All this means that Vatican officials usually have an acute sense of the issues, the players, and the trends in the local church. The same point, to greater or lesser degrees, could be made about the Germans, the Indians, the Argentinians, and the other nationalities represented in the Curia. One monsignore who works in a congregation of the Roman Curia put it this way: “It’s a chronic misunderstanding that the Roman Curia is a monolithic institution that has trouble understanding local cultures. They don’t realize how many different cultures are present here to bring about a truly Catholic perspective. We’re usually very well informed about their situation, but we may just have a different perspective on it."
What might that different perspective be? In a word, objectivity. Seen from a Vatican point of view, the passions surrounding a particular issue sometimes have the effect of overwhelming rational judgment. It is precisely the benefit of having some distance from the “rattle and hum" that allows the Holy See, its defenders argue, to bring a more objective, a more serene, judgment to the matter. Thus Vatican officials would insist that they are not isolated in the negative sense that critics intend, that is, ignorant of local realities. There is, however, a positive kind of isolation they believe comes with their office, which is being insulated from the political and cultural pressures that tend to intrude on sober reflection when one stands too close to the flame. In other words, sometimes seeing and acting on the truth requires distance. That’s why they believe the Holy See is often capable of an objectivity that eludes local pastors.
One classic example of how this works was offered by the American sexual abuse crisis. In Dallas in June 2002, the American bishops adopted a set of norms that relied on a bishop’s exercise of administrative authority to remove accused priests from ministry. In part, the bishops opted for this route because their experience of canon law courts in Rome had been that procedures tended to drag out for long periods, and in some cases, procedural strictness had led to orders of reinstatement for at least a few accused abusers. The bishops wanted to be able to promise the American public swift and sure justice, and adopted a program that relied on their stroke of a pen to impose final judgment. At the time a small knot of bishops voiced concern that this amounted to “hanging priests out to dry," treating them as guilty until proven innocent, but in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Dallas this argument cut little ice. After the norms were issued, priests’ groups and canon lawyers voiced fears that the bishops had in effect tried to resolve one injustice, which was sluggishness in responding to accusations of sexual abuse, with another injustice, which was a rush to judgment against priests.
In fact, the fierce debate over Dallas was in one sense unnecessary, because it was abundantly clear that the Holy See never had any intention of approving the norms as written. They did not wish to embarrass the American bishops (recall the bella figura), so instead of saying a flat no, they invited the bishops into a mixed commission made up of four officials from the Holy See and four U.S. bishops to produce a set of norms. What resulted was a streamlined canonical procedure that sped up the administration of justice but also preserved the priest’s due process rights. Most observers, even those normally cynical about the motives for Vatican interventions, tend to grant that in this case the system worked. In Vatican circles, the evolution of the American norms has now become a locus classicus for why review of local policy at the level of the universal Church is so important.
Rumors in June 2002 had it, in fact, that some American bishops voted for the Dallas norms in order to satisfy public demands for dramatic action with the expectation that Rome would intervene. Whether that’s true or not, it does illustrate a point familiar to anyone who works inside an institution: sometimes it’s easier to let a higher level of authority make an unpopular decision. Teachers rely on principals to run interference with complaining parents, reporters sometimes fall back on editors to explain why certain stories turned out the way they did, and soldiers explain to disgruntled citizens that they’re only following orders. Likewise, in some cases bishops will submit a case to Rome when they know full well how it will shake out, but they’d rather have people blame the Vatican for bringing the hammer down. It is a tendency that irritates some Vatican officials, who feel that bishops ought to have the courage of their convictions, but everyone recognizes that it happens. Distance, the theory goes, buys the Vatican precious insulation from local reaction.
There are two other senses in which the value of objectivity is a key that unlocks Vatican behavior. The first concerns Vatican documents. Whether a particular text is issued by the Pope or by one or more of the dicasteries, it is almost always treated as a document of the Holy See rather than the product of individual authors. Journalists and Church insiders enjoy speculating about who actually wrote them, and in some cases authorship becomes an open secret. The Pope’s September 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, for example, is known around Rome as “Fisichella et Ratzinger" because two of the most important contributors were Bishop Salvatore Fisichella and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. When Dominus Iesus appeared in September 2000, its primary authors, Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz and Salesian Fr. Angelo Amato, joined Ratzinger at the press conference presenting the document. (Ocáriz is the vicar general of Opus Dei, while Amato has since become archbishop and secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.) Even in these instances, however, the Holy See never officially acknowledges individual authorship, because it does not want the authority of the document to depend upon the personal qualities of its authors. Its authority depends upon the fact that it has been duly promulgated. Its authority, in other words, is objective rather than subjective. This is the same reason that documents from dicasteries are usually signed by both the prefect and the secretary. The idea is that its authority is dependent upon its due issuance, not the personality of any one figure. (The prefect and secretary are expected to sign the document, by the way, even if they voted against it in the plenary assembly.)
The second way in which objectivity is relevant to understanding Vatican behavior has to do with secrecy. Many times the Vatican comes under fire because it will not release the case files that have given rise to controversial judgments. For example, censured theologians such as Hans Küng and Charles Curran have long complained that despite the fact the Vatican monitored their work for decades, launching investigations that ended in disciplinary action, they have never been allowed to see their own files. Küng, in an interview with me, compared the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the KGB on this basis. Or to consider another instance, the Vatican has never released the results of its eight-month investigation into a 1998 Swiss Guard murder-suicide, despite repeated appeals from the mother of the corporal who, according to the Vatican reconstruction, shot his commander and his wife, then himself. To observers outside the Vatican’s world, denying people the right to see information that concerns them directly seems arrogant and almost incomprehensible.
Aside from privacy concerns, the primary logic of nondisclosure is to protect the objectivity of those who must make judgments based on this information. If case files were a matter of public record, then pressure could be brought to bear to try to sway those judgments one way or the other. Lobbying and spin would be the result. The classic example, which still looms large in the Vatican’s collective imagination, is the 1967 publication by the National Catholic Reporter and Le Monde of the majority report from Paul VI’s birth control commission, which had supported a change in Church teaching. Pope Paul decided against this proposal, and the publication of the commission’s report subjected the pontiff to withering public criticism for “ignoring" his own advisors. The culture of the Holy See resists exposing its decisions to the pressures of public relations or interest group politics, neither of which are viewed as reliable means for arriving at truth. The refusal to turn over files, even to people directly concerned, is thus to the Vatican’s mind not about covering up the truth, but, on the contrary, about a different co
ncept of how best to foster fair and impartial judgments. From the Vatican point of view, parliamentary inquiries in which conservatives treat liberals as guilty until proven innocent and vice-versa, with the outcome hinging on who has the most votes, may be more transparent than procedures in the Holy See, but that’s hardly any assurance they’re more equitable.
Populism
Of all the values listed in this chapter, this one may be the most difficult for many outside observers of the Vatican to understand or accept. People are accustomed to thinking of the Holy See as “the world’s last absolute monarchy," a place where a tiny ecclesiastical aristocracy makes decisions based on their own vision of how the Church and the world ought to be run. Whether this is considered a good or a bad thing will vary with the observer, but there is a measure of truth to such perceptions. Vatican officials are not subject to the same democratic scrutiny as personnel in other governments, nor to the commercial pressures of the bottom line faced by the corporate sector. At the same time, however, Vatican personnel by and large do not see themselves as imperialists imposing their will on the rest of the Catholic Church. In many instances, the exact reverse is the case: they see themselves defending the people against elites running roughshod over their rights. Vatican officials perceive themselves to be the last line of defense for the “simple faithful" against avant-garde theologians who would betray the faith, against experimental liturgists who risk transforming the Mass into something profane or banal, or against ecclesiastical bureaucrats, including bishops, who fancy themselves above the law. They see themselves, in other words, as populists.
One sometimes hears diocesan bishops complain about being pushed around by junior curial officials when they come to Rome on their ad limina visits, about being treated like altar boys. Part of this is a generational dynamic. No man in his sixties who is a senior leader of a major international organization enjoys coming to headquarters and being questioned by someone in his twenties or thirties. Part of this, undeniably, is the fact that certain curial officials are a bit drunk on their own power and enjoy asserting themselves, often in ways that exceed their actual authority. Yet in most cases curial officials are loathe to confront bishops (recall what was said above about reverence for authority), and will do so only in order to vindicate the rights of lower clergy or laity when there has been what seems to them a clear abuse of power. In other words, it is sometimes not a bureaucratic power play, but a rather idealistic insistence upon equality before the law, that leads a curial official to push around a bishop. In such a case, the bishop’s complaint about process may ignore the deeper question of whether the Vatican was right on content.
No one has articulated this view more forcefully over the years than Pope Benedict XVI, even well before he arrived in the Vatican in 1981 as Cardinal Ratzinger. In 1970, for example, Ratzinger and his Bavarian friend and colleague Hans Meier put out a volume called Democracy in the Church . In it, Ratzinger accuses advocates of democracy in the church of posing as populists, but in reality harboring a snobbish disdain for the simple faith of the great mass of believers. “Those circles which talk especially loud about democratization of the Church," Ratzinger wrote, “manifest the least respect for the faith shared by the community." To those who claim that he has strained the relationship between the Vatican and theologians, Ratzinger replies that keeping theologians happy is not his main concern. Above all, he must protect the right of simple believers to have the faith preserved in each generation. “Those who can’t fight back intellectually have to be defended against intellectual assault on what sustains their life," he said in 1998’s Salt of the Earth, a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald. Elsewhere in that book: “This is His Church [meaning Christ’s], and not a laboratory for theologians." In a 1988 interview with the Austrian daily Die Presse, Ratzinger said his role was to defend those Catholics “who do not write books or learned articles." The point is clear: Ratzinger sees himself not as an inquisitor but as a tribune, protecting ordinary Catholics from intellectual abuse by self-appointed elites. To varying degrees, this attitude, perhaps expressed in different language, would characterize many officials in Vatican service.
One way this concern for the little guy shows up is that few institutions on earth take their mail more seriously than the Holy See. Every letter that comes into the Vatican is registered and processed, even if the decision is eventually made not to respond, because it would be a waste of time, because no one’s quite sure what to say, or because the writer is too wacky. As one American Vatican official put it in an interview: “Letters do make a difference. People underestimate the capacity of the Holy See to evaluate these things. The mail gets taken seriously." Curial officials describe heartbreaking letters from mothers whose children lost their faith because of what was being taught in the local Catholic school, or grown men who say they will never darken the door of a church again because of a sacrilege they saw during the Sunday Mass. Some of these accounts are of course exaggerated, or overly sensitive. It is also true that letters complaining about various abuses or difficult pastoral situations will elicit more sympathy from Vatican officials when those letters express a point of view that coincides with their own. Since in general most Vatican officials tend to be theological conservatives, the populism of the Holy See tilts to the right.
Still, one will misunderstand the psychology of the Roman Curia by believing that they send faxes around the world dictating details for liturgical celebrations, or ordering a halt to the publication of theological journals, simply for the thrill of issuing orders. We should be under no illusions, of course, that sometimes people do act out of arrogance. One curial veteran puts it this way: “Narcissism in this world is a real danger. We have a certain power and influence, and there’s an absence of foils to a strong will." At the same time, even granting these issues of power and control, it’s not true to the psychological reality to believe that many people in the Holy See consciously make decisions simply on this basis. Far more often, they perceive themselves to be defending the rights of Catholics around the world to have the faith transmitted in its integrity, to have the Mass celebrated according to the rules, to be sure that Catholic schools are in synch with the Church, and so on.
In that sense, and despite the incredulity such language is bound to provoke, one could say that from a Roman point of view, the men and women of the Holy See regard themselves as the real “Voice of the Faithful" in the Catholic Church.
Realism
Though Vatican officials may have a high-minded sense of service to the Holy Father, they also believe in having their feet on the ground when it comes to how things work in the real world. This realism applies first of all to the Church, and the very human qualities of the men and women who serve it. Vatican officials generally have spent most of their lives inside the institutional Catholic Church, and are under no illusions that the mere fact of ordination or having taken religious vows makes people more generous, or honest, or patient, or forgiving. They know that people in the Church can be petty and mean-spirited, and sometimes can fail in spectacular ways. If the official works in a congregation with responsibility for discipline in some area of Church life such as liturgy, doctrine, clerical life, or education, he or she may spend a good part of each day dealing with case files documenting just such instances of moral or theological corruption. Indeed, one could probably make the argument that no one is in a better position to understand and appreciate the imperfect character of the Catholic Church than the personnel of the Holy See. Italians tend to be especially realistic in this sense about the Church, having seen it all over the centuries.
This ecclesiastical realism was clear during the American sex abuse crisis, when many Vatican officials initially had a hard time grasping just what it was that American Catholics were so upset about. That a Catholic priest might break his vows of celibacy is disappointing, of course, and that he might do it through the sexual abuse of a minor is horrifying. Yet two thousand ye
ars of Church history teaches that priests are capable even of the most despicable acts. Being human, some of them will fail. What, many Vatican officials wondered, is the revelation? Are Americans just discovering in 2002 that priests too are marred by Original Sin? They wondered if the outrage in the American press related to the Catholic sex abuse scandal was a reflection of the same Calvinist hysteria about sex that was on display during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky farce. It took time for many Vatican officials to grasp that the real source of American anger was not so much the sexual misconduct of a small percentage of priests, but the moral (and perhaps criminal) failure of the bishops to intervene when they should have known better.
This realism also applies to the way the institutional Church relates to the world, and it’s in contrast with a kind of ecclesiastical docetism that would like to see the Church move through history uncontaminated by contact with sin. An episode from the fall of 2001 illustrates the difference. Pope John Paul II had called Christians to a day of fasting on December 14, the last day of Ramadan, as a post– September 11 gesture of solidarity with Islam. He suggested that people donate the money they would have spent on food that day to the poor. The Vatican’s charitable arm, called Cor Unum, opened a special account with the Bank of Rome to collect contributions for this purpose. The idea was sufficiently important to Vatican officials that they installed a special pop-up window on the Vatican website explaining how to transfer money into this account. The respected Italian Catholic missionary journal Missione Oggi, however, swiftly called for a boycott of the Vatican account, on the grounds that the Bank of Rome is a major player in the global arms market. The journal, published by the Xaverian Missionaries, charged that the Bank of Rome financed $106 million worth of arms deals in 2000, earning $8 million in transaction fees. When I called an official at Cor Unum for comment, I was rather wearily told that the Xaverian stance, while laudable, was also unrealistic, given that most banks are engaged in some kind of ethically debatable commerce. “If you want to get anything done, sooner or later you will find yourself doing business with someone who’s got dirty hands in one way or another," the official said. “But our account is certainly not an endorsement of the arms trade." This was not intended as surrender in the face of evil, but a realistic appraisal of what it means for the Church to be in history.
All the Pope's Men Page 14
