome or may want a pastoral assignment rather than working behind a desk. Some want to be free to write and publish under their own name. Most have no desire to be in the Curia forever, or even very long. One of the untold stories of curial hiring, in fact, is how difficult it can be to fill certain slots because people with the proper training and professional experience don’t want the job. I could fill a small dicastery with friends who have been approached about working in the Roman Curia and turned it down. It’s not that these friends are less career-oriented than the officials who eventually said yes. In some cases, in fact, they rejected the curial job precisely because they knew they would find more prestige, more affirmation, greater personal satisfaction, and even more money with other pursuits.

It will be useful at this stage to allow three curial officials to speak for themselves, as a window onto what the real attitudes within the Holy See are on the careerism issue. The first is a North American priest in his fifties, who has worked in the same dicastery since the 1980s; the second is an Italian in his forties who is considered a rising star in the Secretariat of State; and the third is a young Northern European who works in a congregation and who is at the same time trying to complete a doctoral degree at a Roman university.

The North American never wanted to work in the Roman Curia, and in fact did everything he could to avoid the assignment. He was first approached in the mid-1980s, after he had finished a doctorate in Rome and had returned to his home diocese to teach in the seminary, which had been his dream. One of the cardinals of the Roman Curia was looking for someone whose first language was English and had asked around town for suggestions. This man’s name came up, and so the curial cardinal sent him a letter. The priest went to his vicar general in his home diocese, saying he didn’t want the job, but the vicar encouraged him to go to Rome and to hear what the curial cardinal had to say. The priest did so and was offered the job. After consultation with his spiritual director back home, he turned it down. After a few weeks, he got a phone call from his own cardinal’s secretary, saying the cardinal wanted to see him. When the priest showed up for the appointment, the cardinal asked if he had made a firm decision. The priest said yes, he was happy teaching in the seminary and had also just been accepted for another doctoral program in the States that he wanted to pursue on a part-time basis. The cardinal advised him to think again, and asked, “Why not just go over for a year or two?" In the end, the priest realized that the curial cardinal had enlisted his own cardinal’s blessing, and that no was not an acceptable response. He agreed to go to Rome for two years, and has been in the dicastery ever since, some twenty years now. For him, the idea that he came to Rome to make his career is absurd— he came kicking and screaming, and being here for almost two decades has not shot him up the ladder. He is in the same job he was when he arrived.

The Italian had completed his studies at the Pontificia Accademia, the training ground for future diplomats in the Church, when he was approached by the rector of the college where he was living, the Capranica. (In the European system, a college is a residence, not a place of study.) Anyone who knows Italy realizes that a young cleric who is selected to study at the Accademia and to live at the Capranica is going places, and it was no great shock when the rector said there was interest in this man’s services at the Secretariat of State. “Before the rector proposed it, I had never sought it," the priest insists. “But it was not unusual." Like many Italians, he takes a very realistic view of clerical ambition. “We are human beings, sensible to all the gratification that conditions a normal human life," he said. “People do have ambitions and desires. I believe that you have to be honest with yourself. The goal of your work is not to become first, but to render service. If it’s possible to do this with gratification of being recognized, all the better. We’re not called to become martyrs." The priest added that in his job he is often asked to liaison with secular governments, where he said the drive for career advancement is far more palpable than in the Roman Curia. “Yes, some of us hope to be bishops, in the same way that a vice-pastor wants to be pastor, a pastor wants to be the vicar general or president of the tribunal, and the vicar wants to be bishop. Maybe those of us of the Roman Curia feel this a little more, because we spend so much of our time with high-profile contacts. But on the other hand, I know of two cases where a curial official turned down a bishop’s appointment, arguing that they were better suited for other work."

The Northern European priest, a soft-spoken and short man who looks much younger than his forty-one years, was training to teach Scripture in his diocesan seminary when a friend in Rome approached him about working in one of the Vatican congregations. He said he had already promised himself that he would never seek an assignment in his priestly career, and he would never exclude an assignment, in order to be open to what God might want. He told his friend that if the congregation was serious, they should contact his cardinal. Later that fall he saw the cardinal and asked if he should send in his curriculum vitae. The cardinal said no, let the congregation deal with me. The priest had the impression that the cardinal was not inclined to let him go, and so he forgot about the prospect. Next spring, however, the cardinal told him to go to the dicastery for an interview, which happened over the summer. At that time it seemed clear they had already settled on him for the job. By September he began work, having received the obligatory nulla osta, or “all clear," from the Secretariat of State. He’s been in his congregation now five years, and says that if the call came to come home tomorrow, he’d be ready to go. “I don’t want to be here just to be here. I don’t want that awful kind of possessiveness," he said.

Bottom line: none of these three men sought their assignments, and none would be crushed to let their job go. The Italian priest in the Secretariat of State, reflecting the general tendency of Italian clerical culture, is more frank about his career ambitions, but does not seem consumed by them. In each case, they appear to have balanced, sober attitudes toward life and work that do not resemble the preening lust for power that the careerism myth suggests. Each man concedes that he knows colleagues who seem overly anxious for the next step up the ladder; each reports, however, that they are exceptions. As the Northern European puts it: “That kind of person will rise, but not too far, and certainly not far enough or fast enough for their own taste. They’ll be miserable and make other people miserable. Thank God, they’re not the majority."

Finally, there is a special variant of the careerism myth, which is that every cardinal dreams of being Pope. Certainly this kind of ambition does happen. Italian journalist Benny Lai’s 1993 biography
The
Pope Never Elected
, about Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genova, made clear that Siri unabashedly felt he would have been a good choice for the Church’s top job. Frankly, however, the number of cardinals who entertain such dreams is probably much lower than, say, the number of United States senators who fantasize about becoming president. There are two reasons why. First, the gap between being a senator and being the president is comparatively small. It’s easy enough for a senator to imagine himself in the Oval Office. The psychological and theological distance between being a cardinal and being the Pope, on the other hand, is enormous. Most cardinals genuinely have a difficult time believing themselves worthy of such an enormous responsibility. Second, one can have a life after being president. Bill Clinton was only fifty-four upon leaving office after two terms, meaning he could look forward to perhaps as many as twenty-five productive years to do something else. There is no such thing as an ex-Pope. (This is not the place to pursue the point, but canon 332 of the
Code of Canon Law
does provide for a papal resignation. The last time this happened without outside pressure, however, was 1294. The reality is that popes don’t resign.) There is no lecture circuit to hit, no memoirs to write, no papal library to open. One carries the burden of office until death. Contrast that with the relatively plush life of a retired cardinal, and it’s clear why most members of the College of Cardinals pray that “this cup may pass."

TOP TEN VATICAN VALUES

Authority

Cardinal Godfried Daneels of Belgium observed during the October 1999 Synod on Europe that the developed West is allergic to the concept of authority, and nowhere is this more true than in English-speaking countries, where Enlightenment-inspired individualism has made self-assertion the heart of what it means to be free. Most English-speakers, certainly most Americans, regard the idea of doing something because they were told to do so as suspect. Obedience is often seen as a kind of cowardice or moral surrender, associated, for example, with German soldiers mindlessly carrying out the orders of their Nazi superiors. It is regarded as something unworthy of educated, emancipated adults. Cultural critics would note that Americans are a nation of “rugged individualists" who drive the same cars, wear the same clothes, drink the same colas, and see the same movies. Nevertheless, it cuts against the grain to accept something solely on the basis that it comes from a superior level of authority. We are in that sense children of Nietzsche, regarding the exercise of our own wills as the
summum bonum
of the moral life.

This is not how things look within the Holy See. Like most bureaucracies with a clear chain of command, such as the Army or General Motors, there’s an emphasis on following orders. Yet the roots of the attitude toward authority in the Vatican run much deeper. Its internal culture is closer to the ancient Greco-Roman view of learning, which takes submission to a teacher and a particular tradition of inquiry as its point of departure. Think of Plato’s descriptions of the disciples of Socrates gathered around the master, or of the disciples of Jesus pondering the Sermon on the Mount. From this point of view, authority is not opposed to reason, but a prerequisite to it. To put the point in slightly more complex terms, Roman Catholicism is a kind of “narrative tradition" as described by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in which reasoning makes sense only from inside a tradition and under the guidance of those who have mastered it. Taking something on authority is not the sacrifice of one’s own conscience, but a decision to shape one’s conscience in accord with the tradition, on the theory that doing so will lead to greater clarity and insight. Here’s the basic difference: for most Westerners, doing something because they are told to do so by an authority would be irrational. For someone who accepts the claim of a tradition, however, submitting to the decisions of authority, even when its logic is not clear, is an affirmation of faith in that tradition. It’s a way of saying, “I’m not an isolated atom but a member of this community of inquiry, and I trust its wisdom."

That philosophical conviction is bolstered by the Church’s theology of authority. Power within the Church, according to the perspective widely held in the Vatican, comes from the risen Christ and is entrusted to the apostles and to their successors in the apostolic college, first and foremost to the successor of Peter, the Pope. In a 1995 address to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul II described his authority as “a means of guaranteeing, safeguarding and guiding the Christian community in fidelity to and continuity with tradition, to make it possible for believers to be in contact with the preaching of the Apostles and with the source of the Christian reality itself." Obviously, the culture of the Holy See puts a premium on the authority of the Holy Father. Beyond that, there is a strong emphasis on accepting the authority of one’s superiors, especially the prefects and secretaries of the various dicasteries, who draw on both the Pope’s authority and their own as bishops. As we saw in chapter 2, the working assumption of modern democracies may be that power corrupts, but within the ecclesiastical system it’s precisely the opposite—power ennobles, because it flows from Holy Orders and draws on the grace of the sacrament. The bias is always in favor of authority.

That said, few Vatican officials are under the illusion that ordination inoculates their superiors, including the Pope himself, against sometimes being ill-informed, naïve, stubborn, or just plain wrong. Indeed, some of the Pope’s fiercest critics are just down the hall from him, or across St. Peter’s Square. One
monsignore
who works in the Vatican, for example, told me the Pope had made a serious doctrinal error with his interreligious gatherings in Assisi, and huffed that, “The man has never apologized!" We were looking out his office window toward the papal apartments as he spoke. Other Vatican insiders complained that the Pope was careless in allowing his appeals for peace in Iraq to be seen as an endorsement of the antiwar movement, which lumped together socialists, communists, eco-radicals, and a host of others not always congenial to a Catholic worldview. It’s not just the Pope who is the subject of this sort of griping. I’ve known mid-level officials in dicasteries who, at various times, were convinced that their superior was an idiot or mentally unhinged or simply too weird to be believed. This is all par for the course in any organization full of intelligent, passionate people with their own strong visions about how things ought to be done.

The key point is that for most of the men and women of the Curia, and for others formed in the same intellectual tradition, their respect for authority is not dependent upon any particular exercise of it. It rests instead on the philosophical pillar that the tradition is usually wiser, that it sees further, than the individual. This is coupled with the theological conviction that ultimately authority in the Church comes from God. Submission to authority, even when one can’t in the moment see the logic for its choice, is usually a higher value than assertion of one’s own vision. Ironically, while Vatican officials are often accused of arrogance, on this point at least their institutional culture enforces a certain epistemological humility. They are shaped to believe there is a wisdom higher than their own. While many Westerners might wonder why that
monsignore
who disagrees with the Pope about Assisi doesn’t just walk out, from his point of view, the call of authority trumps his private feelings.

The Vatican’s respect for authority rests on two other foundations, one moral, the other historical. The moral element is rooted in Thomism, and the conviction that authority is intended to foster virtue, leading to the practice of a moral life and, ultimately, to salvation. The hierarchically structured Christian Church is thus, by definition, a virtuous community. While allowing that individual bishops may screw up, the assumption is that most bishops, most of the time, use their authority for good ends. Note that this is an assumption about the Church, not about any given official. It does not mean that people in the Curia are naïve about abuses of power. In my experience, Vatican officials usually have no problem believing that Bishop X may have committed mistakes, ridden roughshod over people’s rights, or been too weak to assert the interests of the Church. In that sense, they are terrific realists. They see this sort of thing all the time, and, in fact, can site chapter and verse on episodes of episcopal incompetence that would make one’s toes curl. But they do not move from such episodes to a systematic criticism of authority in the Church, because they perceive a value in authority that transcends particular acts of poor judgment. It is the value of moral uplift—that by trusting the authority of the Church, over time, despite the potential for disappointments and setbacks, the overall effect will be growth in the moral life pointing toward eventual union with God.

The historical component comes from a recognition that for better or worse, the Catholic Church tends to rise and fall in tandem with how the authority of its bishops and other clergy has waxed and waned. As early as the end of the first century, Ignatius of Antioch urged the local church to be subject to the bishop. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage wrote, “The bishop is in the church, and the church is in the bishop." For nearly two thousand years, communion with the bishop has been the hallmark of Christian identity. Weak bishops have often been the cause of serious ecclesiastical crises. In the sixth to the ninth centuries, for example, when the bishops in Europe were often subservient to kings and local nobles, the moral standards of the clergy were in disarray and the management of church affairs was shoddy. All one has to do is to read the edicts of the regional synods and councils of the day, which vainly attempted to rein in embarrassing clerical comportment. The Council of Vaison, for example, in 529, complained of drunkenness, incontinence, scandals from the renewal of married life after ordination, theft, and murder. All this was possible in part because weak and compromised bishops, hobbled by lay lords, weren’t capable of putting a stop to it.

Similarly in the late Middle Ages, as abbeys and religious orders sliced off progressively bigger chunks of the bishop’s authority, and more and more decisions were reserved to the authority of the Holy See, bishops drifted into idleness and the Church suffered. Some became “absentee bishops," holding the title to a see and collecting its revenues but living, often in luxury, someplace else. This meant nobody was supervising the clergy, monitoring what was being taught in schools, and so on. By the time of the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century, a bishop had not lived in Milan for one hundred years. This neglect allowed all sorts of anomalies to flourish, including outlandish requests for indulgences, which was part of the landscape that led to the Protestant Reformation. Trent revivified the bishop’s office, reestablishing the bishop’s authority and insisting that he live in his diocese to exercise it. Bishops were now obligated to personally ordain all the clergy destined to work in their diocese. What followed was the Counter-Reformation, one of the most glorious and productive periods of Catholic history. Similarly, many observers in the Holy See read the American sex abuse scandals of 2002 in terms of the failure of bishops to exercise their authority.

Policy measures or theological proposals that seem to undercut ecclesiastical authority will thus almost always trigger suspicion in the Holy See. This is not merely a matter of defending clerical power, but about making sure the people of God have the tools they need to form future generations in the faith and to defend the Church when it is under threat. The central tool in that toolbox, from the Vatican’s point of view, and rooted in its sense of history, is a strong bishop capable of teaching, sanctifying, and governing the faithful. To take an example of how this plays out, there was considerable negative reaction within the Holy See in May 2003 when Bishop Thomas O’Brien of Phoenix renounced certain powers to oversee his clergy as part of a deal to avoid criminal prosecution related to sex abuse scandals. “It’s not so much the details of the agreement that bother me," said one senior Vatican canonist. “He delegated certain responsibilities to a priest, which is envisioned by canon law. It’s the idea that the civil authority compelled a bishop to renounce his authority—that’s a dangerous precedent." The canonist saw it as dangerous not because it implied the loss of clerical privilege (at least not primarily), but because by weakening the bishop, the long-term well-being of the community could be put at risk.

Bella Figura

This value is drawn from Italian culture: the cult of the
bella figura
, meaning literally “beautiful figure," and translated loosely as the importance of always looking good. Its prevalence in Italy is one reason why Milan is the capital of the world’s fashion industry. It’s why Italians will spend lavishly to repaint the outside of their houses every year even when the plumbing and electricity don’t work. The neighbors don’t see the plumbing! Even today, when an Italian is leaving to spend time overseas, a relative is almost sure to issue a reminder:
Si deve fare una
bella figura all’estero
, meaning, “You have to make a good impression when you’re away!" The bottom line is that no matter what happens, one has to keep up appearances.

This can sound like a rather vain and superficial principle, and at its worst it becomes an excuse for not confronting inner rot as long as the surface looks good. Many Catholics would say that this value played a role in the failure of some bishops to react vigorously when priests were guilty of sexual abuse, contenting themselves with negotiating secret payouts that prevented public scandal. It was in this sense that then-Bishop Sean O’Malley, now the Archbishop of Boston, invoked the term during floor debate at the November 2002 meeting of the U.S. bishops in Washington, D.C. “Church leaders dealt with sexual abuse by clergy in a
modus operandi
that was suggested by a theology of sin and grace, redemption, permanence of the priesthood, but also a great concern about scandal, the
bella figura
, and the financial patrimony of the Church," O’Malley said. “We know now that not enough attention was given to the reporting of crimes, the protection of children, and the spiritual and psychological damage done to victims." The potential for hypocrisy latent in this value is bluntly expressed by the
Economist
magazine, in its guide to business customs in Italy: “When doing business, maintain your
bella figura
—the Italian expression for showing your best face," the magazine counsels. “This means never admitting you are wrong."

The
bella figura
in this sense is undeniably influential in Vatican psychology. Public discussion of problems can sometimes be discouraged simply out of reluctance to air one’s dirty laundry in public, an instinct sometimes rationalized as a desire to protect the faithful from shock or hurt. Aside from the rather patronizing nature of such concerns, experience shows they almost always backfire, as the stonewalling generates far more hurt than disclosure would have in the first place.

(This is perhaps the place for a quick footnote about scandal. Sometimes people charge that Church officials try to sweep problems under the rug in order to “avoid scandal," using the term in its generic sense as a publicized incident that causes outrage or disgrace, like the “Enron scandal." This is not the sense in which Church documents, however, generally use the word. For example, a May 1999 document from the Vatican, defrocking an American priest named Robert Burns, made a brief flurry in the media because it stipulated that Burns “ought to live away from the places where his previous condition is known," unless his presence “will cause no scandal." Some took this as evidence that Rome had ordered a cover-up of Burns’s abuse in order to avoid bad press. In Catholic parlance, however,
scandal
has a more technical definition. It means inducing someone to sin against the faith or morals of the Church. The Church has always taught that certain things should be kept quiet if making them public might lead people into serious sin. For example, if a priest committed a heinous act and his bishop felt it was possible that public disclosure would lead people to conclude it was okay for them to do the same thing, that might be a good reason to keep it quiet. Obviously, it’s a principle open to abuse. The point is that when the Church says it wants to “avoid scandal," it doesn’t mean bad publicity. It means leading people to endanger their souls.)