Some people proposed then Cardinal Ratzinger for this Rasputin role, others Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, Pope John Paul’s private secretary. Others would have nominated a small group of senior cardinals. Again, there was a reality in these perceptions. Ratzinger was one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, and Dziwisz, like all papal secretaries, enjoyed tremendous influence as one man who could speak authoritatively on the mind of the Pope. It is also true that in the real world of the Vatican, some cardinals are more equal than others. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who today runs the Congregation for Bishops, was sosituto in the Secretariat of State for eleven years and knows how to work the curial levers of power. That makes him a more formidable figure than, say, Spanish Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, now retired from the Congregation for Religious.
Yet the basic reality is this: no one person or group of persons, including the Pope, makes all the key decisions for the Roman Catholic Church. Despite its image as an ultrahierarchical, rigidly controlled organization, the Church is actually remarkably decentralized. No one in the Vatican decides how much St. Anne’s Parish in Arlington, Virginia, can spend on pencils. Even within the Holy See, offices operate quite independently of one another. Often the left hand really does not know, or in some cases does not approve of, what the right hand is doing. The result can appear to the outside world like incoherence. In theory and in canon law, the Pope has “supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power" in the Church. In reality, things are not as tightly controlled as the “Who’s in charge?" myth suggests.
Consider, for example, the brouhaha that broke out in 2001 over the $10 million renovation of St. John the Evangelist Cathedral in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Then-Archbishop Rembert Weakland, widely viewed as among the more liberal American bishops, is also a former abbot primate of the worldwide Benedictine order and a man with strong views on liturgical matters. Broadly speaking, Weakland subscribes to the Marini approach. Under his guidance, plans were made to reshape Milwaukee’s historic downtown cathedral, which had been built in 1853 and then rebuilt after a fire in 1935. Controversial steps included moving the altar out of the sanctuary, placing the tabernacle in a Blessed Sacrament Chapel and an organ in the former sanctuary. This plan did not sit well with some conservative Milwaukee-area Catholics. “We had a beautiful cathedral," said Al Szews, head of the St. Gregory VII chapter of the conservative activist group Catholics United for the Faith (CUF). “The art and environment of that cathedral was very conducive to Catholic worship. A little refurbishing certainly was in order, but we became alarmed when we learned what the archbishop wanted to do."
The CUF members contacted the St. Joseph Foundation, an advocacy organization in the United States that tries to help Catholics assert their rights under canon law. The foundation filed a canonical appeal with Medina’s Congregation for Divine Worship. On May 26, 2001, Medina faxed Weakland, asking that work be suspended until certain questions were resolved. The archbishop replied to Medina’s questions in writing, flew to Rome to answer more questions on June 13, and then resumed the project when he returned. On June 30, Medina sent another fax citing concerns about moving the main altar, the organ in the apse, and the Blessed Sacrament chapel. The letter also noted “regrettable instances" of inaccurate statements in a pamphlet put out by the archdiocese that claimed the changes were sanctioned by liturgical law. On July 3, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement of support for Weakland and expressed regret over the controversy.
Weakland then sent a letter to all his priests, stating that:
Liturgical documents give the local bishop authority to make “the ultimate decision on the disposition of the spaces."
He and Medina di fer on the priority to be given in adapting older churches to current liturgical practices.
The Vatican congregation did not follow correct legal procedures in dealing with the complaint.
Weakland also charged that a small group of people wanted to humiliate him before his retirement the following year and that others were simply resisting change or misunderstanding the role of a cathedral. In the end, Weakland was the one who signed the checks for the work, and it proceeded according to his specifications. Just to show that he had not lost his sense of humor over the episode, Weakland commissioned a marble plaque for the back of the cathedral to commemorate the renovation. Its tongue-in-cheek Latin inscription reads that the cathedral was redesigned “in accordance with the principles of the Second Vatican Council . . . notwithstanding certain difficulties."
The point of the story is that there are clear limits to how far the Vatican can go toward throwing its weight around and that when lower levels of authority are determined to assert their prerogatives, they can often do so with surprising resilience. In fact, the Catholic Church is not designed such that the details like the fine points of cathedral design need to be worked out in Rome. On a wide range of matters, from finance to personnel to positions on specific public policy questions, most decisions in the Catholic Church are made on the regional, national, and local levels. When the Holy See intervenes on one issue, it makes news; when it refrains on ninety-nine others, no one notices. In response to the question of “Who’s in charge?" as people normally intend it, that is, “Who controls everything that happens in global Catholicism?" the only honest answer is, “Nobody."
In a parallel way, it’s fruitless to ask “Who’s in charge?" in the sense of one person or force calling all the shots, of the Holy See itself. To be true to the reality of the Vatican, the question has to be rephrased as, “Who’s in charge of what?"
The first reason is structural. The Vatican is highly compartmentalized, so that each dicastery works in relative isolation, without much communication, at least formally, with the others. There is a strong emphasis on respecting the juridical competence of each office, so that cardinals and their lower-level aides are often hesitant to intervene outside their specific area of authority. Documents and policy decisions can be in the works in one dicastery for months, in some cases for years, before anyone else knows about them. A classic example came with a February 2002 decision to create four new Roman Catholic dioceses in Moscow, a move that angered the Russian Orthodox Church who took it as a sign of Catholic plans to expand in Russia. Cardinal Walter Kasper was scheduled to travel to Moscow just days after the announcement, but given the sharply negative reaction, the trip had to be canceled. It emerged that Kasper had not been informed of the move and had no chance to alert his opposite numbers on the Orthodox side.
Why didn’t someone working the Russia desk in the Secretariat of State pick up the phone and give Kasper what Americans call a “heads-up"? One reason that such informal communication is hit and miss is because the Holy See strives to respect official channels of information. An official in one dicastery is not supposed to call his friend in another to get the scoop as to what’s going on, because that creates a kind of favoritism. Requests for information are directed to the secretary or undersecretary, who has consistent policies about what is said to whom. In that way, no one can complain about being cut out of the loop because they don’t know the right people.
There’s also a historical logic for the independence of each dicastery. The reform of the Curia carried out by Pope Pius X in 1908 specified that the congregations would be supreme and autonomous in their own area. An issue brought to the attention of the Holy See was to be dealt with by one and only one dicastery, and not by several at the same time. The idea was to solve the problem of overlapping jurisdiction that had plagued the Vatican in the nineteenth century, when appellants who didn’t like the answer they got from one tribunal or congregation simply sought out another, with the result being a riot of often conflicting rulings. By putting up high fences around the work of each dicastery, Pius hoped for greater consistency. In fact, while his reform did result in greater consistency on an issue-by-issue basis, it also created the possibility for gre
ater inconsistency at the big-picture level of overall institutional policy, with different dicasteries pulling in different directions. While the Roman Rota gives consistent responses on annulment cases, whether the Rota’s response is also consistent with the theology of marriage being presented by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is another matter.
The 1967 reform of Paul VI in Regimini Ecclesiae universae attempted to tackle this problem by instituting periodic interdicasterial meetings of all the prefects and presidents of the various dicasteries to consider common problems, but to date those sessions have been episodic and of limited effectiveness. One problem is that the meetings try to cover too much ground, from routine administration to major philosophical questions. At one such gathering in 2003, for example, the assembled cardinals and archbishops were asked to discuss the possibility of creating an Eastern Rite patriarchate in Ukraine, and at the same time to consider how to solve the problem of employees clocking in late to work.
There is also a more realpolitik consideration as to why dicasteries often don’t communicate well. Prefects and presidents sometimes don’t want their employees building networks of information throughout the Vatican that could give them, in effect, an independent power base. One official told me that when he started out in the 1980s, his prefect told him that he would never put two speakers of the same language in the same office—too much possibility they might “gang up on me," the prefect said. As in every bureaucracy, in the Vatican information is power, and no one wants to share too much of it.
The relative autonomy of discasteries was exacerbated in the pontificate of John Paul II by his own personal style. Those who knew the Pope best say that when he came into office in October 1978, he felt that God had a logic for his election. It included addressing the Cold War split between the Soviet empire and the West, persuading Europe that it needs to “breathe with both lungs," East and West, reawakening the pastoral and evangelic dimensions of the papal office through travel, and pursuing a dialogue with the broader culture through his encyclicals and other writings. The price of pursuing these objectives was leaving much ordinary Church business in the hands of his aides. To some extent, John Paul II opted to work around, rather than through, the Roman Curia. The result is that heads of dicasteries have enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. That freedom can ebb and flow depending upon the strength and personal interests of the secretary of state, but with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the incumbent since 1991, there has not been a strong push toward uniformity on most fronts.
Finally, there is a historical reason why, increasingly, no one is “in charge" at the Vatican in the mythic sense. As a papacy nears its end, there are always two camps within the Roman Curia. There are those who realize their service will end with this pope and are anxious to complete its unfinished business. This camp will seem increasingly hard-line in its policies. At the same time, there is another camp that would like to continue in curial service under a future pontificate. Since it is impossible to anticipate what the next pope will be like, it is safer not to burn bridges. This camp will seem increasingly open to compromises. The nomination of German Bishop Karl Lehmann as a cardinal in February 2001, despite his famous clashes with the Vatican over the years as president of the German bishops conference, is an illustration.
Of course, the buck does still stop on the Pope’s desk, and when he wants to bend the institution to his will, he can. John Paul II ran roughshod over internal Vatican opposition three times in order to call leaders of the world’s religions together with him to pray for peace in Assisi. Yet the point is that for reasons both personal and structural, the Catholic Church is for the most part not directed from the Vatican, and even the departments of the Vatican work independently. If a Pope tried to call all the shots himself, he would do nothing other than make detailed policy decisions dicastery by dicastery, and that’s an invitation to miss the forest for the trees.
MYTH THREE: VATICAN SECRECY
No myth about the Vatican is more enduring or widespread than the belief that it is an ultrasecret closed world, impermeable to the outsider. A cluster of adjectives expresses the idea: Byzantine, mysterious, occult. Here’s how one major American daily newspaper packaged the image in the lead paragraph of a feature splashed across page A1, just ahead of Cardinal Bernard Law’s December 13, 2002, resignation:
The sense of impenetrability begins at the Vatican gate just beyond St. Peter’s Square. Swiss Guards . . . lift their pikes to allow passage only after receiving orders. Farther inside, a gatekeeper checks his list before giving a reluctant nod for a visitor to enter a 12-foot door reinforced with steel and iron spikes to repel invaders. . . . Inside the fortress-like building, an air of secrecy and monarchical power wafts through elegant, marble halls like a thick plume of incense.
It’s a classic version of what most people believe the Vatican is like. It is also enormously misleading. For one thing, there are far more security checks to enter the White House than to enter the Vatican, despite the absence of iron spikes and Swiss Guards at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Let’s unpack the mythology. Does the Vatican have secrets? Yes, as every government, corporation, NGO, and other institution does. Moreover, for those things it really wants to keep under wraps—such as the files of theologians under investigation or correspondence from American bishops about sexually abusive priests—the Vatican is far more insulated from pressures for disclosure than secular democracies. There are no sunshine laws that compel the Vatican to release case files, no civil judges who can order the institution to turn over records. After the Swiss Guard murders of 1998, for example, the Vatican judiciary conducted its own investigation, the results of which have never been released even to the families of those who died. Unlike corporations, the Vatican does not have to file audited financial statements or release environmental impact studies. Further, the internal culture of the Vatican often resists putting materials in the public realm, for reasons to be discussed later. At an individual level, Vatican officials can range from dismissive to unhelpful when pressed for information. Every journalist I know in Rome has a story of being told, more or less gently, to “buzz off" by a Vatican official when they asked for some insight or data.
The relevant question, however, is this: Granted all the above, is the Vatican more successful than anyone else at keeping things quiet? Not from anything I can tell. To put the point as clearly as possible: the Vatican may try to be secretive, but for the most part, it doesn’t succeed. If you are determined and capable, there’s very little about the Vatican you can’t discover.
For example, each time the Synod of Bishops concludes its business, it produces a set of propositions for the Pope. These proposals, designed to reflect the consensus of the synod, are supposed to be for the Pope’s eyes only, so that he won’t be influenced by public pressure either for or against particular propositions. The final set of propositions is distributed to participants only on the date of the vote itself, in a stamped and numbered copy, and then collected in an attempt to prevent its circulation. Yet an Italian news agency called Adista obtains the propositions and publishes them within a matter of days after the close of the synod every time. How? They do what reporters do—they gather news from their sources, without getting an engraved invitation from officialdom to do so.
Another example. Roughly a year into my stint as a Vatican correspondent, my newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, broke a story regarding the sexual abuse of nuns, often by priests, in Africa and elsewhere. In some cases the priests looked to these nuns, who were often very young, as safe targets of sexual activity in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In at least one case, a priest had actually arranged to abort the child he had fathered with a nun. The disclosures, as shocking as they were in the court of public opinion, were nothing new to the Vatican. In fact, our story was based on five documents that had been submitted to the Vatican as early as 1994. We had been working on the story over a number of months and decided t
o go forward when I managed to obtain the fifth and final document from a Roman source. The story became a blockbuster, and pushed the Congregation for Religious, working in combination with the major umbrella groups for men and women’s religious communities, to take steps to be sure that religious women in Africa, especially in communities that depend entirely on the local bishop, are less vulnerable. At no stage in the reporting of this story did we have any official assistance from the Vatican. In fact, I provided the Vatican press office with a one-page summary of the story several days in advance of publication, seeking comment. There was no response until after we published, when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls indicated the Holy See was aware of what he called a “geographically limited" problem.
The point of the episode is that “Vatican secrecy" did not prevent the National Catholic Reporter from doing this story, any more than “corporate secrecy" allowed Enron to block stories about the financial scandals that eventually made that company a symbol of fiscal meltdown in the United States. The lack of sunshine laws and court orders to unseal documents did not, in the end, stop reporters from getting their hands on the incriminating materials. Is the Vatican going to bend over backward to help out when a news agency wishes to do a story that will not paint it in a flattering light? Probably not anymore than Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street rushed to open its files to British journalists investigating the death of David Kelly or than the Clinton White House made its files available to reporters working the Whitewater investments story. But the bottom line is that, in my experience, the Vatican is no more successful than other major bureaucracies in controlling the information flow.
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