Vatican realism also applies to international relations. When John Paul II visited Chile in 1988, for example, he administered communion to then-president Augusto Pinochet, and appeared with him on the balcony of Moneda Palace to the cheers of Pinochet supporters. The imagery scandalized some human rights activists, given that 3,191 people were confirmed either killed or disappeared under Pinochet’s regime, while unofficial estimates put the total at several times that number. Yet Vatican officials argued that the Pope cannot nominate the rulers of the countries he visits, and the price of bringing his message to the world is sometimes “doing business" with unsavory regimes. It was the same logic, for example, that justified the visit of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray to Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the American-led war in Iraq, and the visit of Tarik Aziz to the Vatican and to Assisi during the same period. The argument is that this philosophy of “doing business" bears more fruit in the real world than a morally satisfying, but largely ineffective, disengagement. Defenders of this approach say that Chile offers a prime example: John Paul made it clear on the papal plane that he saw the Pinochet regime as “transitory by definition," and in fact a plebiscite marking the transition to civilian rule took place a few months after the papal trip.
When President George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton in the United States, many analysts believed the Holy See would welcome the transition, since the Church had more in common with the Bush administration on issues such as abortion, cloning, and the role of religion in public life than with Clinton. Toward the end of Bush’s first year in office, before 9/11 or the war in Iraq, I interviewed a senior Vatican diplomat on what seemed the warm rapport between Bush and the Holy See. His response was illuminating: “Yes, we like this man better. He at least seems to be a genuine religious believer, a sincere person of faith. But at the end of the day, business is business. We’ll be able to work with him on some things, like cloning, but on other issues that are important to us, such as the International Criminal Court and globalization, it may be that Clinton was actually better. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and you have to see what you can do together case by case. The attitudes of individuals only get you so far." When the Holy See and the Bush administration found themselves at loggerheads over Iraq, few in the Vatican were surprised by the standoff.
Finally, Vatican realism also applies to the internal management of the Church, especially how far and how fast one can move at any given time. Many Vatican officials, when pressed for their own ideas about how things in the Church ought to work, will offer a vision that is quite different from current realities. When pressed as to why they don’t do more to try to shake things up, they will smile and patiently explain a few of the thousand and one political, sociological, and institutional reasons why doing so, for now, is impossible. It’s a bit like Michelangelo’s analysis, as Irving Stone described it in The Agony and the Ecstasy: In any given hunk of marble, there’s only one statue inside. The trick is to find out which is “the statue in the stone," and remove everything that is superfluous. Try to force that block of stone to produce a statue that’s not inside it and, however beautiful the idea, the result will be disaster. Vatican officials have been taught by their experience to be realistic about utopian ecclesiastical proposals that sound great, but whose actual impact is anyone’s guess.
Rule of Law
At first glance this value may seem in contradiction with the bella figura understanding of law described above. To some extent that may be right, since nowhere is it written that a culture’s value system has to be perfectly consistent. Yet the seeming contradiction is more like two sides of the same coin. The bella figura means that Vatican officials can have a surprising tolerance for human failure, but they will defend the law tenaciously at the level of principle. That’s the essence of their insistence on the “rule of law"—however difficult application of the principles of the Code of Canon Law may be in practice, it must always remain the norm and goal of Church life. In that sense, Vatican officials often come across as “sticklers" for the law, with a strong by-the-book approach.
Law is, from this point of view, the translation of the Church’s principles of justice into the practical realm. A high percentage of Vatican officials are by training canon lawyers, rather than theologians, philosophers, or biblical scholars. Even personnel whose background is in other fields will usually have a working knowledge of the Code of Canon Law , because much of what the Holy See does is the application of the Code to specific situations in local churches. From the Vatican’s point of view, the Code of Canon Law and its parallel Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, governing the twenty-one Eastern Rite churches in communion with Rome, are foundational texts for understanding how the Church is supposed to work.
Vatican officials become annoyed when critics oppose canon law to “pastoral" instincts, as if the law isn’t itself pastoral. In a February 2003 address to Brazilian bishops in Rome on an ad limina visit, John Paul made this point. “It is necessary to remember that pastoral action cannot be reduced to a certain ‘pastoralism,’ understood in the sense of ignoring or attenuating other essential dimensions of the Christian mystery, among these the juridical," the Pope said. “The pastoral truth can never be contrary to the truth of the Law of the Church."
It is frustrating to curial personnel that many Catholics have never bothered to so much as crack a copy of the code. Even many of the world’s 4,563 Catholic bishops have, at best, a rudimentary understanding. This was a frequent complaint inside the Roman Curia at the peak of the American sex abuse crisis. For many Vatican officials it has become an article of faith that the American bishops were wasting their time by drafting a new set of norms and procedures for the removal of abuser-priests. The existing Code of Canon Law, these officials said, already gave the bishops all the tools they needed, had they been serious about applying them. The problem, from their point of view, was never the absence of law, but the absence of nerve.
Vatican officials thus tend to be protective of the code. In September 2002, the Congregation for Catholic Education issued a decree extending the period of time required to obtain a licentiate, or basic degree, in canon law from two years to three, and mandating that a detailed knowledge of Latin be part of the program. This same spirit of protectiveness sometimes means Vatican officials are sticklers for the fine print of the code. In some cases, reverence for episcopal authority gives way to irritation with bishops for neglect of the requirements of the law. Few places on earth probably witness more “bishop-bashing," in this sense, than the chambers of the Roman Rota and the Apostolic Signatura, or the offices of the Congregation for Clergy and the Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts. One of the great untold stories of the Vatican is how often in this allegedly ultrahierarchical institution bishops find their decisions challenged by lower clergy or laity, and, in a surprising number of cases, overturned. The philosophy one often hears invoked in such circumstances is that “no one is above the law." Granted, this sort of judicial intervention happens less often with archbishops, and very rarely with cardinals, but in neither case is it unprecedented.
This passion for law must be understood in its proper psychological context. It is not merely, or even primarily, a matter of busybodies insisting that everyone follow the rules. It is a matter of defending a uniform standard of justice. The philosophy is that the hearing one gets from the Church should not depend on accidents such as how a bishop is feeling that day, or whether the tribunal in a particular area is liberal or conservative. Beyond this emphasis on consistency lies an even more fundamental concern for the just ordering of relationships in the Church. The mens, or mind, of canon law has as its prime directive a balance between the rights of the individual and the well-being of the entire community. When bishops or anyone else become cavalier about the code or succumb to the illusion that “the rules don’t apply to me," Vatican officials believe, both individuals and the community suffer. Insistence on the letter of the law is, seen thr
ough their eyes, a protection of the common good, as well as of the little guy in the Church whose only defense against the abuse of power is the Code.
A classic illustration of this bias in favor of proper legal procedures came in 2002, when the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Church’s Supreme Court, overturned a suspension issued by then-Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, against a priest named Barry Whelan, who has since resigned. Pell, now the cardinal of Sydney, had removed Whelan from ministry in 1996 based on allegations of sexual abuse, but the Signatura found procedural defects in Pell’s action and ordered Whelan reinstated to Sacred Heart Parish in West St. Kilda. He remained there until the new Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, had to intercede again in 2002, once again on the basis of sex abuse allegations. Whelan’s story is revealing, because Pell is well-liked and respected in Rome, where there is great sympathy for what is perceived to be the difficult cultural situation facing him in Australia. If the system were always stacked in favor of bishops with the right connections, Pell would have prevailed. In this case, however, the Holy See’s judgment was that Pell could not use administrative means to impose a permanent removal from ministry—precisely the same concern for due process that would later inform the Holy See’s response to the sex abuse norms adopted by the American bishops in Dallas. This must be clearly understood: It’s not that anyone in the Vatican wants to use legal niceties to shield priests who engage in sexual abuse. It’s rather that they insist even priests guilty of the most horrific offenses are entitled to a just process of law.
Americans will recall a similar case from the early 1990s involving Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh and a priest named Anthony Cipolla, whom Wuerl had removed and the Vatican ordered reinstated. Wuerl eventually prevailed, but only following a long and complex battle. The case is discussed in chapter 6.
Time
To listen to some wags talk about the slow pace in the Vatican, one would think it’s a Mexican village from a Sergio Leone movie—men taking siestas with sombreros pulled over their eyes, dogs listlessly wandering in search of shade, an air of stupor about the entire scene. The amount of time it takes for the Vatican to produce certain decisions is the stuff of legend. At one stage, the Catholic Biblical Association in the United States actually had an on-line clock tracking how long it was taking the Vatican to approve a new lectionary, or collection of readings for the Sunday Mass. The final period, from the two-thirds vote in favor of the text from the U.S. bishops to formal approval by Rome, was 1,954 days, or five and one-half years! Frustration with such delays is widespread. One longtime observer of the Vatican, Jesuit Fr. Robert Taft, a leading expert on Eastern liturgy and a consultor to the Congregation for Eastern Churches, told me that the length of time it takes to get a response from the system is, in his view, its single least attractive feature.
None of this means, however, that curial personnel lack a work ethic. Although some observers complain that they work only half days, in fact the workday runs from 8:30 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., Monday through Saturday. Twice a week, usually Tuesday and Fridays, officials return to the office from 4:00 to 7:00 P.M. That amounts to a thirty-six-hour workweek, which is perhaps less than the customary American forty hours, but hardly half-time. Rumor has it that not everyone goes back in the evenings, but a majority certainly does. Moreover, many curial personnel take mountains of work home in their off-hours. Of course this is not universally true, and as in any bureaucracy, there are some Vatican officials who are on autopilot. Most, however, are reasonably earnest, some incredibly so. Diplomats say that when Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re was the sostituto, or number two official in the Secretariat of State, he would sometimes return phone calls at 2:00 A.M. because that was when he had the time. Re’s predecessor and patron, Giovanni Benelli, had two secretaries so one could go home after a ten-hour shift, allowing the other to be on hand for whatever Benelli needed, since he would routinely work twenty-hour days.
A large part of the reason that things can take such a long time is not because Vatican personnel are lazy, but because, relative to the work it’s trying to do, the Roman Curia is understaffed. The second section of the Secretariat of State does the work of a fully functional foreign ministry, but with a staff of thirty. That means that one officer is responsible for the entire Balkans region and another for all of Central Europe. Simply trying to keep up with the daily press from those places, let alone monitoring the ecclesiastical situation and knowing local dynamics well enough to make intelligent policy recommendations, is beyond any one person’s capacity, however polished their linguistic skills and however spongelike their reading facility. The Congregation for Worship has roughly twenty-five officials whose job is to try to monitor, and shape, liturgical texts and rituals in every language on the surface of the earth. It is, once again, an almost comical mismatch of resources to the size of the challenge. All told, the Roman Curia is trying to administer the affairs of a church with 1 billion members, in addition to participating as a sovereign state in global affairs, with a staff of twenty-five hundred. It should be no mystery why, despite the greatest dedication imaginable, things get bogged down.
Yet the time lag is not simply structural, but psychological. There is a built-in bias in favor of delay when facing virtually any decision in the Vatican. This is expressed in words such as opportune and mature, as in: “I’m not sure that an intervention at this time would be opportune," or “Perhaps it would be best to allow the problem to mature for a few months and then see where we are." There is a resistance to being rushed that is part of the genetic code. In part, of course, this is a standard bureaucratic device to buy time and hope that a problem will solve itself. In part, however, it is also a wise appreciation that sometimes problems, like wine, do get better with time. Sometimes the heat of the battle is not the best moment to make a judgment, because emotions are too inflamed and passions too raw. In some cases only time can allow one to grasp the true dimensions of an issue. When I’ve taken colleagues from the secular press along with me to visit curial offices, one of the first things they usually notice is how much more quiet it seems inside, as compared to the noisy Roman streets and public spaces. There is a kind of calm that is palpable, and I think it’s in part to promote an unrushed, steady approach to work.
Obviously, the rhythms of the liturgical calendar and the Roman year also have an impact on the pace inside the Vatican. Liturgically, the chunks of time around Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Holy Week tend to be dead periods in the Vatican, so that work comes to more or less a standstill while the liturgical celebrations of the season unfold. In Rome, moreover, the annual custom is that summer is basically down time with the annual Ferragosto break meaning that from late July to early September, the Vatican is in effect idled. There’s a sense in which most of the action in a year in Rome is crammed into seven months: late September through late November, and late February through mid-May. During other periods, liturgical observances, vacation schedules, closings of pontifical universities and institutes all mean that it is difficult to arrange meetings and to make work schedules coincide, so things slip into a lower gear. In the world of the Vatican, it’s nothing for someone to say in early November, “We’ll deal with this after the holidays," meaning we’ll get back to it in late January or so.
Moreover, the respect for authority that was described above also influences the sense of how long it ought to take to resolve a problem. Despite public perceptions to the contrary, Vatican officials are usually loathe to force a confrontation, especially if it involves bishops. For one thing, they want to avoid an open display of disunity, which they often believe would compromise the Church’s public image. But it’s also the case that psychologically, many curial officials cringe at the idea of attacking or undercutting the authority of a member of the hierarchy. Therefore, if it’s possible to wait out a problem with a bishop, maybe until the bishop retires, if he happens to be near the mandatory age of seventy-five, that will often be the preferred so
lution. In this way, face can be saved all around.
Finally, there’s the impact of history on the way that curial personnel tend to think in centuries. Many Vatican officials work in buildings that are five hundred years old. Some, such as members of religious communities, may live in churches that date back fifteen hundred years. Italians have historical memories not just of the Church, but of political and cultural accomplishments that are some twenty-five hundred years old. Walking down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, one sees the maps of ancient conquests that Mussolini had erected to remind Romans of past glories. In Vatican conversation, it’s a routine matter to invoke Church fathers who wrote seventeen hundred years ago. Of course, all this secular and ecclesiastical history has to be set against the even more sweeping background of salvation history, the record of God’s dialogue with humanity from Creation through Redemption to Final Judgment. There’s a famous remark of Pope St. Pius X (1903–1914) that makes the point. During squabbles with the French government over Church property, some critics felt the Pope was too slow to defend the rights of the Church. Pius responded: “God could have sent us a Redeemer immediately after the Fall. And He made the world wait thousands of years!" All of this shapes a perspective in which one’s horizons are much broader than yesterday and tomorrow. Policy choices have to be understood in terms of a very long history, and projected into a potentially equally long future. Perspective, not efficiency, is the most admired quality in this culture.
All the Pope's Men Page 15
