From a certain point of view, one could argue that these myths are basically harmless. It can be amusing to contemplate in a “what if?" fashion the possibilities of something like the Pope Joan story. The problem, however, is that mythology gets in the way of understanding. Especially in the English-speaking world, people who want to talk about the Vatican usually start out with a bundle of stereotypes, rooted in movies and cheap novels and yellow journalism, that collectively make it difficult for them to see the institution for what it really is. Getting past these popular myths represents the biggest obstacle facing anyone seeking to explain what the Vatican is actually like.
To take just one example, every year during the Peter’s Pence collection, an annual worldwide fund-raising drive in support of the Pope’s charities, people will demand to know why the Vatican is asking for money. The obvious answer—it doesn’t have any—is one that most people simply can’t, or won’t, accept. Their perceptions are shaped by the myth of vast Vatican wealth, fueled by sensationalistic media accounts of Vatican Bank scandals, plus movies and TV shows that showcase the glittering magnificence of the Apostolic Palace. My own family is no exception to such perceptions. One year my grandfather announced to his local pastor in Hill City, Kansas, that if the Pope really wanted to help the poor, he could sell “one of those hats" and give the proceeds away. Grandpa was referring to the papal tiara, a jewel-encrusted crown popes once wore, and he didn’t realize that Paul VI had done just that in 1964. Unfortunately, there are more poor people than papal crowns to go around, and if the Pope wants to help them, he’s got to get the money from somewhere. In reality, the Vatican is less well-heeled than most mid-sized American colleges, and all that artistic splendor people usually think of as “Vatican treasure" has no cash value because it can never be sold or borrowed against.
Before we can get down to the main business of this book, therefore, we have to clear away some of this intellectual clutter. This chapter is designed to make it possible to talk honestly and in a clear-eyed fashion about the realities of the Vatican. It will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, for readers to let go of these myths, either because they feed their prejudices or because they’re simply too much fun. Once you puncture the myth of Vatican secrecy, for example, what’s to become of legends about the elite Opus Dei movement acting in cahoots with rogue elements in the CIA, or some other secret agency, to advance a global plot? (Think of the success of the recent potboiler novel The Da Vinci Code.) Others will cling to the illusion that the Vatican is an idealized spiritual preserve, where no one ever thinks a political thought or acts for any motive other than perfect obedience to the Holy Father. Being willing to think past such mythology is, alas, the price that must be paid for seeing the Vatican as it really is.
MYTH ONE: “THE” VATICAN
This first bit of news, which will be surprising to many readers, is that there is no such thing as “the Vatican." At least, there is no “the Vatican" in the sense that most English-speaking journalists, commentators, and activists use the phrase. In the pages of the New York Times, or in press releases from activist groups such as Catholics United for the Faith or Call to Action, or in the comments of TV pundits, one finds phrases such as “The Vatican wants," or “The Vatican announced today," or “The Vatican is afraid that . . . In reality, such formulae are built on an image of the Vatican that is more mythic than real.
The implicit assumption in such language is that there is a living creature somewhere called “the Vatican" with a single mind and a single will capable of wanting or fearing, capable of acting in a unified fashion. In fact, a moment’s reflection should expose the falsehood of this notion. The Vatican is not an organism, it is a bureaucracy. It is staffed by human beings, each of whom has his or her own wants, fears, intentions, visions, hopes, and dreams. Anyone who knows a bureaucracy from the inside can spot where the fault lines lie, who’s in which camp, and where the major disagreements are. Spend some time around the Holy See, and it will become clear that in some ways, though certainly not all, it reflects the diversity of the wider Catholic world. There are progressives and traditionalists, sticklers for liturgical fine points and social justice activists who couldn’t care less when one kneels and when one stands, ecumenical dreamers but also hardheaded realists who think dialogue with Protestants is a waste of time. Only from a distance can the Vatican seem like an indistinct gray mass in which everyone looks alike, acts alike, and thinks alike. Seen from up close, it is far more polychromatic.
Two examples make the point.
The two most powerful Germans in the Holy See are former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who ran the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Both are eminent theologians, both once taught at Germany’s premier theological institute in Tübingen, and both have crossed swords over the years with the premier enfant terrible of twentieth-century German Catholic theology, Hans Küng. On different occasions, Küng has accused both of “scarlet fever," that is, a desire to move up the ecclesiastical ladder. Both were among the key figures in the launch of the theological journal Communio, founded as an alternative to the more liberal post–Vatican II publication Concilium dominated by Küng and his progressive allies. One might think, therefore, that Ratzinger and Kasper would be like two peas in a pod. In fact, the two men have serious theological differences and have explored them in a series of public exchanges.
The heart of the disagreement is over the relationship between the local church and the universal Church. Ratzinger believes that the Church was universal before it was local, that the Church was intended for all of humanity before it began to take on local forms in Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Corinth, and so on. In a November 2000 address in Rome, Ratzinger said: “This ontological precedence of the universal Church, the one Church, the one body, the one bride, over the concrete empirical realizations in the particular Churches seems to me so obvious that I find it hard to understand the objections to it." Kasper, on the other hand, argues that the local and universal churches are intrinsically related—just as the local church cannot be fully itself apart from its reference to the universal, so the universal Church has no reality apart from its incarnation in a local setting. For Kasper it makes no sense to talk about which “came first."
The dispute may sound technical, but it has wide-ranging consequences. Ratzinger’s accent on the universal Church tends to promote a top-down ecclesiology, emphasizing the authority of Rome. Kasper’s view lends itself to a more decentralized vision. Here’s how Kasper put it in his response to Ratzinger’s Rome lecture: “A local church is not a province or a department of the universal Church: it is rather the Church in that particular place. The bishop is not a delegate of the Pope but rather a representative of Jesus Christ: he enjoys his own sacramentally-based individual responsibility." The article in which Kasper unfolds this argument was published first in a German theological journal, then in both the U.S. journal America and the English Catholic weekly The Tablet in separate English translations.
The editors of America invited Ratzinger to respond, which he did in the November 19, 2001, issue. The disagreement, Ratzinger wrote, should be clarified by reference to the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church as Communio," published by his congregation on June 28, 1992. That letter contains the principle “that the universal Church (ecclesia universalis) is in its essential mystery a reality that takes precedence, ontologically and temporally, over the individual local churches." Ratzinger understands the concerns for authority that underlie Kasper’s critique. He writes: “Why does this same association keep coming up everywhere, even with so great a theologian as Walter Kasper? What makes people suspect that the thesis of the internal priority of the one divine idea of the Church over the individual churches might be a ploy of Roman centralism?" He answers his own question by noting that the term “universal Church" is often understood to
refer to the Pope and the Curia, while its deeper theological meaning is dismissed as a pure abstraction.
Kasper replied in a German essay: “The formula becomes thoroughly problematic if the universal Church is being covertly identified with the church of Rome, and de facto with the Pope and the Curia," Kasper wrote. “If that happens, the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith cannot be read as an aid in clarifying communio -ecclesiology, but as a dismissal of it and as an attempt to restore Roman centralism."
To close observers of the Vatican, the fact that two cardinals disagreed on a theological question is hardly news. During the era of the Second Vatican Council, for example, clashes between Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani, Ratzinger’s predecessor, and Augustine Bea, Kasper’s predecessor, were the stuff of legend. The subject was actually not all that different. Usually, however, an effort is made to contain these disputes behind closed doors, on the theory that it could be destabilizing to expose disagreements. In the case of Ratzinger and Kasper, they opted to go public, and many observers believe the Church is healthier for their example of reasoned and civil, but still very sharp, debate.
Let’s take another classic case of Vatican officials not singing from the same hymnbook. There are two critical jobs in the Holy See when it comes to liturgy, meaning the ritual and worship of the Church. The first is prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. This congregation approves liturgical texts such as the Roman Missal (the book of prayers for the Mass), translations of these texts into the various languages, and adaptations of liturgical practices on the local level. If a Catholic in Peoria doesn’t like the way his local parish is celebrating the Mass, and if he can’t get satisfaction from the bishop, it’s the Congregation for Divine Worship with which he can lodge an appeal.
The second office with impact on the liturgy is the Office of the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff. Its job is to organize the liturgies celebrated by the Pope, which include canonization and beatifications, the Holy Week and Christmas liturgies that are broadcast around the world, and all the Masses and prayer services when the Pope travels. The Master of Ceremonies, who is the head of the office, exercises tremendous influence because whatever people see the Pope doing will be widely imitated. “If it’s good enough for the Pope, it’s good enough for me" is a bit of Catholic wisdom that has resonated down through the ages.
From February 1998 to September 2002, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship was Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, a Chilean who had been a peritus, or theological expert, at Vatican II. Along with then Cardinal Ratzinger, another former peritus from the council, Medina represented a current of opinion that the reforms unleashed by the council were going too far. That view had deep roots. On October 11, 1972, Medina, Ratzinger, and six other members of the International Theological Commission wrote to Paul VI to express urgent concern that the “unity and purity of the Catholic faith" was being compromised by inaccurate and theologically suspect translations of liturgical texts from Latin into the vernacular languages. They complained that the Congregation for Divine Worship was relying on local bishops’ conferences to judge the quality of translated texts rather than examining them carefully in Rome. Thus twenty-five years later, when Medina was appointed to head this office, it was with a clear sense of what had to be done: break the structures that had engineered the liturgical reform.
In just under five years, Medina managed to push through sweeping changes in the rules according to which liturgical texts are translated into the vernacular languages, insisting upon a more literal and “Roman" approach. He also took a wrecking ball to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, a translation body that had become a favorite target of conservative liturgical activists. Key ICEL personnel resigned under pressure, a stern new set of rules on translation was promulgated in the May 2001 document Liturgiam Authenticam, and a new set of statutes for ICEL was prepared to give Rome more control. Rome now has indirect power to approve ICEL staff, plus a clear acknowledgment that it is the Congregation for Worship, not the bishops’ conferences, which erects the commission.
At the same time all this was happening, the papal Master of Ceremonies, Italian Archbishop Piero Marini, was an unabashed supporter of the very reforms Medina was intent on reversing. As a young cleric, Marini, now sixty-one, served as personal secretary to Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, head of the special Vatican commission that oversaw liturgical reform. Bugnini became the lightning rod for what some regarded as unacceptably radical changes, and his fall from power in July 1975 was the beginning of a backlash that eventually culminated in Medina’s campaign. Marini worked in the Vatican on liturgical issues until 1987, when John Paul II named him Master of Ceremonies. More people have watched Masses planned by Marini than by any other liturgist in the world.
Marini clearly believes in the progressive liturgical vision of worship that is dynamic, participatory, and shaped by the local culture. In a June 2003 interview with the National Catholic Reporter, he talked about the tunnel vision before Vatican II: “It was the liturgical expression of the countries of the Mediterranean Basin," he said. “With the separation of the Protestants, also in France, what remained was Spain, Italy, Austria . . . the Church had been reduced to something relatively small. But with the New World, Latin America, and the various missions in Africa and Asia, it was necessary to open this liturgy that had been closed to the new peoples. That happened with the Second Vatican Council and with the trips of the Pope."
Hence for five years, the Vatican’s top two officials on liturgy were at loggerheads. One symptomatic flashpoint was liturgical dance. The Congregation for Divine Worship, even before Medina, had frowned on the idea of dance in the liturgy. In 1975 it issued a document titled Dance in the Liturgy, which concluded, “[Dance] cannot be introduced into liturgical celebrations of any kind whatever. That would be to inject into the liturgy one of the most desacralized and desacralizing elements; and so it would be equivalent to creating an atmosphere of profaneness which would easily recall to those present and to the participants in the celebration worldly places and situations." Medina aggressively enforced this policy. In 1998, for example, he wrote to the bishop of Honolulu to ban the use of hula dancing in any liturgical context, a custom that had become common among Catholics in Hawaii.
Yet when John Paul visited Brussels in 1995 for the beatification of Fr. Damien DeVeuster, the famous saint of the Hawaiian lepers, a hula dance was performed smack in the middle of the ceremony. For those who know Marini’s style, it was hardly a surprise. Anyone who has ever attended a major papal liturgy, such as a World Youth Day Mass or a major canonization Mass, has seen enough dance to remind them of Broadway production numbers. During the World Youth Day Mass in Rome in the summer of 2000, for example, a troupe of young dancers bearing flags with different colors representing different countries was one of the highlights of the event. In Mexico, when John Paul II canonized Juan Diego, the indigenous visionary at the heart of the cult surrounding Our Lady of Guadalupe, native Aztec dancers gyrated down a walkway toward the Pope as native music blared forth. The next day, when the Pope beatified a pair of Mayan martyrs in the same spot, another native dance was performed. This time there was the further twist of a limpia, or purification, ceremony. The Indian blessing is believed to cure spiritual and physical ailments by driving off evil spirits. Indian women bearing smoking pots of incense brushed herbs on the pontiff, Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, and other prelates as the dancing unfolded.
Some people will be disillusioned to find this sort of clash within the Vatican. In fact, however, that reaction reflects a rather idealized vision of how the Church works. The Church may be protected by angels, but it is still staffed by human beings. Moreover, diversity is healthy. Any organization stagnates without internal tension to keep it creative. The Vatican is full of men and women who care passionately about the Catholic Church, and who bring their
intelligence and vision to the task of serving it. Inevitably there will be disagreements, even serious ones. The result is a far greater degree of pluralism within the Holy See than most outsiders realize.
There is not, and never has been, a “Vatican" in the mythic sense. The Vatican is Joseph Ratzinger, but it’s also Walter Kasper; it’s Jorge Medina Estévez, but it’s also Piero Marini. The next time someone tries to tell you what the Vatican is afraid of, what it wants, or what it thinks, the only proper response is: “Who are you talking about?" Not only does this make for clearer analysis, it’s also good politics. Catholics of left, right, or center often assume that “the Vatican" is their enemy. The truth is, there are probably people within the Holy See who share their ideas, and identifying and supporting them could create powerful allies for those who can think beyond the mythology.
MYTH TWO: WHO’S IN CHARGE?
When I lecture on the Vatican, the single most frequent question I draw from audiences is, “Who’s really in charge?" On one level, the question reflected the perfectly accurate observation that as Pope John Paul II became more frail, his capacity to keep track of issues and personnel diminished. This reality meant that a greater share of decisions fell to aides, and it’s certainly legitimate to ask who they were. Yet also lurking behind the “who’s in charge" question is a mythological assumption that somebody has to be “in charge" of everything. People accustomed to thinking of the Vatican as “the world’s last absolute monarchy" assume that means the Pope makes all the decisions for global Catholicism, and if it isn’t the Pope pulling the strings, somebody else, or a small cabal, must be doing it for him. The implied image is that there is a computer terminal somewhere deep within the Apostolic Palace and whoever’s at the keyboard is running the Church.
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