That said, perceptions as to just what the stakes are, and when they’re high enough to justify action, can be very different in Rome than in other places. To outsiders, Vatican choices can occasionally seem not just debatable, but almost inexplicable. Such was the case in mid-November 1997, for example, when the Holy See released a document titled Instruction on the Collaboration of the Non-ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests. The prefects of eight congregations signed the letter (technically known as an interdicasterial document) and the Pope approved it. Among its other provisions, the document stipulated that:
Only a priest can direct, coordinate, moderate, or govern a parish.
Laity may not assume titles such as pastor, chaplain, coordinator, moderator, which can confuse their role with that of the pastor, who is always a bishop or priest.
The homily during Mass must be reserved to the priest or deacon, even if laypeople act as pastoral assistants or catechists.
In Eucharistic celebrations, deacons or laity may not pronounce prayers or any other parts of the liturgy.
Laity may not wear sacred vestments (stoles, chasubles, or dalmatics).
Laity may distribute Communion only when there are no ordained ministers, or when those ordained ministers are unable to distribute Communion.
Reaction was, for the most part, predictably hostile. The document was widely seen as a naked attempt to keep the laity “in their place." In some instances, its edicts also seemed completely impractical. To take one example, some 80 percent of hospital chaplains in the United States are laity. Trying to fill those positions with clergy in an era of priest shortages would be an exercise in futility. Many commentators were amused that the Vatican considered the use of the title “chaplain" by lay people a serious enough crisis that it required the heads of eight dicasteries to handle it. It seemed almost a self-parodying variant of, “How many Vatican officials does it take to screw in a light-bulb?" The same incredulity surrounded the document’s apparent fear that the sky would fall in if a layperson donned a stole at Mass or distributed Communion on a regular basis. Reflecting this climate of opinion, most reporters presented the document almost entirely as an assertion of Vatican power. The story was one of those cases where journalists fell back on what they knew, power politics, to explain a Vatican move that otherwise seemed irrational.
This sort of incomprehension greets many documents or disciplinary moves from Rome. It’s almost axiomatic in some circles that everything the Vatican does is motivated by either power or fear, if not both. Yet when one understands the value system of the Holy See, the Instruction made all the sense in the world. Consider:
Historically, periods when the Church has been fuzzy about the identity of its clergy have tended to coincide with deep crises. The corruption that paved the way for the Protestant Reformation, for example, was made possible by absentee bishops who let their priests go to seed. Ensuring that priests are clear as to their powers and responsibilities is thus considered a service to the health of the Church. This historical perspective is known as “thinking in centuries."
While theologically sophisticated communities in the First World may scoff at the notion that a layperson wearing a cassock or preaching a homily or being called “chaplain" could confuse anyone as to the identity of the ordained priest, the Vatican has to make policy for the whole world. In mission territories, especially young churches in Africa and Asia, this sort of mixed symbolism can indeed be a real problem for catechists. It’s typical Western arrogance, some Vatican officials quietly say, to assume that because something’s not a problem in New York or Cologne, it’s not a problem for anybody.
The sacrament of holy orders, and the distinction it implies between the ordained and laity, is rooted in the will of Christ. From the Vatican’s point of view, protecting the identity of the priesthood is not just about being a stick in the mud, or running an exclusive club, but about being faithful and accountable to Catholic tradition.
Laypeople who insist upon wearing chasubles and giving homilies sometimes end up just as clericalized as the clerical caste they set out to dislodge. In some respects, therefore, this document was intended as a defense of the lay role of the average Catholic, out in the world, against an elite that seeks quasiclerical privileges inside the Church.
Finally, Vatican officials are realistic enough to realize that universal prescriptions such as these may not make sense in every context on the planet, and they are generally willing to turn a prudent blind eye when the situation calls for it. The point of this document was to defend the principle behind the law. Indeed, laity in the United States are still using the title of chaplain seven years after this decree was issued, and no one from the Holy See has brought down a hammer. (Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Illinois, an astute canon lawyer, noticed that the document said laity may not “assume" the title, which left open the possibility that bishops could delegate it to them.)
The point here is not to defend the Instruction. It may well be that the document was ill timed or that it should have been more generous. The point is rather to observe that seen from within the mindset of the Holy See, the document was eminently rational and premised on more than simply the maintenance of clerical power. If one wishes to challenge the Instruction , that challenge will be more effective if one can show how an alternative strategy could better serve the legitimate values the Holy See was trying to uphold, rather than just scolding the Vatican for arrogance.
This angle of vision is the difference between analysis and judgment. One has to understand why a choice was made, what historical and psychological factors were at work, before a judgment can be based on anything more than one’s own biases. This means having the intellectual self-discipline to set aside one’s assumptions and to take the perspective of the other seriously. The purpose of this chapter is thus to “get inside the head" of the Roman Curia, to present its worldview in an accurate and sympathetic way, so that decisions of the Holy See can be located within the value system that actually shapes them.
I have elected to make this presentation through the device of a list of Top Ten Vatican Values. By values, I mean the basic principles that form the building blocks of Vatican policy, the ends that Vatican personnel generally strive to protect and defend. This is my list, not the Vatican’s. These values are not printed in the employee’s handbook of the Holy See or posted in curial hallways. At the same time, however, I didn’t pull them out of the air. When I’ve asked Vatican personnel to explain the subtext to particular issues, whether it was the beatification of Pius IX or the Holy See’s stance on the Iraq war, certain core values kept surfacing. Usually we wouldn’t start out talking about these values, but in order for officials to explain what the Vatican was trying to accomplish, they fell back on one or more, and usually some combination, of the values listed below. By the way, I am aware that some Catholic moralists shun the term “values" because of its association with Nietzsche and moral relativism. That is obviously not the sense in which I use the term here.
While individual Vatican officials might quibble with one or another choice, overall I believe most people in the Holy See would recognize this set of principles as a fair expression of their institutional culture. I asked several Vatican officials to go through the list with me, item by item. Collectively, I hope these values add up to a profile of what is sometimes called Romanità—the unique atmosphere of “Romanness" that permeates the Holy See. Taken in themselves, each value describes a genuine good. As with most things, it is when the value is pushed too far in a particular direction that virtue can turn into vice. Bear in mind, of course, what we said in chapter 2 about the myth of a single-minded creature called “the Vatican." Not everyone who works in the Holy See thinks alike, and no one is going to perfectly identify with this or any other list. Some Vatican personnel actually chafe, occasionally ferociously, against one or more of these values. Nevertheless, as a working guide to the psychology of the Holy See, I believe they amou
nt to a pretty good introduction. The values are listed alphabetically.
Finally, offering this list of values is more than a descriptive exercise. It is also an invitation to more fruitful conversation between the Holy See and Catholics around the world, especially in the English-speaking realm. Since all these values are positive in themselves, or at least have positive dimensions if properly understood, they should be the basis for dialogue in the Church. That is, presumably all Catholics, not merely Vatican officials, strive to uphold these values, even if they may differ on their application in a given set of circumstances. Hence the next time the Vatican is contemplating a policy measure of concern to English-speaking Catholics, it would be useful to phrase arguments not in terms of imputed Vatican motives such as power or fear, but rather to show how an alternative course might better satisfy these common values. Then all parties to the discussion would at least be speaking the same language, and it might lead to surprising areas of common ground.
TOP TEN VATICAN VALUES
Authority
Cardinal Godfried Daneels of Belgium observed during the October 1999 Synod on Europe that the developed West is allergic to the concept of authority, and nowhere is this more true than in English-speaking countries, where Enlightenment-inspired individualism has made self-assertion the heart of what it means to be free. Most English-speakers, certainly most Americans, regard the idea of doing something because they were told to do so as suspect. Obedience is often seen as a kind of cowardice or moral surrender, associated, for example, with German soldiers mindlessly carrying out the orders of their Nazi superiors. It is regarded as something unworthy of educated, emancipated adults. Cultural critics would note that Americans are a nation of “rugged individualists" who drive the same cars, wear the same clothes, drink the same colas, and see the same movies. Nevertheless, it cuts against the grain to accept something solely on the basis that it comes from a superior level of authority. We are in that sense children of Nietzsche, regarding the exercise of our own wills as the summum bonum of the moral life.
This is not how things look within the Holy See. Like most bureaucracies with a clear chain of command, such as the Army or General Motors, there’s an emphasis on following orders. Yet the roots of the attitude toward authority in the Vatican run much deeper. Its internal culture is closer to the ancient Greco-Roman view of learning, which takes submission to a teacher and a particular tradition of inquiry as its point of departure. Think of Plato’s descriptions of the disciples of Socrates gathered around the master, or of the disciples of Jesus pondering the Sermon on the Mount. From this point of view, authority is not opposed to reason, but a prerequisite to it. To put the point in slightly more complex terms, Roman Catholicism is a kind of “narrative tradition" as described by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in which reasoning makes sense only from inside a tradition and under the guidance of those who have mastered it. Taking something on authority is not the sacrifice of one’s own conscience, but a decision to shape one’s conscience in accord with the tradition, on the theory that doing so will lead to greater clarity and insight. Here’s the basic difference: for most Westerners, doing something because they are told to do so by an authority would be irrational. For someone who accepts the claim of a tradition, however, submitting to the decisions of authority, even when its logic is not clear, is an affirmation of faith in that tradition. It’s a way of saying, “I’m not an isolated atom but a member of this community of inquiry, and I trust its wisdom."
That philosophical conviction is bolstered by the Church’s theology of authority. Power within the Church, according to the perspective widely held in the Vatican, comes from the risen Christ and is entrusted to the apostles and to their successors in the apostolic college, first and foremost to the successor of Peter, the Pope. In a 1995 address to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul II described his authority as “a means of guaranteeing, safeguarding and guiding the Christian community in fidelity to and continuity with tradition, to make it possible for believers to be in contact with the preaching of the Apostles and with the source of the Christian reality itself." Obviously, the culture of the Holy See puts a premium on the authority of the Holy Father. Beyond that, there is a strong emphasis on accepting the authority of one’s superiors, especially the prefects and secretaries of the various dicasteries, who draw on both the Pope’s authority and their own as bishops. As we saw in chapter 2, the working assumption of modern democracies may be that power corrupts, but within the ecclesiastical system it’s precisely the opposite—power ennobles, because it flows from Holy Orders and draws on the grace of the sacrament. The bias is always in favor of authority.
That said, few Vatican officials are under the illusion that ordination inoculates their superiors, including the Pope himself, against sometimes being ill-informed, naïve, stubborn, or just plain wrong. Indeed, some of the Pope’s fiercest critics are just down the hall from him, or across St. Peter’s Square. One monsignore who works in the Vatican, for example, told me the Pope had made a serious doctrinal error with his interreligious gatherings in Assisi, and huffed that, “The man has never apologized!" We were looking out his office window toward the papal apartments as he spoke. Other Vatican insiders complained that the Pope was careless in allowing his appeals for peace in Iraq to be seen as an endorsement of the antiwar movement, which lumped together socialists, communists, eco-radicals, and a host of others not always congenial to a Catholic worldview. It’s not just the Pope who is the subject of this sort of griping. I’ve known mid-level officials in dicasteries who, at various times, were convinced that their superior was an idiot or mentally unhinged or simply too weird to be believed. This is all par for the course in any organization full of intelligent, passionate people with their own strong visions about how things ought to be done.
The key point is that for most of the men and women of the Curia, and for others formed in the same intellectual tradition, their respect for authority is not dependent upon any particular exercise of it. It rests instead on the philosophical pillar that the tradition is usually wiser, that it sees further, than the individual. This is coupled with the theological conviction that ultimately authority in the Church comes from God. Submission to authority, even when one can’t in the moment see the logic for its choice, is usually a higher value than assertion of one’s own vision. Ironically, while Vatican officials are often accused of arrogance, on this point at least their institutional culture enforces a certain epistemological humility. They are shaped to believe there is a wisdom higher than their own. While many Westerners might wonder why that monsignore who disagrees with the Pope about Assisi doesn’t just walk out, from his point of view, the call of authority trumps his private feelings.
The Vatican’s respect for authority rests on two other foundations, one moral, the other historical. The moral element is rooted in Thomism, and the conviction that authority is intended to foster virtue, leading to the practice of a moral life and, ultimately, to salvation. The hierarchically structured Christian Church is thus, by definition, a virtuous community. While allowing that individual bishops may screw up, the assumption is that most bishops, most of the time, use their authority for good ends. Note that this is an assumption about the Church, not about any given official. It does not mean that people in the Curia are naïve about abuses of power. In my experience, Vatican officials usually have no problem believing that Bishop X may have committed mistakes, ridden roughshod over people’s rights, or been too weak to assert the interests of the Church. In that sense, they are terrific realists. They see this sort of thing all the time, and, in fact, can site chapter and verse on episodes of episcopal incompetence that would make one’s toes curl. But they do not move from such episodes to a systematic criticism of authority in the Church, because they perceive a value in authority that transcends particular acts of poor judgment. It is the value of moral uplift—that by trusting the authority of the Church, over time, despite the potentia
l for disappointments and setbacks, the overall effect will be growth in the moral life pointing toward eventual union with God.
The historical component comes from a recognition that for better or worse, the Catholic Church tends to rise and fall in tandem with how the authority of its bishops and other clergy has waxed and waned. As early as the end of the first century, Ignatius of Antioch urged the local church to be subject to the bishop. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage wrote, “The bishop is in the church, and the church is in the bishop." For nearly two thousand years, communion with the bishop has been the hallmark of Christian identity. Weak bishops have often been the cause of serious ecclesiastical crises. In the sixth to the ninth centuries, for example, when the bishops in Europe were often subservient to kings and local nobles, the moral standards of the clergy were in disarray and the management of church affairs was shoddy. All one has to do is to read the edicts of the regional synods and councils of the day, which vainly attempted to rein in embarrassing clerical comportment. The Council of Vaison, for example, in 529, complained of drunkenness, incontinence, scandals from the renewal of married life after ordination, theft, and murder. All this was possible in part because weak and compromised bishops, hobbled by lay lords, weren’t capable of putting a stop to it.
Similarly in the late Middle Ages, as abbeys and religious orders sliced off progressively bigger chunks of the bishop’s authority, and more and more decisions were reserved to the authority of the Holy See, bishops drifted into idleness and the Church suffered. Some became “absentee bishops," holding the title to a see and collecting its revenues but living, often in luxury, someplace else. This meant nobody was supervising the clergy, monitoring what was being taught in schools, and so on. By the time of the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century, a bishop had not lived in Milan for one hundred years. This neglect allowed all sorts of anomalies to flourish, including outlandish requests for indulgences, which was part of the landscape that led to the Protestant Reformation. Trent revivified the bishop’s office, reestablishing the bishop’s authority and insisting that he live in his diocese to exercise it. Bishops were now obligated to personally ordain all the clergy destined to work in their diocese. What followed was the Counter-Reformation, one of the most glorious and productive periods of Catholic history. Similarly, many observers in the Holy See read the American sex abuse scandals of 2002 in terms of the failure of bishops to exercise their authority.
All the Pope's Men Page 11
