All the Pope's Men (19 page)

The bottom line is that Vatican officials cannot expect their work to draw the conventional rewards of other professions: high pay, large homes, fancy cars, fat stock portfolios, and the like. Nor can most of them expect fame instead of fortune, since most Vatican work is performed anonymously. As human beings, since money and glory are denied to them, many Vatican officials will seek their rewards elsewhere. This perhaps helps explain the fact that some in the Vatican are so attentive to who is promoted, how fast, and into how important a position. It helps explain why the question of who becomes a bishop, for example, can be so staggeringly important. In the rarefied world of curial service, these are among the few ways people have of “keeping score." It also helps explain why Vatican officials sometimes preen, or comport themselves in ways that come off as arrogant or self-inflated. In other walks of life, big paychecks or a public following are the ways that professionals satisfy their egos, but those channels are closed in the Holy See. If Vatican officials sometimes seem keen on power and career, therefore, this context should be borne in mind. That’s not to excuse the behavior, which is by no means universal. But perhaps it will at least seem less shocking if one understands how the curial system is, from a twenty-first-century corporate point of view, in almost willful denial of the normal laws of human motivation. This is another instance of the
bella figura
view of law: set the expectations high, as a way of fostering virtue, and accept that many will fall short.

Layer Two: Rome

Outside the walls of the Vatican, the men and women of the Curia live and move in the city of Rome, with all its chaos and magnificence, all its modern woes and ancient glories. Just as journalists often develop story ideas based on the things they trip across on their way to work, Vatican officials cannot help but be influenced in their conception of what’s going on in the world by their experience of the streets and public squares of Rome. This influence shows up in ways large and small. One example: real insiders say the true fault line in the Holy See is not between liberals and conservatives, or between Italians and non-Italians, but between
Romanisti
and
Laziali
—fans of Rome’s two professional soccer clubs, Roma and Lazio, whose bitter rivalry divides families, neighborhoods, and workplaces. (In one potential sign of divine favor, Roma won the Italian championship that began during the Holy Year of 2000.)

In most ways the experience of this urban milieu is a healthy one, because it puts curial personnel in contact with the live reality of ordinary people. On the other hand, it means that if Romans have a skewed view of things, that skew tends to be reproduced in curial attitudes. In either case, one can establish this basic rule of thumb about Vatican sociology: If something is important in Rome, it’s also likely to be considered important in the Vatican; if something is invisible in Rome, it’s probably invisible in the Vatican as well. In this section, we’ll consider two examples from ecclesiastical Rome and two examples from secular Rome of how the realities of Roman life help shape the worldview of the men and women in the Vatican.

ECCLESIASTICAL ROME

One of the burning questions Catholics from around the world typically ask about the Vatican is, “What are they planning to do about the priest shortage?" This for the obvious reason that the priest shortage is a serious problem in many parts of the world. In the rural United States, for example, a typical diocesan priest in his late sixties may struggle to cover four or five parish Masses on a given Sunday, sometimes spread over hundreds of miles. Since 1975, the number of priests in the United States has dropped nearly 24 percent, from 58,900 to 44,900 in 2002. The number of diocesan priests, who do the majority of parish work, fell from 36,000 to 30,000 during the same period. At the same time, the Catholic population jumped from 48.7 million to 62.2 million. One quarter of diocesan priests are seventy or older. In 1965, 994 priests were ordained in the United States; less than half that number, or 450, were ordained in 2002. Already 2,000 parishes in the United States are without a resident pastor. All this means that American Catholics can touch, smell, and taste the priest shortage.

Vatican officials are well aware of these trends, and the situation is a matter of deep, and sincere, pastoral alarm. Yet if one asks if officials of the Roman Curia go to bed at night worrying about the priest shortage, the answer is generally no. In part this is because they are consoled by worldwide statistics that suggest a small upturn in priestly vocations, fueled by dramatic growth in the Third World. They also are cheered by the success of the new ecclesial movements and religious communities in generating vocations, such as the Legionaries of Christ, with some 2,500 seminarians worldwide. Yet there is another, more sociological factor: Curial officials are not reminded of the crisis by their daily experience, because there simply is no priest shortage in Rome.

According to the latest Catholic directory for the Rome archdiocese, there are more than 5,000 priests currently working in Rome— nearly 15 for each of the 334 parishes. Of course, not every priest in the Eternal City is involved in parish work. Many work in the Vatican, or teach in one of the 24 ecclesiastical universities, or work in schools, retreat centers or office jobs. In such a milieu, it’s difficult to be personally anxious about a shortage of clergy. For example, when the pastor of Santa Susanna, the official American parish in Rome, needs to be out of town on a weekend, there are literally dozens of American priests he can call upon to cover for him. Few pastors in the United States have a similar wealth of options.

Many of the priests in Rome are not official members of the local church. Some 832 are on temporary loan from other dioceses, while more than 3,100 belong to religious orders. Another 115 are priests who belong juridically to the Church’s lone personal prelature, Opus Dei. But that’s only the beginning of the story. When students and others who have no apparent job or ministry are added to the equation, the 5,000 priests burgeon to at least three times that number. That means there are 15,000 priests in Rome, giving an impression of surplus rather than shortage. That’s not even to speak about the thousands of not-yet-ordained seminarians, many of whom are dressed in Roman collar and black clerical dress. With such a visible presence of clerics, it’s no wonder that Vatican officials can have a difficult time appreciating just how urgent the lack of priests can seem in other places. It’s one thing to ponder shoddy construction practices when one’s own house is safe and sound. If water is filling the basement, on the other hand, one feels a whole different level of urgency.

A second example of the impact of ecclesiastical Rome upon Vatican psychology concerns attitudes toward the new ecclesial movements, such as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ. (Technically, neither one of these groups is a movement; one is a personal prelature, the other a community of priests. But this is fine print we can ignore for now.) In the English-speaking Catholic world, these new ecclesial movements have become a lightning rod for controversy, symbols of the cultural wars in the Church between liberals and conservatives. In part this is because in the English-speaking Catholic mind, the movements are associated with the conservative wing of the Church. Those movements that are best known among English-speakers, such as the Legionaries of Christ, Opus Dei, and the Neocatechumenate, tend to be the most conservative, both politically and theologically. English-language Catholic literature contains a number of critical books about the growing power of the movements, such as
The Pope’s Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of Mysterious and Powerful New Sects in the Church
by Gordon Urquhart and
Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of
Opus Dei
by Robert Hutchinson. Liberal Catholics in the English-speaking world consider it almost obligatory to be alarmed about the movements, while conservatives champion them, often in both cases without any personal experience. Few subjects get English-speaking Catholics as worked up as Opus Dei; in my years covering the Vatican, the topic that has consistently generated the most reader mail is Opus.

There is little such climate of alarm in Rome. In part, this is because Vatican officials tend to be doctrinal conservatives and appreciative of the stands taken by the groups mentioned above. In part, this is because Vatican officials are more likely to have personal experience of some of the movements. Several lay employees in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for example, belong to the Focolare movement. The Communion and Liberation movement has many admirers in the Holy See. When one has friends and colleagues who belong to a particular group, that tends to put a human face on it and reduce apprehension.

But an even more decisive factor is that, seen from the Roman perspective, the movements are not predominantly conservative. Historically, the most visible movement throughout Italy has been Catholic Action, whose guiding spirit has always been centrist, which politically allied it with the old Christian Democratic party, placing it equidistant from the extreme right (neofascism or monarchism) and from the extreme left (communism). Today the complex world of lay Catholic movements in Italy, such as Pax Christi, Beati i Costruttori di Pace, Tempi di fraternità, Cipax, ACLI, and the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, tend to be identified with the political left. The more moderate are considered by political analysts as a reliable base of support for center-left candidates such as Romano Prodi, who governed Italy as prime minister in the mid-1990s and then became president of the European Commission. Those further to the left may have links to the no-global movement and Italy’s Refounded Communist Party.

In recent times, the highest profile movement in Rome itself has been the Community of Sant’Egidio, the only one of the new movements born in the Eternal City. It was founded in 1968 by a group of young Catholic leftists who did not want to drift off into secular radicalism, but wanted to stay anchored to the gospel. Initially they set up schools for the poor around Rome’s periphery. Eventually they needed a meeting place in the middle of town, and took up residence in the Piazza di Sant’Egidio in Trastevere, from where the community takes its name. Today Sant’Egidio is active across a wide range of issues, from conflict resolution in Mozambique to abolition of the death penalty to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. Sociologically and politically, the center of gravity in Sant’Egidio is on the left, yet it has terrific contacts in the Vatican. Founder Andrea Riccardi is sometimes dubbed
un
cardinale laico
by the Italian press, because despite being a layman, he has the Pope’s ear and moves in all the right ecclesiastical company. Rarely is there a high-profile conference or symposium in Rome that Riccardi is not on the panel. Occasionally Riccardi publishes an essay on some cultural debate on the front page of
Corriere della Sera
, Italy’s most respected daily newspaper. This is not to say that Sant’Egidio lacks detractors—respected Italian journalist Sandro Magister, for example, has published critical commentaries about their recruiting tactics and the cult of personality around Riccardi. Even that sort of negative public commentary, however, has increased Sant’Egidio’s profile on the Roman scene.

Hence when officials in the Vatican think about the “new movements," they are not thinking of a cluster of right-wing groups. They do not have the impression that the movements are an ideologically identifiable phenomenon, and therefore tend not to think of them as divisive or polarizing. In short, the negative images that some English-speaking Catholics have of the movements simply are not in the air in Rome. Of course, this does not mean that Vatican officials are unaware of the debate surrounding the movements in other parts of the world. They realize that some have developed a reputation as being elitist, secretive, and hard to reconcile with the pastoral agenda of local parishes and dioceses. But their sense of the urgency of these problems, and what context to put such complaints in versus the good that the movements do, is likely to be quite different when one sees the issue from the Roman vantage point.

SECULAR ROME

Rome, like many urban centers in Europe, tilts to the left politically. In most elections, the city will reliably come in for the center-left coalition, with a good chunk of votes for the Refounded Communist party, while the wealthier communities in the hills outside vote center-right. This means that living and working in urban Rome, as most Vatican officials do, one’s sense of “popular opinion" may sometimes be distorted. For example, hanging out in Roman cafes one would be astonished that conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ever elected in Italy, because you’d struggle to find anyone who admits voting for him. Polls at the time of this writing show, however, that Berlusconi has the support of some 60 percent of Italians. It’s not that those people are figments of pollsters’ imaginations, but they simply don’t spend much time in wine bars in the capital city. Thus when Vatican officials take stock of what’s going on by opening their eyes in the middle of Rome, what they see is real, but not always representative.

One example came in late 2002 and 2003, during the long and diplomatically fractious buildup to the U.S.-led war in Iraq. John Paul II and the Holy See emerged as a leading global center of opposition to the war. This opposition was in the first place a principled moral stand that the proposed action did not meet the tests of a just war, and furthermore that it risked damaging the rule of international law and triggering a “clash of civilizations." It was also a realpolitik calculation that a war would not be in the interests of the 14 million Christians living in the Arab world, and that by visibly opposing the war, the Pope could help the Islamic street distinguish between the Bush administration and “the West." As the diplomatic wrangling became more intense, the Vatican took comfort from what officials perceived as near-unanimous public support for the Pope’s antiwar stance. This perception was easy to understand if one took as the barometer of public opinion what was visible in the streets of Rome, where antiwar sentiment was nearly unanimous. Virtually every building in town had at least one, and often dozens, of the rainbow-colored peace flags that became the symbol of the antiwar movement hanging out its windows. Newspapers were full of antiwar commentary, alarmist analyses about the growing isolation of the Bush White House, and warm praise for the Pope’s stance. On February 17, 2003, organizers claimed some 3 million people clogged the center of Rome for an antiwar rally. Even though police estimates knocked the number down to roughly 1 million, it was still an enormous turnout. For weeks, smaller groups of young protestors disrupted crosstown traffic by sitting or lying down in the middle of roads in the center of the city.