Lost Shepherd

by Philip F. Lawler

  In the business world, multinational corporations can merge, shed divisions, and restructure their operations overnight. At the Vatican, four years of crusading zeal have produced only a few tentative changes, with no fundamental shift in the way business is conducted. There has been no suggestion of change in the overall structure of the Roman Curia, in which the Secretariat of State is preeminent.

  Contrary to what American Catholics might assume, the Vatican Secretariat of State is not the equivalent of the U.S. State Department. It is a super-department, wielding considerable influence over all the other Vatican dicasteries except the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Secretariat of State has two main divisions: one dealing with diplomacy, the other with internal Church affairs. The latter handles the day-to-day paperwork of the Curia. So the routine administration of the Vatican is conducted by the same office that handles relations with foreign governments.

  The secretary of state is the most powerful man at the Vatican after the pope, outranking the prefects of congregations and presidents of pontifical councils. He sets the agenda for Vatican diplomacy while simultaneously controlling the flow of internal paperwork and managing the Vatican’s public-relations machinery. All the important business of the Vatican flows through his office. This odd organizational structure has two important drawbacks.

  First, the concentration of power in one office discourages teamwork and creativity among the other leaders of the Roman Curia and restricts the flow of information to the supreme pontiff. The pope, not his secretary of state, should make crucial policy decisions. And like any other policy maker, he could benefit from broad consultation with officials who have direct knowledge of their own fields. In the 2013 general congregations, several cardinals suggested a new office, the Moderator of the Curia—a papal chief of staff coordinating the direction of all other agencies. That proposal appears never to have gained traction with the Council of Cardinals.

  Second, the combination of diplomacy and internal affairs produces an unhealthy atmosphere for the administration of the Holy See. Because clerics trained in the arts of diplomacy are the ones most likely to be influenced by worldly concerns, they should be separated from the internal administration of the Church. Vatican diplomats should understand that their job is to represent the Church to the world, not vice versa.

  The Communications Revolution

  The consolidation of the Vatican’s media operations represents another effort at reform. In 2014 the pope formed an expert commission to study the communications needs of the Holy See and offer suggestions. According to the Vatican press office, when the Council of Cardinals reviewed the first commission’s report, it “proposed to His Holiness the institution of a commission to study this final report and to suggest feasible approaches to its implementation.” That announcement raised more questions than it answered. Did the first commission not offer plans for implementing its recommendations? If the ultimate goal of a reform of the Vatican’s media operations is to encourage candor and clarity, it’s obvious that the reforms haven’t taken effect yet.

  Yet there was a more important reason for concern about the announcement of the second panel. The original commission was composed of recognized experts from around the world in the fields of media and communications. The new commission was made up of clerics working in the Vatican’s media operations and one executive of the newspaper owned by the Italian bishops’ conference. In other words, after the Vatican had recognized the need for a thorough overhaul of its outdated, uncoordinated, and ineffective media operations, the task of implementing those proposals was assigned to a group of insiders from those same outdated, uncoordinated, and ineffective operations.

  Nevertheless, efforts at reform continued, eventually producing the new Secretariat for Communications. But that new secretariat faced enormous challenges. Msgr. Dario Vigano, appointed to head the secretariat, reported in 2015 that it would take at least three years to bring all the scattered offices together into a single coordinated unit. In an unusually candid address to the staff of the secretariat in May 2017, Francis admitted that the consolidation of the many offices involved in the project would require “a little violence.” It will be “good violence,” the pope hastened to assure his audience, insofar as it responds to the needs of the Church in a new era of public communications.

  Bringing the Vatican’s communications strategy into the age of the Internet and social media was simple in comparison with the challenge of getting Vatican officials to appreciate the field of public relations. The Vatican offices involved in public communications included the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican television center, the press office, Vatican Radio, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, and a half-dozen other offices—all operating independently, without any central strategy. Each had its own staff, its own proud history, its own interests to protect. Chris Patten, the British politician who chaired the first expert commission studying the problem, did not have to be a prophet to predict that there would be entrenched opposition to the proposed reforms.

  Apart from the inevitable turf battles, the reform effort confronted knotty questions of budget and personnel. In both of those categories, the dominant concern was Vatican Radio, an enormously expensive operation with a staff of three hundred. Its employees are generally good at what they do, but what they do—what they have done, anyway—is produce radio programs. In the Vatican’s new strategy for the digital age, radio broadcasts were to play a much reduced role.

  But even if all the resistance could be overcome and all the turf battles settled, even if the Vatican Radio staff could adapt happily to new responsibilities and the money could be found to pay them all, the process of reform would be only beginning. The real obstacles to effective communications at the Vatican do not, and will not, lie within the reorganized Secretariat for Communications. The effort is hampered by the policies and habits of other Vatican offices on which the secretariat must rely.

  Charles Collins pinpointed one of the most revealing difficulties in his analysis for the Catholic news service Crux:

  Sometimes a papal speech can be translated independently, in whole or in part, 3 or 4 times by different offices. Yet a central translation office hasn’t been established, and it would require coordination between the new communications office, the powerful Secretariat of State, and the Pontifical Household, which controls the pope’s schedule.

  Control of the papal schedule was another vexed question. Before he retired from his position as director of the Vatican press office, Father Federico Lombardi admitted that he often did not know where the pope was or what he was doing. If the pope’s chief spokesman doesn’t know what the pontiff is doing, how can he be expected to answer the media’s questions?

  But often it’s when the pope himself speaks that the communications problems really begin. Collins explains that “whenever the Pope speaks off the cuff—or says something controversial—the Secretariat of State tells everyone in the Vatican to wait, until the ‘official version’ comes out, no matter that the ‘unofficial,’ but authentic, version is all over television and the newswires.” This problem is compounded, of course, when the pope sets aside a prepared text and speaks extemporaneously, as Francis frequently does. Reporters hear his words immediately, but hours might pass before the press office has the “official” version, vetted by the Secretariat of State—and that version might not match the statement that by now has been broadcast all over the world.

  And why is the Secretariat of State involved in this process at all? Again, the secretary of state outranks everyone at the Vatican except the pope himself. Certainly Cardinal Parolin outranks Msgr. Vigano (who is, Collins notes, “the highest-ranking Vatican official to not be a bishop”). The Secretariat of State supervises every other office of the Roman Curia, and that includes the Secretariat for Communications. At any moment, then, the strategies devised by the media experts at the Secretariat for Communications can be thwarted by of
ficials at the Secretariat of State, who are definitely not media experts.

  The Vatileaks Scandal—Repeated

  During the pontificate of Benedict XVI, one of the toughest public relations problems facing the Vatican was the leakage of confidential documents, and the problem has continued under Francis, exposing infighting and inefficiency—if not outright dishonesty—within the offices of the Holy See. The first Vatileaks trial, under Benedict, resulted in the conviction of his valet and left lingering suspicions of a broader conspiracy. The second scandal, dubbed “Vatileaks II,” confirmed the impression that the Vatican staff was troubled by backbiting rivalries, insider deals, and flagrant misuse of the funds confided to the use of the Holy See.

  The Vatileaks II scandal broke in 2015 when the Italian journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi published books based on confidential documents obtained from sources inside the Vatican that exposed clear abuses of trust. For instance, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints—the office that investigates candidates for beatification and canonization—had no effective controls on spending. The Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the office that administers the Vatican’s extensive real estate holdings, regularly engaged contractors without soliciting competitive bids and offered special rates to favored tenants. Few of these complaints were surprising to anyone who had covered the Vatican. But the specific evidence proffered by the two journalists, drawn from confidential documents, was evidence of another problem.

  The leaks were traced, strangely enough, to a committee formed by Francis to study the Vatican’s financial affairs. In November 2015 a Vatican prosecutor brought criminal charges against three Vatican staffers—Msgr. Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, and Nicola Maio—for leaking the internal documents. The journalists Fittipaldi and Nuzzi were also charged with “soliciting and exercising pressure” on the Vatican staff to furnish the documents.

  The trial, before a Vatican tribunal, provided even more tabloid fodder than the stolen documents did. Msgr. Vallejo Balda testified that Chaouqui had seduced him and then threatened to tell all if he did not release the documents. The flamboyant Chaouqui—whose presence on the financial panel was difficult to explain, since she was a publicist rather than an expert in finance—generated headlines by alternately protesting her innocence and claiming to have more damaging secrets about the Vatican’s finances. It emerged during the trial that her husband, Corrado Lanino, controlled the computer on which the stolen documents had been stored. In yet another strange twist, that computer was kept in the barracks of the Swiss Guard rather than in the office of the financial commission, apparently because of fears that the latter was not physically secure.

  In July 2016, the Vatican tribunal announced its verdicts.

  Msgr. Vallejo Balda, the former secretary of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, was convicted of leaking confidential documents to reporters. The court sentenced him to eighteen months in prison. (In December he would be granted a papal pardon and released.)

  Francesca Chaouqui, who had been described by prosecutors as the instigator of the leaks, was found guilty of conspiracy. But because the court found no conclusive evidence that she had actually given documents to reporters, she received only a ten-month sentence—to be suspended for five years. Thus Chaouqui, who had recently given birth to a son, avoided prison time.

  Nicola Maio, who had been an assistant to Msgr. Vallejo Balda, was found innocent of involvement in the conspiracy.

  Nuzzi and Fittipaldi, the journalists who published books based on the leaked documents, were acquitted on the grounds that since they were Italian citizens acting outside the Vatican, the court did not have jurisdiction over them.

  Early in 2017, Chaouqui released her own book on the Vatileaks II affair. To no one’s surprise, her account was self-serving and offered little new information, merely rehashing old stories about financial mismanagement. What was puzzling, however, was her evident determination to make the Australian Cardinal George Pell the villain of the story. Now the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, about which more will be said below, Cardinal Pell had become the Vatican’s financial accountability czar only after the excesses that Chaouqui had recounted, and his role was to curtail the financial misadventures. So why would Chaouqui point her finger at him?

  The Resistance of the Old Guard

  In Morris West’s novel Shoes of the Fisherman, an old Vatican hand gives this advice to a newly elected pope from a country far away from Rome: “Don’t try to change the Romans, Holiness. Don’t try to fight or convert them. They’ve been managing Popes for the last nineteen hundred years and they’ll break your neck before you bend theirs.”

  Financial misconduct was only one aspect of the trouble within the Roman Curia. In their discussions leading up to the conclave of 2013, the cardinals voiced their dissatisfaction with the general culture within the Vatican bureaucracy: a dysfunctional combination of secrecy, careerism, intramural rivalries, and office politicking. Two years later, fresh leaks of confidential documents had shown that that culture persisted.

  It made sense to address the Vatican’s chaotic financial system first, because money is always the lifeblood of any corrupt system. The new Secretariat for the Economy, led by the imposing Cardinal Pell, was designed to make all Vatican officials accountable for their spending. But not everyone was happy with the financial reforms; Cardinal Pell ruffled feathers. So it was no surprise that when the Vatileaks II scandal broke, Andrea Tornielli, one of the best-informed Vatican journalists, had identified Pell as the target of the latest gossip.

  Again, the juiciest tidbits in the new “scandal” involve incidents that occurred before Pell’s appointment—incidents that were, in fact, among the main reasons for his appointment. Yes, one new book reported heavy spending in the Secretariat for the Economy. But this was an entirely new office, with broad responsibilities, needing office equipment and a full staff, including some employees with expertise in accounting and financial affairs; it was never going to be an inexpensive proposition. Perhaps more to the point, the people primarily responsible for the leaks—Vallejo Balda and Chaouqui—had evidently expected to play major roles in the new financial structures, and the leaks began after their hopes for advancement were disappointed.

  Some reports have suggested that Vatileaks II demonstrated the resistance of the “old guard” to the reforming spirit of Francis. That is at best an oversimplification. The two persons who were found guilty of the leaks had been appointed by Francis himself to a commission that was intended to propose financial reforms. Vallejo Balda and Chaouqui could not simply be characterized as enemies of Francis or of economic reforms. Furthermore, there is at least some evidence that the same persons may have been involved in Vatileaks I, long before Francis arrived on the scene.

  An interesting insight into Vatileaks II comes from the Vatican journalist Andrea Gagliarducci, who believes that the scandal involved a different sort of power struggle within the Curia. For years, powerful men inside the Vatican exchanged small favors with their Italian secular counterparts, Gagliarducci explains. Some of those favors involved financial transactions—the use of the Vatican bank for personal accounts, perhaps, or real estate transfers on friendly terms. Most of these little deals were harmless, but some were technically illegal, and some may have involved shady characters.

  For Italian financiers, unsupervised transactions through the Vatican became more attractive after 9/11, when European banking authorities began imposing strict new regulations on Italy’s banks to counteract money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Some Vatican officials—Gagliarducci refers to them as the “men of compromise”—remained willing to help out their friends, and their influence grew as the health of John Paul II deteriorated. Things came to a head when Italian banking officials began to cut ties with Vatican institutions, citing the risk of unaccountable transactions. Pope Benedict XVI responded
by beginning a process of financial reform. Gagliarducci writes: “To cut a long story short, under Benedict XVI, the ‘men of compromise’ who played games across the Vatican-Italian financial border, lost influence.”

  The financial reforms that began under Benedict XVI accelerated under Francis. The prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal Pell, steadily increased the pressure to make all Vatican financial dealings transparent. These changes were not welcomed by the “men of compromise,” who sought to undermine the reforms in general and Pell in particular.

  Seen in this light, the leaks could be recognized as an attempt to embarrass the Holy See, to put public pressure on the new secretariat, and to make the reforms look wrongheaded. It was significant, then, that the latest leaks revealed questionable dealings before the reforms took effect. The goal of the leakers was not to expose wrongdoing and thereby clear the way for reform; the problems had already been identified and the solutions were being implemented. The goal, instead, was to create an impression of chaos. “In the end,” Gagliarducci wrote, “the leaks seem to be the latest attempt to cast shadows on the Vatican in order to thwart Vatican reforms and exert influence over Vatican projects.”

  Uncontrolled Spending, Uncoordinated Budgets

  To appreciate the importance of the economic reforms, one must understand that until the Secretariat for the Economy began imposing new rules, Vatican dicasteries followed no standard accounting procedures. Each office made its own spending decisions with little or no oversight. So the new Secretariat for the Economy was not merely tweaking the existing rules; it was imposing rules where none previously existed.

  Francis signaled his intent to bring reform to the management of the Roman Curia when he put Cardinal Pell in charge of the secretariat. The former archbishop of Sydney was, in his youth, a star in Australian rules football, and he has never lost his combative spirit. Of all the members of the College of Cardinals, he may be the one least likely to worry about stepping on toes or about stating his blunt disagreement with any other prelate—including the pope himself.