There is no other example in international diplomacy of a religious body acting as a sovereign state, and every now and then someone will object to the privileged status enjoyed by the Catholic Church. In 2000, for example, the liberal group Catholics for a Free Choice led a push, cleverly called the See Change Campaign, to try to revoke the Holy See’s diplomatic status. While the campaign garnered a fair bit of media interest, it did not go anywhere politically. The United States Congress, for example, voted 416–1 to support maintaining the Holy See’s sovereign status. The lone contrary vote came from California Democrat Rep. Pete Stark.
The diplomatic corps is highly prestigious in terms of the internal culture of the Vatican. Most nuncios are graduates of the Pontificia Accademia Ecclesiastica, the elite institution in Rome that since 1700 has trained future priests for careers in the diplomatic service. Five popes have been graduates of the Accademia and several more had been professors. Entering the diplomatic service of the Holy See is generally considered a very promising start to a clerical career. Often these men will end up back in Rome in some capacity, in part because they have already mastered the language skills necessary to function in an international environment.
Given the small size of the Secretariat of State, as well as the small staffs most nuncios have, the Holy See’s diplomats might seem out of their depth compared to the resources that many other ambassadors and foreign ministries can deploy. Yet the nuncios possess some unique advantages. For one thing, the Holy See is not part of any power block or trade system that creates rivalries, so its working relationships are not limited primarily to those nations “on its side." While the U.S. ambassador to Germany, for example, has little chance of phoning his opposite number in the Iranian embassy and getting access to confidential intelligence, the papal nuncio is in a much better position to swap news and views with all parties.
Further, the nuncio in every country on earth has access to a network of intelligence and perspective that any spy agency would envy: the local church, meaning the local clergy and bishops, who know the situation, the people, and the language from the inside out. When the Vatican wanted to understand the impact of the UN sanctions regime in Iraq during the 1990s, for example, it did not have to send observers or commission studies. It could simply phone the head of the 1-million-strong Chaldean Catholic Church in Baghdad, or the archbishop of the Latin Rite, and ask for impressions. The nuncio and the Secretariat of State also have access to the vast network of missionary communities in the Catholic Church, who have missionary priests, brothers, and sisters in every nook and cranny of the planet. Nuncios who know how to deploy these assets can be among the best-informed members of any diplomatic corps.
In addition to handling affairs of state, the nuncio is also the Pope’s eyes and ears for oversight of the local church. When Catholics in a given country have complaints about the bishop, it is the nuncio to whom they are addressed. The nuncio can decide how to process those concerns—whether to ignore them, to handle the matter himself, or to refer it on to Rome for review. These decisions are often fateful in terms of determining impressions in the Holy See. The nuncio also has the responsibility for preparing the terna, or list of three names of candidates for the appointment of new bishops. Of course, the Congregation for Bishops when it meets in its plenary session in Rome can change the order of the terna or add or subtract names, and the Pope has complete liberty to disregard the terna altogether and appoint someone of his own choosing. This is rare but not unprecedented; John Paul disregarded the set of three names presented to him in May 2000, for example, in order to name Edward Egan to succeed John O’Connor as the archbishop of New York. Yet according to Cardinal Jorge Mejia, former secretary of the Congregation for Bishops, between 80 and 90 percent of the time the first candidate on the terna prepared by the nuncio ends up getting the job. This makes the nuncio’s role often a decisive one.
VATICAN COMMUNICATIONS
Like any major international organization, the Holy See has a variety of communications tools for getting its message out. These include a semiofficial daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which some wags jokingly compare to the old Pravda in the Soviet Union because it is filled with pictures and speeches by the Great Leader and because it muffles criticism. (On August 19, 1914, L’Osservatore published a stinging editorial denouncing unnamed commentators who had suggested the previous day that Pope Pius X had a cold. Less than twenty-four hours later, Pius was dead.) L’Osservatore Romano is published daily in Italian, and weekly in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French, with a monthly edition in Polish.
The Jesuit order puts out a twice-monthly journal whose pages are reviewed by the Secretariat of State prior to publication, called La Civiltà Cattolica. Vatican Radio is the largest single employer within the Holy See, boasting a workforce of more than four hundred people, including two hundred journalists from sixty-one different countries, producing programs every day in forty languages—including, quixotically enough, Esperanto. It is also a major drain on Vatican finances, since it sells no advertising and accepts no corporate sponsorship as other forms of “commercial-free" radio have learned to do. The Vatican TV Center produces a weekly news program in several languages and provides live television feed of papal events to the world’s networks. The Vatican website has gone from a simple one-page Christmas greeting in 1995 to one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, with offerings from the Vatican museums and access to the full texts of papal documents as well as documents of most dicasteries. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the Vatican official who oversees the site, said in a June 2003 press conference that it makes an attractive target for hackers and is subject to some thirty attacks a week, mostly from the United States. But to date, he said, none have succeeded. The culprits are not always teenage War Games–style prodigies: Celli said using sophisticated cyber-tracking software, the Vatican was once able to establish that a particular would-be hacker was a member of the Franciscan order. They elected not to prosecute: “We thought maybe he was just bored by the heat," Celli said, a joking reference to the torridly hot European summer of 2003.
The Press Office of the Holy See produces a daily bulletin, along with other documentation for journalists, and holds periodic press conferences in conjunction with the issuance of documents or in anticipation of major Vatican events. The director and vice-director of the press office are frequently called upon to make statements for journalists when stories about the Vatican arise, and Navarro-Valls was thus easily one of the most visible of all Vatican officials during the pontificate of John Paul II. When the Pope traveled, it was Navarro-Valls who spoke on his behalf to the world’s press corps accompanying John Paul on the papal plane. Finally, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications provides a moral and theological perspective on the world of mass communications, as well as coordinating the activities of broadcast media in covering the Vatican.
The Holy See’s media operation provides it with an impressive range of tools to communicate with the outside world. The trouble is making sure that all these outlets are on the same page, a challenge that will only grow as twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, or 24/7, instantaneous news cycles become ever more voracious in their appetite for information, comment, and analysis.
THE SYNOD OF BISHOPS
Paul VI created the synod in 1965 as a means of providing the Pope with regular access to the voice of the world’s bishops to assist him in governing the universal Church. The synod is not, as some analysts have dubbed it, a kind of “parliament for the Church," because it has no decision-making authority. All of its conclusions are merely suggestions to the Pope, and it is up to him to decide what to do. It is the Pope who issues the concluding document from the synod, in his own name. Nevertheless, Paul VI envisioned the synod as a sort of continuation of the Second Vatican Council in miniature, an experiment in collegial governance of the Church. An ordinary meeting of the synod is designed to deal with some question of univer
sal relevance for the entire Church. An extraordinary meeting deals with some situation of urgent relevance for the universal Church. A special assembly considers a subject of relevance for one region, either a specific nation or an entire continent. To date, there have been twenty meetings of the synod.
Regardless of the type of meeting, the process is the same. Before the synod a working paper is drafted by the Synod Secretariat called the lineamenta, from a Latin word meaning outline, and sent out to participants for comment. After feedback is received, this document is revised into the instrumentum laboris, which is to be the guide for discussions during the meeting. In theory, speeches in the assembly should be phrased as comments on the instrumentum laboris, though in reality people are free to raise pretty much any subject under the sun.
The bishops, usually some 225 or so, along with a handful of other clergy, such as the head of religious orders, and occasionally a few lay members, spend the first week or so of each synod giving speeches. The format calls for each participant to signal when he or she wishes to speak. Names are put on a list each day, and each speaker reads his or her speech from a seated position in the auditorium. There is an eight-minute time limit, which is more or less enforced depending on who the speaker is. Cardinals and other celebrities, such as Kiko Arguello, founder of the Neocatechumenate, get more leeway. In theory, the speeches are the property of the Synod Secretariat and are supposed to be kept secret, with only short and typically anodyne summaries distributed to the press. In fact, however, there is always a flourishing black market for the full texts of these addresses, and journalists from the different language groups often arrange swap meets. In some cases, bishops themselves hand out their texts, which they want to see quoted in the world’s press.
In the second phase of the synod, which usually lasts a week, participants divide up into small groups, called circuli minores, organized by language to discuss the ideas that have surfaced. Each puts together a list of suggestions for the Pope, which are then submitted to two facilitators called the special secretary and the general rapporteur, both positions appointed by the Pope. The two combine the proposals into a general list of propositions. In the third phase, the groups discuss the list of propositions. They can suggest amendments, but the ultimate decision as to what goes on the list belongs to the special secretary and the general rapporteur. Then the full synod votes up or down on the propositions, which are considered secret and go to the Pope. After some months, and in the case of the second assembly for Europe after three years, the Pope issues an apostolic exhortation offering the fruits of the synod to the world.
John Paul II obviously believed in this process, because he sat through almost every day of each of the twenty meetings of the synod—a record that no one else can claim. At the same time, the Pope’s faith was not universally shared. Critics complained that the synod amounted to sound and fury signifying nothing, since the process from start to finish is under tight Vatican control. The Synod Secretariat sets the agenda and prepares the working documents, and papal appointees determine what ideas survive in the propositions. In the end, the synod’s conclusions are up to the Pope anyway. This reality has led to a sort of cynicism. For example, most days John Paul sat in front of the synod hall and was often seen praying his breviary, the book that contains the daily prayers of the Church. An old joke, however, has it that the Pope was not really reading the breviary, but the synod’s conclusions while the event was still going on!
In the end, however, this may be a case of whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. It’s true that synods do not produce the immediate, decisive action that many Catholics would like to see. But the Catholic Church, with its two-thousand-year history and 1-billion-strong global membership, is not designed to turn on a dime. It needs time for ideas to mature and for a wide base of support to build in order to accommodate change without rupturing communion. What the synod perhaps provides is a chance for ideas to get a first hearing, to be injected into the Catholic bloodstream in order to see how the body reacts. During those eight-minute speeches in the first week, participants have the liberty to raise whatever concerns they like, and the world’s press is listening. The Asian bishops did just this in 1997, making a case for inculturation and an approach to “mission" based on dialogue and witness. At the most recent synod, more than fifty speakers raised the need for greater collegiality in the Church, despite specific instructions to avoid the topic. It was an unmistakable signal that this issue is “on the table" and will have to be confronted, even if the synod itself brought no closure. One could argue that the synod offers a valuable sounding board for the Church, even if its bark is, at present, worse than its bite.
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TOP FIVE MYTHS ABOUT THE VATICAN
Pilgrims who arrived at the famed cathedral in Siena, Italy, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have come across a series of busts of popes, including one bearing a rather remarkable inscription: “John VIII, a woman from England." The statue, placed in the cathedral around 1400, reflects the widely held conviction in Europe for more than three hundred years that a woman had once been Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. She was known as “Pope Joan," and there are more than five hundred textual references to her story during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Even today some Catholic feminists take Pope Joan as a point of reference, even while, in most cases, recognizing that she’s fable rather than fact.
Although there are different versions of the Pope Joan legend, the most common form goes like this. In the ninth century, a woman of English origin, but born in the German city of Mainz, begins to dress like a man and heads off to Athens, where she becomes a learned theologian. Later she moves to Rome, still dressed like a male, now in clerical garb. She begins to ascend the career ladder in the Curia, gaining a reputation for learning and virtue. Upon the death of Pope Leo IV in 855, she is elected Pope and takes the name of John. She rules for two and a half years before her secret is discovered, in the most shocking fashion possible. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child in the middle of a papal procession from St. Peter’s Basilica to St. John Lateran. (The site is usually thought to have been between the Colosseum and the Church of St. Clement.) Some versions of the story say she was immediately stoned to death, others that she went into exile. Those who believe she survived often added that her child grew up to be the Bishop of Ostia.
Despite a complete lack of historical plausibility, Renaissance writers such as Boccaccio and Belli regarded the Pope Joan story as literally true. The Czech reformer Jan Hus, hauled before the Council of Constance in 1414 to defend ideas that would later help fuel the Protestant Reformation, cited the story of Pope Joan in his own defense, and no one challenged its veracity. It wasn’t until the awakening of the science of historical criticism that people began to realize how wildly improbable the story actually was. There is very good evidence, for example, that Benedict III was elected Pope immediately after the death of Leo IV in 855, with no room for another Pope, female or otherwise, in between. None of the other time frames that have been suggested over the years work any better. The reality is, there never was a Pope Joan. Even so, the story continued to be recycled down the centuries, especially in Protestant and Masonic circles. What better evidence of the fallibility of the papacy than that it failed to detect a woman Pope for two and a half years, until she gave birth in the streets of Rome?
How did such a story get started? For one thing, when medieval popes took possession of the Cathedral of St. John Lateran, they apparently would seat themselves upon a marble throne in front of the cathedral that had come from the nearby Roman baths. It seems to have been, in fact, an ancient toilet, and hence was open in the middle. That fact gave rise to the rather vulgar fantasy that when the newly elected Pope was seated upon this throne, someone reached up from beneath to verify his manhood. The reason for such an inspection, as the legend went, was to avoid another Pope Joan fiasco. It’s also true that medieval popes generally
avoided the street between St. Clement’s and the Colosseum when in a processional to St. John Lateran, ostensibly because it was too narrow, although many believed it was because of the memory of the illicit birth that had taken place on the spot. More basically, however, most historians believe the story reflects the female domination of the papacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries. While there was no Pope Joan, there were a number of female powers behind the throne effectively calling the shots. Pope John X, elected in 914, owed his elevation to his mistress, Theodora, whose beauty, talents, and intrigues had made her the unofficial queen of Rome. Theodora’s daughter, Marozia, wielded a similar influence over Sergius III and helped engineer the election of her son by Sergius to the papacy with the title of John XI. At a still later period, John XII was so enthralled by one of his concubines, Rainera, that he entrusted her with much of the administration of the Holy See.
Over the centuries, the Vatican has acted as a magnet for legends, myths, and conspiracy theories such as that of Pope Joan. In part, this is because the odd dress, ritual, and language of the Holy See invite speculation, just like the Skull and Bones Society at Yale. In part, it’s because the Roman Catholic Church tends to excite strong passions, among supporters and detractors, and all sorts of wild allegations that would not be taken seriously if attached to other institutions manage to get a hearing. The modern equivalents of the Pope Joan legend take different forms. Since popes are constantly on the public stage, it’s no longer credible to believe that a cross-dresser could somehow go unnoticed. Our Vatican mythology is of a twenty-first century, X-Files sort: occult financial wheeling and dealing, vast political conspiracies, high-tech secrecy and treachery. Like the legend of Pope Joan in its day, however, these myths have a wide following. A surprising number of otherwise intelligent people, including many Catholics, regard the Vatican as an ultrasecretive, Stepford wives–type environment with a maniacal focus on wealth and power.
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