An anecdote illustrates how the Curia’s conception of time can affect policy choices. On October 1, 2000, John Paul II canonized 120 Chinese martyrs, including 87 native converts and 33 foreign missionaries, most of whom had been killed during the anti-Western Boxer movement of the early twentieth century. The Communist government in China complained bitterly about the canonizations, in part because they see most of these martyrs as having in fact been agents of Western imperialism. In part, however, the complaints were also based on the fact that October 1 is National Day in China, marking the day the Communist Party came to power. To stage the canonizations on October 1, according to the Chinese government, thus amounted to a deliberate provocation. The truth was that the Congregation for Saints simply didn’t bother consulting a Chinese calendar to explore potential conflicts. Once the conflict was pointed out, however, the Vatican took no steps to resolve it. As it happened, I ran into Archbishop Edward Nowak, secretary of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, at a party at the American Embassy that week. Kathleen Drexel, the second American-born saint, had been canonized at the same time. I asked Nowak his point of view on the controversy. He said: “You know, in one thousand years the Communist Party will be a footnote in Chinese history, but we will still be celebrating a holy day on October 1 in the memory of these martyrs." It was a classic instance of taking the long view.
Yet none of this means the Vatican is incapable of change, sometimes surprisingly swift change. To take just one example, John Paul II was numbered among the strongest anti-death penalty campaigners in the world. During his January 1999 trip to St. Louis, his personal plea to Missouri’s then-governor Mel Carnahan saved the life of convicted murderer Darrell Mease. The Vatican’s diplomatic corps around the world is under instruction to deliver papal requests for clemency every time an execution is scheduled. Various Catholic organizations, such as the Sant’Egidio Community, are leaders in grassroots activism against the death penalty, and this activity is blessed and celebrated from the Apostolic Palace. Yet just over one hundred years ago, popes not only supported capital punishment, they practiced it. In Rome’s Museum of Criminology, one can still see the official twelve-foot-tall papal guillotine, last used in 1868, just before the fall of the Papal States. More than a hundred people were beheaded by papal edict on the guillotine, introduced in Rome by Napoleon. As is well-known, Catholic catechisms presented the death penalty as not merely acceptable, but indeed obligatory, well into the post–Vatican II period. Indeed, a provision for capital punishment remained part of the fundamental law of the Vatican City-State until Paul VI declared it null in 1969. It was not actually removed from the books until February 2001. The theological, liturgical, and political nexus surrounding capital punishment developed in the Catholic church over centuries, yet it needed only one determined papacy to dissolve. Rapid movement on seemingly intractable issues is, therefore, possible.
Moreover, the Holy See is capable of rapid response when the situation calls for it. This was clear in the American sex abuse crisis of 2002. Perhaps it’s a fair criticism that the Holy See was slow to grasp the depth of the crisis, but once that message was received, it moved beyond business as usual. When the U.S. bishops took their first stab at adopting a new set of sex abuse norms in Dallas in June, the Vatican had its response ready by mid-October—which may not seem remarkable by conventional business standards, but is certainly an accelerated reaction in ecclesiastical terms. Even more remarkable, however, was the Vatican’s offer to create a mixed commission, four officials from the Holy See and four bishops from the United States, that would produce a revised set of norms in advance of the November meeting of the U.S. bishops in Washington, D.C. The commission met over just two days in Rome, October 28 and 29, and was ready to present its results to the public November 4. Before the meeting, I had been asked for comment by several broadcast media outlets in the United States, and I expressed skepticism that the commission could really accomplish anything in such a short period. “Around the Vatican, it takes two days to open the mail," I joked. In fact, however, the commission was equal to the task. The norms it produced were then adopted by the U.S. bishops and formally approved by the Vatican. The point is that when the chips are down, and, perhaps equally important, are understood to be down, the Holy See can move fast.
Tradition
The Vatican is one of the few places remaining on earth where the argument “we’ve always done it this way" is vigorously defended from a philosophical point of view. If one accepts Christ’s promise that the Holy Spirit would always be with his Church, this means the Spirit has been guiding the growth and development of the Roman Catholic Church over two thousand years of history, and its structures and practices are not the product of chance or human invention. They represent where the Spirit was calling the Church in a particular moment in its history. Of course, it’s always possible that the Church misread the Spirit’s intentions, or that in changed times the Spirit may be eliciting a new response. But an extra degree of caution comes into play in evaluating any proposal for reform, because there is a presumption in favor of the wisdom of tradition that is difficult to override.
Can this insistence on tradition be stifling? Yes, especially to Western sensibilities accustomed to the constant arrival of new and improved versions of everything. Sometimes the presumption in favor of how things have always been done sits in the Curia like a lead weight, making even the simplest and most obvious changes in customs difficult to execute. When John Paul II received twenty-three thousand e-mails for his eighty-third birthday in May 2003, for example, every one of them had to be printed out on paper and boxed for shipping up to the Secretariat of State, where they were distributed to the language desks, considered, and given a response. Obviously, the purpose of e-mail is precisely to avoid the need for paper in such a situation. The Secretariat of State has a computer system, and the e-mails could easily have been forwarded with a tap of a keyboard button. But tradition dictated that incoming correspondence to the Holy Father be processed on paper. So it was written, and so it was done.
The Vatican’s emphasis on tradition is not, however, merely an excuse for sloughing off new ideas out of laziness or indifference. It is also a recognition that an institution with two thousand years of history has its reasons for doing things a certain way, and caution is in order before one starts cutting through all that to solve today’s particular problem. In a sense, it is rather a democratic instinct, a belief that the preferences and insights of all those who have come before ought to have weight in the deliberations.
G. K. Chesterton expressed this view in his book Orthodoxy, and it’s worth quoting him at length.
But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to sub
mit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.
This emphasis on tradition also informs the Vatican’s sense of accountability. Critics sometimes complain that the Vatican does not regard itself as accountable to the people of the Church, and there’s a sense in which this is true. Leadership in the Church, from the Vatican point of view, is accountable primarily to the tradition, and ultimately to God, who is its author. Policy is based on theological and philosophical principles derived from the tradition, the deposit of faith, entrusted by Christ to the apostles. Vatican officials believe the defense and transmission of the tradition is the highest service Church leaders can offer to their people. In that sense, they do not perceive themselves to be unconcerned or unaccountable to the people. Indeed, as discussed above, there is a sense in which they actually see themselves as populists. At the same time, it is certainly true that opinion polls, ballot boxes, and the other instruments of democratic government are not part of the accountability mechanisms within the curial world.
Truth to be told, most people who work in the Curia have a pet reform they’d like to push through, some area where they sincerely believe tradition has become dysfunctional or oppressive or simply outdated. An official I know in the Congregation for Saints, for example, thinks the time has come to do away with the penultimate step of beatification before canonization. Originally, beatification was designed to approve local veneration of a holy person, while canonization approved that person’s cult for the universal Church. In a globalized world in which the distinction between local and universal is increasingly relative, however, this official believes beatification no longer makes sense. Yet he’s not rattling cages to put this issue on the fast track. Why not? In part, because most Vatican officials also have a story of a time when they challenged a tradition only later to appreciate its wisdom. A German priest, for example, began working some years ago in a dicastery and was assigned an office whose window faced in the direction of St. Peter’s Square. When he moved in, he found the window had been painted shut. He inquired with his superior why this was so, and was informed, “It was like that when I got here." This German, a moderate-to-progressive who grew up on the Second Vatican Council, regarded this restriction not merely as silly, but a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the contemporary Church and its failure to live up to Pope John XXIII’s spirit of “throwing open the windows" of the Church. One day he brought a chisel and a small knife and knocked out the paint, opening up his window. He regarded this as a small but symbolic victory for the postconciliar church. Business called him out of the office for several hours, and when he returned he discovered the logic for the tradition—a gaggle of pigeons had settled down on his desk, his filing cabinet, and everywhere else in the office. After spending a clumsy, and messy, afternoon getting rid of the pigeons, the paint went back on the window. The priest has not stopped pressing gently for reform, but he also moves with a more modest appreciation that sometimes there are reasons things are the way they are.
This core belief in the wisdom of tradition also means that most Vatican officials would be considered, by the standards of the total spectrum of opinion in the Catholic Church, conservatives. By no means should this suggest that the men and women of the Roman Curia are narrow-minded traditionalists. A surprising number of curial officials might vote in favor of married priests in a secret ballot and some would support a relaxation in the teaching on birth control. A handful might be open to the eventual ordination of women as priests. Yet even those leaning toward the reform position on these issues typically also see the wisdom in contrary views, since the benefit of the doubt would go to the tradition, and they would regard compromise and patience as the best strategy. In classifying Vatican personnel, in fact, I have found it relatively unhelpful to think in terms of liberal and conservative, since most people in the Curia would be by conventional standards moderate-to-conservative. The more illuminating category is open and closed, that is, those whose regard for tradition does not inhibit them from entertaining criticism, and those inaccessible to any critique.
Finally, it should be noted that at times the Holy See’s reverence for tradition can shade off into arrogance toward those who are not comparably grounded in the fine points of Roman Catholic history, theology, spirituality, and law. Vatican officials rightfully insist that the Catholic Church is the product of a two-thousand-year history, which has given it a rich and multifaceted culture. They can become impatient with reformers demanding that this culture be stood on its head in response to a challenge that, in the context of two thousand years, just arose yesterday. They have every reason to demand that people who want to make proposals for change in the tradition at least master it first, so they’ll know what they’re talking about. At the same time, it is unreasonable to expect that average lay Catholics must become professional theologians or canon lawyers before their experience and insight counts. Vatican officials thus face the challenge of fostering an appreciation for tradition, so that proposals for change can be evaluated in the proper ecclesiological context, and yet not setting the bar so high that they rule out of bounds all views but their own.
4
VATICAN SOCIOLOGY
By the standard of contemporary best practices in the corporate world, the Holy See’s top level of management doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Quite often, there’s no discernible relationship between the work performed by a given division of the Vatican and the qualifications of the person tapped to lead it. As of the fall of 2003, the Catholic Church’s chief liturgical officer had no background in liturgy, its top official on missions had never been on a mission, its education czar was a canon lawyer, and the man who ran its ministry of health had no medical training. Indeed, it was hailed as a major breakthrough in 2000 when the Pope appointed as prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches a man who was at least a member of one of the twenty-one Eastern Rite churches. The previous occupant of the job had been an Italian, Cardinal Achille Silvestrini. Likewise, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the first qualified theologian to run the Church’s doctrinal office since Cardinal Robert Bellarmine in the seventeenth century.
Why does the Holy See place seemingly unprepared and ill-suited officials in such sensitive posts? The answer is that the Vatican’s personnel policy, which is informal and largely unspoken, arose well before MIT or Harvard Business School began to contemplate the science of hiring. Content-area knowledge is not the highest value in this system. Traditionally, churchmen have been assigned Vatican jobs not so much on the basis of their training or professional expertise, but their loyalty, their ecclesiastical pedigree, and the compatibility of their vision with that of the Pope or of other top officials such as the secretary of state. Expertise can be developed or brought in at lower levels of management; the most important quality the top official must possess is not competence, but commitment.
This way of doing business reflects centuries of cultural history, shaped not by the ethos of corporate efficiency but by dynastic politics, in which family loyalties were usually a far more important criterion for holding a leadership post than academic credentials. Luigi Barzini, in his famous book The Italians, offered the example of Napoleon Bonaparte (who was born into an Italian family on Corsica in 1769, and narrowly missed being an Italian citizen since the French had occupied the island just two years before):
As so
on as he was able to, he made adequate arrangements for his brothers, sisters, in-laws, and stepsons. His older brother Joseph was made King of Naples for a time and later promoted to King of Spain; his younger brother Lucien, who mistrusted Napoleon, was made Prince of Canino, a rich fief north of Rome, in the Maremma; his sister Elisa was married to Prince Felice Bacciocchi and was first given the Duchy of Lucca and later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; his brother Louis became King of Holland; his sister Pauline married Prince Camillo Borghese; his sister Caroline married Joachim Murat, who was appointed King of Naples; his brother Jerome, who had married the American beauty Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore, had to divorce her and marry the not very pretty Catherine of Württemberg to become King of Westphalia; his stepson Eugene de Beauharnais was an excellent viceroy of Italy.
As Barzini went on to note, this tradition survived in Italy well into the twentieth century. “Brothers, brothers-in-law, sons, sons-in -law or cousins of prominent politicians in the Christian Democrat party are ensconced in comfortable and rewarding positions in state-controlled or nationalized organizations, industries and holding companies, posts for which they seldom hold a particular training." In the Holy See today, this belief in putting family members in key jobs is more figurative than literal; trustworthy individuals are sometimes said to be della famiglia, in the family. In past centuries, however, popes would appoint blood relatives as the equivalent of their secretary of state, a position that came to be known as the cardinal-nephew. That office was suppressed in 1692 with the bull Romanum decet Pontificem.
All the Pope's Men Page 16
