Policy measures or theological proposals that seem to undercut ecclesiastical authority will thus almost always trigger suspicion in the Holy See. This is not merely a matter of defending clerical power, but about making sure the people of God have the tools they need to form future generations in the faith and to defend the Church when it is under threat. The central tool in that toolbox, from the Vatican’s point of view, and rooted in its sense of history, is a strong bishop capable of teaching, sanctifying, and governing the faithful. To take an example of how this plays out, there was considerable negative reaction within the Holy See in May 2003 when Bishop Thomas O’Brien of Phoenix renounced certain powers to oversee his clergy as part of a deal to avoid criminal prosecution related to sex abuse scandals. “It’s not so much the details of the agreement that bother me," said one senior Vatican canonist. “He delegated certain responsibilities to a priest, which is envisioned by canon law. It’s the idea that the civil authority compelled a bishop to renounce his authority—that’s a dangerous precedent." The canonist saw it as dangerous not because it implied the loss of clerical privilege (at least not primarily), but because by weakening the bishop, the long-term well-being of the community could be put at risk.
Bella Figura
This value is drawn from Italian culture: the cult of the bella figura , meaning literally “beautiful figure," and translated loosely as the importance of always looking good. Its prevalence in Italy is one reason why Milan is the capital of the world’s fashion industry. It’s why Italians will spend lavishly to repaint the outside of their houses every year even when the plumbing and electricity don’t work. The neighbors don’t see the plumbing! Even today, when an Italian is leaving to spend time overseas, a relative is almost sure to issue a reminder: Si deve fare una bella figura all’estero, meaning, “You have to make a good impression when you’re away!" The bottom line is that no matter what happens, one has to keep up appearances.
This can sound like a rather vain and superficial principle, and at its worst it becomes an excuse for not confronting inner rot as long as the surface looks good. Many Catholics would say that this value played a role in the failure of some bishops to react vigorously when priests were guilty of sexual abuse, contenting themselves with negotiating secret payouts that prevented public scandal. It was in this sense that then-Bishop Sean O’Malley, now the Archbishop of Boston, invoked the term during floor debate at the November 2002 meeting of the U.S. bishops in Washington, D.C. “Church leaders dealt with sexual abuse by clergy in a modus operandi that was suggested by a theology of sin and grace, redemption, permanence of the priesthood, but also a great concern about scandal, the bella figura, and the financial patrimony of the Church," O’Malley said. “We know now that not enough attention was given to the reporting of crimes, the protection of children, and the spiritual and psychological damage done to victims." The potential for hypocrisy latent in this value is bluntly expressed by the Economist magazine, in its guide to business customs in Italy: “When doing business, maintain your bella figura—the Italian expression for showing your best face," the magazine counsels. “This means never admitting you are wrong."
The bella figura in this sense is undeniably influential in Vatican psychology. Public discussion of problems can sometimes be discouraged simply out of reluctance to air one’s dirty laundry in public, an instinct sometimes rationalized as a desire to protect the faithful from shock or hurt. Aside from the rather patronizing nature of such concerns, experience shows they almost always backfire, as the stonewalling generates far more hurt than disclosure would have in the first place.
(This is perhaps the place for a quick footnote about scandal. Sometimes people charge that Church officials try to sweep problems under the rug in order to “avoid scandal," using the term in its generic sense as a publicized incident that causes outrage or disgrace, like the “Enron scandal." This is not the sense in which Church documents, however, generally use the word. For example, a May 1999 document from the Vatican, defrocking an American priest named Robert Burns, made a brief flurry in the media because it stipulated that Burns “ought to live away from the places where his previous condition is known," unless his presence “will cause no scandal." Some took this as evidence that Rome had ordered a cover-up of Burns’s abuse in order to avoid bad press. In Catholic parlance, however, scandal has a more technical definition. It means inducing someone to sin against the faith or morals of the Church. The Church has always taught that certain things should be kept quiet if making them public might lead people into serious sin. For example, if a priest committed a heinous act and his bishop felt it was possible that public disclosure would lead people to conclude it was okay for them to do the same thing, that might be a good reason to keep it quiet. Obviously, it’s a principle open to abuse. The point is that when the Church says it wants to “avoid scandal," it doesn’t mean bad publicity. It means leading people to endanger their souls.)
The bella figura can sometimes be an impediment to dealing honestly with disagreements or problems. No one wishes to embarrass a colleague or create negativity within a dicastery, and sometimes this means that errors, poorly reasoned decisions, and even rank incompetence go without challenge. Officials not up to their jobs can survive much longer than in corporate environments, in part because it is considered discourteous to criticize someone’s job performance. Curial officials all have stories about meetings dominated by a sort of “emperor’s new clothes" dynamic, where there was an obvious personnel problem no one had the courage to point out, and so the entire session was spent pretending not to notice it was there. Sometimes the price of progress is a momentary bit of ugliness, but this can be a very difficult thing to do in a culture that teaches people to avoid confrontation. This doesn’t mean that Vatican officials do not get angry as often as everyone else, simply that dealing openly with such emotion can be frustrated by the cult of appearances.
Let’s take another example of this sense of the bella figura . Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, currently the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, was for eleven years the sostituto, or number two official in the Secretariat of State in charge of day-to-day Church affairs. In that position, he earned a reputation as the ultimate curial powerbroker, because, in the words of one Vatican official, “You never left his office without a solution." His genius was finding face-saving compromises that allowed all sides to feel like they had prevailed. Fans of Re’s approach, and there are many, hailed it as the best of the Italian diplomatic art. Detractors, however, complained that Re seemed more concerned about maintaining the Church’s bella figura than resolving underlying problems or making a stand on matters of principle. Christianity, these critics insist, has to be about more than conflict resolution.
All this is the pejorative sense in which the bella figura is often invoked. There is a more positive dimension, however, to the bella figura. At its best, it draws upon a deep conviction that life is a form of art, and it should reflect the Thomistic insight that truth, beauty, and goodness are different names for the same reality. In that sense, it can function as an antidote to the hypercapitalist belief that the only thing that really matters is efficiency, or “getting things done." At the bottom of the bella figura is the recognition that being is more important than doing. Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc once expressed this distinctively Roman emphasis on the good life a bit more colorfully: “Where e’er the Catholic sun doth shine / There’s music and laughter and good red wine. / At least I’ve always found it so, / Benedicamus Domino!" This aspect of the bella figura shows up in all areas of Italian life. For example, when one pops into a pasticceria, or pastry shop, to grab a couple of cookies, time will be consumed waiting for the clerk to carefully place the items on a tray and wrap it with colored paper and twine. No brown paper bags are worthy of holding these treasures. The result will look great, even if meanwhile five people have lined up awaiting their turn.
In the world of the Roman Curia, one runs up against
this sense of bella figura in several different forms. Perhaps the most obvious is the pasticceria principle: if there’s a choice between doing something quickly and doing it beautifully, beauty is going to beat speed every time. One of the reasons that it can take long periods of time to elicit a response from a dicastery is that officials want to craft something “for the ages," meaning a result that is satisfying not merely from the point of view of systems management, but also aesthetically. This is especially the case since, from the curial point of view, much of their work participates in the magisterium of the Pope, and it has to be perfect not just as to content but as to form. It is, in a word, worth doing well. One should not romanticize curial production in this sense—Vatican offices are just as capable of putting out sloppy or incomplete work as anyone else. Yet there is an emphasis on going slow, taking one’s time, and sweating the details that does often lead to results that reflect a touch of art. Even routine correspondence sometimes is crafted with a rhetorical attentiveness that can be striking.
Another reflection of the bella figura is the frequent insistence on maintaining a degree of formality in working relationships that would be curious by conventional American standards. In many American companies, for instance, employees call the boss by his or her first name, even when this becomes almost self-parodying, as in twenty-two-year-old junior programmers at Microsoft referring to their CEO as Bill. Even in the absence of such informality, they certainly don’t address him or her as “Mister President" every time he or she walks into the office. In the Vatican, however, it’s customary for subordinates to refer to the head of their dicastery as Eminenza, “Your Eminence," even after working for the same official for a number of years. It would also be extremely unusual for a subordinate to use the informal tu (you) in direct address to a superior. Far more common is the formal lei, which implies a certain social distance between the two people speaking. Customarily one has to be invited to use the tu. This is in part to ensure that the boss doesn’t play favorites, allowing some subordinates to be informal and keeping others at a distance. In part, however, it’s simply the linguistic equivalent of dressing up—a way of keeping up appearances. It’s meant to ensure that the seriousness, the gravitas, of the work being performed does not slip from view.
A classic instance where the bella figura has a profound impact on curial psychology is in attitudes toward law. Once again, this reflects the surrounding Italian culture, where law is regarded as the expression of a human ideal, a descriptor of a perfect state of affairs, and everyone realizes most people will fall short. This is very different from a typical Anglo-Saxon approach, which expects the law to reflect what people actually do. Thomists believe the purpose of law is to promote virtue; in the social contract theory underlying Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, the law represents the minimum infringements on personal liberty necessary to regulate social life. In this sense, Italians might best be described as “Thomistic realists"—they think the law should indeed promote higher standards of morality, but they don’t really expect it to work. While they grumble about lawlessness, fundamentally they are believers in subjectivity. No law, they believe, can ever capture the infinite complexity of human situations, and it’s more important for the law to describe a vision of the ideal community than for it to be a lowest common denominator of civic morality. Italians have tough laws, but they’re also enormously forgiving. Not for nothing is their equivalent of the Attorney General known as the “Minister of Justice and Grace."
One place where the difference between Italian and Anglo-Saxon cultures on this point becomes clear is sports. Anglo-Saxons like games that are complex and laden with rules, such as American football or cricket. Italians prefer free-flowing calcio (soccer), with a few simple, clear rules, and lots of room for subjective judgment about how they apply. In American football, league officials meet at the end of every season to discuss rules changes based on last year’s experience. When new problems arise, they are met with a new rule. In calcio, the rules almost never change, even if they’re forever arguing about how to interpret them (especially offsides). The rules are considered lapidary, literally carved in stone, gilded. You adjust on the ground, as it were, in the crucible of real human experience, not in the realm of theory and principle. In this sense, Anglo-Saxons are Aristotelian, crafting rules based on experience and observation; Italians are Platonic, regarding rules as an unchanging ideal existing in a world of pure form.
The bella figura idea that the reach of the law should exceed the grasp of most human beings reflects what writer Christopher Dawson has described as the “erotic" spirit of cultures shaped by Roman Catholicism. Dawson says Catholic cultures are based on the passionate quest for spiritual perfection, and he opposes this “erotic" spirit to the “bourgeoise" culture of the United States, shaped by Protestantism and based on practical reason and the priority of economic concerns. In erotic cultures, the law is premised on the aspirations of the spiritual athlete, not the capacity of the spiritual couch potato. Curial officials shaped by this understanding accept that laws will be broken. That, in their view, is what the sacramental system of repentance and reconciliation is for.
This value system means that while Vatican officials often project a stern moral image on the public stage, in more pastoral settings they can be quite patient and understanding. For example, in May 2003 Archbishop Angelo Amato, a Salesian and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave a lecture in Rome on John Paul’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Amato’s talk was fairly conventional, largely summing up the contents of the encyclical. He did so with a sense of humor; while explaining that group confession is reserved for exceptional circumstances, such as a lack of priests, he wryly noted that in Rome there’s no such excuse: “Here we’ve got more confessors than faithful." The key moment relative to the curial understanding of law came when a man asked if he had to make a confession before taking Communion. He had a sin on his conscience he didn’t feel he was ready to confess, but at the same time he wanted to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. “I repeat, you should go to confession," Amato responded. “But now let me talk to you person-to-person. As a priest, I can’t substitute my conscience for yours. I can’t tell you to go or not to go. You have to make that choice in conscience, always bearing in mind that it must be a well-formed conscience." That’s the bella figura for you: the law’s ideal must be upheld, but individuals have to make the choices that correspond to their own unique situation. Whether that’s hypocrisy or humanism will depend upon your point of view.
Cosmopolitanism
Critics of the Vatican often complain that curial officials are too far removed from local situations to really understand the issues. “Those guys over there," the standard gripe goes, “just don’t get it." But if closeness to the local scene is a virtue, its corresponding vice would be provincialism, an incapacity to see the forest for the trees. From the Vatican point of view, provincialism is often the most besetting vice they have to confront in their contacts with bishops, clergy, and lay Catholics from different parts of the world. People see issues through the lens of their own experience, often without considering how it might cohere with policies developed elsewhere or with the problems faced by other groups within the Church. Yet the idea that in the age of the Internet you can isolate issues in a local church is naïve. Inevitably, decisions made one place have immediate repercussions elsewhere. One example would be the case of Oblate Fr. Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka, a previously obscure theologian whose 1997 excommunication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made him a global celebrity overnight. This tendency for local matters to “go global" in a hurry is especially exaggerated in the United States, because of its wealth and influence. Whatever choices the U.S. Catholic Church makes, therefore, inevitably have global consequences, and the Holy See feels obliged to pay careful attention.
Vatican officials are inevitably thrust into the position of contemplatin
g how policies will resonate not just in one part of the world, but everywhere. The complexity can be staggering, and an anecdote illustrates the point. In the fall of 2001, I attended an international conference of seminary rectors in Rome. One of the workshops was devoted to Dominus Iesus, a controversial Vatican document which concerns the relationship between Christianity and other religions. The session was offered by well-known German Jesuit theologian Hans Waldenfels. He provided an overview of the document, then invited participants to respond. One rector, from Bangalore in India, shot up and said, “This document is a disaster because it has destroyed our dialogue with the religions of Asia. They are offended by this kind of exclusivist language." Another rector, from St. Petersburg in Russia, then took the floor and said, “This document is a Godsend because it has saved our dialogue with the Orthodox. Their Christology is even higher than ours, and this is the only Vatican document in recent memory that’s really excited them." The same text, filtered through two different cultures, produced exactly opposite effects. The experience drove home this point: Vatican officials have to be in the habit of thinking not just about how something will play in Peoria, but in Pretoria and Peking and São Paulo. This need to think through policy implications in global terms generates a very cosmopolitan sense of things in the Vatican.
All the Pope's Men Page 12
