All the Pope's Men (16 page)

Vatican officials thus tend to be protective of the code. In September 2002, the Congregation for Catholic Education issued a decree extending the period of time required to obtain a
licentiate
, or basic degree, in canon law from two years to three, and mandating that a detailed knowledge of Latin be part of the program. This same spirit of protectiveness sometimes means Vatican officials are sticklers for the fine print of the code. In some cases, reverence for episcopal authority gives way to irritation with bishops for neglect of the requirements of the law. Few places on earth probably witness more “bishop-bashing," in this sense, than the chambers of the Roman Rota and the Apostolic Signatura, or the offices of the Congregation for Clergy and the Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts. One of the great untold stories of the Vatican is how often in this allegedly ultrahierarchical institution bishops find their decisions challenged by lower clergy or laity, and, in a surprising number of cases, overturned. The philosophy one often hears invoked in such circumstances is that “no one is above the law." Granted, this sort of judicial intervention happens less often with archbishops, and very rarely with cardinals, but in neither case is it unprecedented.

This passion for law must be understood in its proper psychological context. It is not merely, or even primarily, a matter of busybodies insisting that everyone follow the rules. It is a matter of defending a uniform standard of justice. The philosophy is that the hearing one gets from the Church should not depend on accidents such as how a bishop is feeling that day, or whether the tribunal in a particular area is liberal or conservative. Beyond this emphasis on consistency lies an even more fundamental concern for the just ordering of relationships in the Church. The
mens
, or mind, of canon law has as its prime directive a balance between the rights of the individual and the well-being of the entire community. When bishops or anyone else become cavalier about the code or succumb to the illusion that “the rules don’t apply to me," Vatican officials believe, both individuals and the community suffer. Insistence on the letter of the law is, seen through their eyes, a protection of the common good, as well as of the little guy in the Church whose only defense against the abuse of power is the
Code
.

A classic illustration of this bias in favor of proper legal procedures came in 2002, when the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Church’s Supreme Court, overturned a suspension issued by then-Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, against a priest named Barry Whelan, who has since resigned. Pell, now the cardinal of Sydney, had removed Whelan from ministry in 1996 based on allegations of sexual abuse, but the Signatura found procedural defects in Pell’s action and ordered Whelan reinstated to Sacred Heart Parish in West St. Kilda. He remained there until the new Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, had to intercede again in 2002, once again on the basis of sex abuse allegations. Whelan’s story is revealing, because Pell is well-liked and respected in Rome, where there is great sympathy for what is perceived to be the difficult cultural situation facing him in Australia. If the system were always stacked in favor of bishops with the right connections, Pell would have prevailed. In this case, however, the Holy See’s judgment was that Pell could not use administrative means to impose a permanent removal from ministry—precisely the same concern for due process that would later inform the Holy See’s response to the sex abuse norms adopted by the American bishops in Dallas. This must be clearly understood: It’s not that anyone in the Vatican wants to use legal niceties to shield priests who engage in sexual abuse. It’s rather that they insist even priests guilty of the most horrific offenses are entitled to a just process of law.

Americans will recall a similar case from the early 1990s involving Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh and a priest named Anthony Cipolla, whom Wuerl had removed and the Vatican ordered reinstated. Wuerl eventually prevailed, but only following a long and complex battle. The case is discussed in chapter 6.

Time

To listen to some wags talk about the slow pace in the Vatican, one would think it’s a Mexican village from a Sergio Leone movie—men taking siestas with sombreros pulled over their eyes, dogs listlessly wandering in search of shade, an air of stupor about the entire scene. The amount of time it takes for the Vatican to produce certain decisions is the stuff of legend. At one stage, the Catholic Biblical Association in the United States actually had an on-line clock tracking how long it was taking the Vatican to approve a new
lectionary
, or collection of readings for the Sunday Mass. The final period, from the two-thirds vote in favor of the text from the U.S. bishops to formal approval by Rome, was 1,954 days, or five and one-half years! Frustration with such delays is widespread. One longtime observer of the Vatican, Jesuit Fr. Robert Taft, a leading expert on Eastern liturgy and a consultor to the Congregation for Eastern Churches, told me that the length of time it takes to get a response from the system is, in his view, its single least attractive feature.

None of this means, however, that curial personnel lack a work ethic. Although some observers complain that they work only half days, in fact the workday runs from 8:30 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., Monday through Saturday. Twice a week, usually Tuesday and Fridays, officials return to the office from 4:00 to 7:00 P.M. That amounts to a thirty-six-hour workweek, which is perhaps less than the customary American forty hours, but hardly half-time. Rumor has it that not everyone goes back in the evenings, but a majority certainly does. Moreover, many curial personnel take mountains of work home in their off-hours. Of course this is not universally true, and as in any bureaucracy, there are some Vatican officials who are on autopilot. Most, however, are reasonably earnest, some incredibly so. Diplomats say that when Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re was the
sostituto
, or number two official in the Secretariat of State, he would sometimes return phone calls at 2:00 A.M. because that was when he had the time. Re’s predecessor and patron, Giovanni Benelli, had two secretaries so one could go home after a ten-hour shift, allowing the other to be on hand for whatever Benelli needed, since he would routinely work twenty-hour days.

A large part of the reason that things can take such a long time is not because Vatican personnel are lazy, but because, relative to the work it’s trying to do, the Roman Curia is understaffed. The second section of the Secretariat of State does the work of a fully functional foreign ministry, but with a staff of thirty. That means that one officer is responsible for the entire Balkans region and another for all of Central Europe. Simply trying to keep up with the daily press from those places, let alone monitoring the ecclesiastical situation and knowing local dynamics well enough to make intelligent policy recommendations, is beyond any one person’s capacity, however polished their linguistic skills and however spongelike their reading facility. The Congregation for Worship has roughly twenty-five officials whose job is to try to monitor, and shape, liturgical texts and rituals in every language on the surface of the earth. It is, once again, an almost comical mismatch of resources to the size of the challenge. All told, the Roman Curia is trying to administer the affairs of a church with 1 billion members, in addition to participating as a sovereign state in global affairs, with a staff of twenty-five hundred. It should be no mystery why, despite the greatest dedication imaginable, things get bogged down.

Yet the time lag is not simply structural, but psychological. There is a built-in bias in favor of delay when facing virtually any decision in the Vatican. This is expressed in words such as
opportune
and
mature,
as in: “I’m not sure that an intervention at this time would be opportune," or “Perhaps it would be best to allow the problem to mature for a few months and then see where we are." There is a resistance to being rushed that is part of the genetic code. In part, of course, this is a standard bureaucratic device to buy time and hope that a problem will solve itself. In part, however, it is also a wise appreciation that sometimes problems, like wine, do get better with time. Sometimes the heat of the battle is not the best moment to make a judgment, because emotions are too inflamed and passions too raw. In some cases only time can allow one to grasp the true dimensions of an issue. When I’ve taken colleagues from the secular press along with me to visit curial offices, one of the first things they usually notice is how much more quiet it seems inside, as compared to the noisy Roman streets and public spaces. There is a kind of calm that is palpable, and I think it’s in part to promote an unrushed, steady approach to work.

Obviously, the rhythms of the liturgical calendar and the Roman year also have an impact on the pace inside the Vatican. Liturgically, the chunks of time around Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Holy Week tend to be dead periods in the Vatican, so that work comes to more or less a standstill while the liturgical celebrations of the season unfold. In Rome, moreover, the annual custom is that summer is basically down time with the annual
Ferragosto
break meaning that from late July to early September, the Vatican is in effect idled. There’s a sense in which most of the action in a year in Rome is crammed into seven months: late September through late November, and late February through mid-May. During other periods, liturgical observances, vacation schedules, closings of pontifical universities and institutes all mean that it is difficult to arrange meetings and to make work schedules coincide, so things slip into a lower gear. In the world of the Vatican, it’s nothing for someone to say in early November, “We’ll deal with this after the holidays," meaning we’ll get back to it in late January or so.

Moreover, the respect for authority that was described above also influences the sense of how long it ought to take to resolve a problem. Despite public perceptions to the contrary, Vatican officials are usually loathe to force a confrontation, especially if it involves bishops. For one thing, they want to avoid an open display of disunity, which they often believe would compromise the Church’s public image. But it’s also the case that psychologically, many curial officials cringe at the idea of attacking or undercutting the authority of a member of the hierarchy. Therefore, if it’s possible to wait out a problem with a bishop, maybe until the bishop retires, if he happens to be near the mandatory age of seventy-five, that will often be the preferred solution. In this way, face can be saved all around.

Finally, there’s the impact of history on the way that curial personnel tend to think in centuries. Many Vatican officials work in buildings that are five hundred years old. Some, such as members of religious communities, may live in churches that date back fifteen hundred years. Italians have historical memories not just of the Church, but of political and cultural accomplishments that are some twenty-five hundred years old. Walking down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, one sees the maps of ancient conquests that Mussolini had erected to remind Romans of past glories. In Vatican conversation, it’s a routine matter to invoke Church fathers who wrote seventeen hundred years ago. Of course, all this secular and ecclesiastical history has to be set against the even more sweeping background of salvation history, the record of God’s dialogue with humanity from Creation through Redemption to Final Judgment. There’s a famous remark of Pope St. Pius X (1903–1914) that makes the point. During squabbles with the French government over Church property, some critics felt the Pope was too slow to defend the rights of the Church. Pius responded: “God could have sent us a Redeemer immediately after the Fall. And He made the world wait thousands of years!" All of this shapes a perspective in which one’s horizons are much broader than yesterday and tomorrow. Policy choices have to be understood in terms of a very long history, and projected into a potentially equally long future. Perspective, not efficiency, is the most admired quality in this culture.

An anecdote illustrates how the Curia’s conception of time can affect policy choices. On October 1, 2000, John Paul II canonized 120 Chinese martyrs, including 87 native converts and 33 foreign missionaries, most of whom had been killed during the anti-Western Boxer movement of the early twentieth century. The Communist government in China complained bitterly about the canonizations, in part because they see most of these martyrs as having in fact been agents of Western imperialism. In part, however, the complaints were also based on the fact that October 1 is National Day in China, marking the day the Communist Party came to power. To stage the canonizations on October 1, according to the Chinese government, thus amounted to a deliberate provocation. The truth was that the Congregation for Saints simply didn’t bother consulting a Chinese calendar to explore potential conflicts. Once the conflict was pointed out, however, the Vatican took no steps to resolve it. As it happened, I ran into Archbishop Edward Nowak, secretary of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, at a party at the American Embassy that week. Kathleen Drexel, the second American-born saint, had been canonized at the same time. I asked Nowak his point of view on the controversy. He said: “You know, in one thousand years the Communist Party will be a footnote in Chinese history, but we will still be celebrating a holy day on October 1 in the memory of these martyrs." It was a classic instance of taking the long view.

Yet none of this means the Vatican is incapable of change, sometimes surprisingly swift change. To take just one example, John Paul II was numbered among the strongest anti-death penalty campaigners in the world. During his January 1999 trip to St. Louis, his personal plea to Missouri’s then-governor Mel Carnahan saved the life of convicted murderer Darrell Mease. The Vatican’s diplomatic corps around the world is under instruction to deliver papal requests for clemency every time an execution is scheduled. Various Catholic organizations, such as the Sant’Egidio Community, are leaders in grassroots activism against the death penalty, and this activity is blessed and celebrated from the Apostolic Palace. Yet just over one hundred years ago, popes not only supported capital punishment, they practiced it. In Rome’s Museum of Criminology, one can still see the official twelve-foot-tall papal guillotine, last used in 1868, just before the fall of the Papal States. More than a hundred people were beheaded by papal edict on the guillotine, introduced in Rome by Napoleon. As is well-known, Catholic catechisms presented the death penalty as not merely acceptable, but indeed obligatory, well into the post–Vatican II period. Indeed, a provision for capital punishment remained part of the fundamental law of the Vatican City-State until Paul VI declared it null in 1969. It was not actually removed from the books until February 2001. The theological, liturgical, and political nexus surrounding capital punishment developed in the Catholic church over centuries, yet it needed only one determined papacy to dissolve. Rapid movement on seemingly intractable issues is, therefore, possible.