Asked if he had run into resistance to change in the Vatican, Francis delivered a mildly rambling response stressing the presence of many helpful and loyal people, along with the blunt judgment that the place's quality has declined from the era of "old curialists" who simply did their jobs.
Then came the telling line: "It's true," the pope said, "that I haven't done very much."
In a sense, of course, he was being modest. Francis has done a great deal, mostly to reverse negative impressions of the church and to afford it a new lease on life. Yet in terms of concrete acts of governance, he had a point.
"I would expect that after the summer lull, we'll see more signs of management changes," he said.
Dolan's forecast confirms something already clear five months ago: This Latin American outsider was elected on a strong reform mandate. The question is, once he gets down to brass tacks, what kind of revolution will Francis lead?
Four areas seem destined to form the front lines.
Finances
Left to his own devices, Francis might not have opted to start with the Vatican bank. He sees it as an important institution but, as he put it during a homily in June, necessary "only up to a certain point."
Yet circumstances have aligned to make the bank an acid test of Francis' commitment to change.
Earlier this summer, the bank's top two officials resigned amid an Italian money-laundering probe and Italian police arrested a Vatican accountant on charges of trying to smuggle $26 million in cash into Italy and using his Vatican bank accounts to disguise funds.
On the plane from Rio de Janeiro to Rome July 28, Francis sketched out three options for the bank, formally known as the Institute for the Works of Religion:
- Turning it into an "ethical bank";
- Transforming it into a charitable assistance fund;
- Closing it.
Most observers regard the third option
as the least probable, if arguably the cleanest. The fact is, Catholic
religious orders and charitable organizations that operate in different
corners of the world, often in circumstances where financial systems are
underdeveloped, need ways to protect their assets and transfer funds
easily. If there were no Vatican bank, popes probably would face
pressure to invent one.
The ethical banking option is considered
the most likely outcome, even if the term itself is a bit nebulous.
In
general, ethical banks share three characteristics: commitment to "best
practices" of transparency, with regularly published balance sheets and a
receptiveness to outside review; use of assets for socially responsible
purposes, often by accepting lower profit margins than regular
commercial banks; and the involvement of stakeholders and community
members in governance.
In Italy, the Banca Popolare Etica is often
cited as a model. It is sponsored by labor and farm groups, shop-owner
associations, even the Italian Scouts.
Signs of change are in the air. Vatican
bank officials have hired the Washington, D.C.-based Promontory
Financial Group to conduct a detailed review of accounts, and most
observers believe it will become more difficult for individuals, as
opposed to organizations, to use the bank's services.
The bank also
recently launched a website that confirms the amount of assets under management ($9.4 billion) and the number of account holders (18,900).
As hard as fixing the bank may be, however,
it's only a preliminary step to the bigger challenge: promoting
transparency at lower levels of the church, where the real money is
concentrated and where hit-and-miss oversight sometimes spells disaster.
That truth has been well-captured by a
recent meltdown in Slovenia, where the country's two archbishops
resigned amid the collapse of the Maribor archdiocese.
After the
country's emergence from communism, church officials in Maribor built a
credit-driven financial colossus, at one point owning three holding
companies that controlled at least 50 different firms, including a cable
TV outlet that aired late-night porn.
The holding companies recently went
belly-up with a debt estimated at more than $1 billion, equivalent to 2
percent of the country's gross domestic product.
Among other things, a
pension fund with the savings of some 65,000 small investors reportedly
was wiped out.
Francis sent a signal of accountability by
accepting the archbishops' resignations, just two years after the
previous archbishop of Maribor was pressured to step aside for his role
in the mess.
The task now is to craft policies and to shape culture so
that similar implosions are avoided elsewhere.
Sex abuse
Another front where critics believe the church needs more transparency is its response to the child sexual abuse scandals.
Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who has more
than two decades of experience dealing with the scandals, recently
placed two ideas on the table.
In a July 26 interview with NCR, O'Malley said Francis should:
- Convene the presidents of bishops' conferences around the world and try to convince those who have not adopted strong anti-abuse guidelines to do so;
- Adopt the same anti-abuse protocols in the Vatican that have become standard practice in dioceses and other Catholic venues around the world, including background checks and screening of all personnel, training in abuse detection and prevention, and instructions in how to handle complaints.
It's not clear whether Francis will
act on those recommendations, although O'Malley is in a unique position
to move the ball. He's the lone American among the eight cardinals
tapped in April to assist Francis in "governance of the universal
church."
Francis made an interesting point about the
issue during his onboard news conference, distinguishing between "sins"
of one's past that may be forgiven and forgotten, and "crimes," such as
"the abuse of minors," that require a different response.
It was a small but potentially telling sign
that Francis intends to take a firm line. Many observers believe one
test will be whether Francis extends the tough accountability the church
now has for priests who abuse also to bishops who mismanage abuse
complaints.
Senior churchmen expressed confidence to NCR that Francis will do so, though to date there's been no clear move along those lines.
Collegiality
In some ways, Francis' most important step
toward fostering greater collegiality may already have come with the
April 13 decision to create the council of eight cardinals.
The effect
is to distribute power away from the Vatican and toward the heads of
local churches.
Among other things, the decision implies
clipping the wings of the Vatican's Secretariat of State. Already it has
lost some of its power as a gatekeeper. For instance, O'Malley said
that when he has questions or wants to make a report to the pope, his
contact is directly with Francis rather than having to go through the
Secretariat of State.
O'Malley also said the eight cardinals want
to act as spokesmen for the concerns and ideas of other bishops. He's
interviewing all the other cardinals in North America and has asked them
for advice.
Others are doing the same. Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz of
Chile, for instance, polled members of the Episcopal Conference of Latin
America (CELAM) during a recent meeting in Panama.
Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the
coordinator of the group of eight cardinals, met with Francis while he
was in Brazil for World Youth Day in July. Rodríguez said he received
approval to put together an instrumentum laboris, or working paper, that would outline recommendations for change.
Another front where Francis seems likely to
move quickly is the Synod of Bishops, which was founded under Pope Paul
VI as an organ of collegial governance.
On the plane, Francis hinted at
the need for reform in the "methodology" of the synod, which many
observers believe is too large, too cumbersome and too focused on single
topics to act as the sounding board a pope needs.
Cardinal George Pell of Sydney suggested in
June that a smaller council of bishops could meet with the pope for
several hours, two or three times a year, to discuss a specific topic at
length. Francis said in his press conference that when the eight
cardinals meet with him in October, they'll ponder changes to the
system.
Marriage and divorce
There are also signs that Francis may be
prepared to untie some longstanding pastoral knots, beginning with
divorced and remarried Catholics.
Under current discipline, those
Catholics are unable to receive the Eucharist, a practice that has long
been a source of heartache in the trenches.
In his remarks on the plane, Francis
signaled interest in the "principle of economy" found in the Orthodox
tradition, according to which a second union may be blessed after
dispensing from the vows of marriage.
He also said the question has to be looked
at in the wider context of the pastoral care of marriage, a theme he
said the council of eight cardinals and a future Synod of Bishops will
examine. The practice of annulments, he said, "has to be looked at
again."
Resistance
In general, Francis appears open to
allowing new pastoral initiatives to surface from below, instead of
being driven from the top down.
In a July 25 meeting with youth from
Argentina during his Brazil trip, he pointedly encouraged them to "make a
mess."
"I want the church to go out onto the
streets," he said. "I want us to resist everything worldly, everything
static, everything comfortable, everything to do with clericalism,
everything that might make us closed in on ourselves."
But every revolution has winners and
losers, and although Francis may insist he hasn't encountered any
resistance, that's not to say it doesn't exist.
So far, there are five
circles where opposition to the "Francis revolution" seems to be
emerging.
- The first is liturgical traditionalists, recently irritated with a decision to forbid the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from saying the older Latin Mass without specific permission -- a decision, some argue, at odds with Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 ruling liberalizing use of the older liturgy.
- Second, Francis is drawing mixed reviews among some church conservatives not so much for anything he's said or done, but because of a diffuse perception that his emphases are not theirs. In a late July interview with NCR, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said his sense is that conservatives "generally have not been really happy" with Francis.
Discontent may fester in pro-life
circles, for instance, if Francis continues his policy of avoiding
public commentary on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
Asked on
the papal plane why he didn't discuss those matters in Brazil, a country
that has recently liberalized both, he said that "the church already
has expressed itself perfectly on this" and "it wasn't necessary to go
back over it."
- Third, the secular right also has expressed some dismay. Reacting to his July 8 visit to the southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, a major point of arrival for migrants from Africa and the Middle East, anti-immigration politicians in Italy suggested that the pope should mind his own business.
- Fourth, Catholic progressives may become disenchanted if their hopes for Francis do not match what he's able, or willing, to deliver. Already, some advocates for women priests and gay rights have taken to the blogosphere to grouse about what they see as a mismatch between the pope's talk about mercy and his concrete positions on those issues.
- Fifth, there's an ill-defined "old guard" in the Vatican that may be resistant to see its traditional power and privilege slip away. So far no one identified with this group has publicly broken ranks, although some have detected its fingerprints on a nasty scandal involving Francis' handpicked prelate, or delegate, to help reform the Vatican bank, an Italian cleric named Msgr. Battista Ricca. In mid-July, Italian journalist Sandro Magister published a sensational piece detailing charges that when Ricca was a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay from 1990 to 2001, he had a live-in male lover, cruised gay bars and was once beaten up, and another time brought a young man back to the embassy and ended up trapped in an elevator with him overnight.
(It was a question about Ricca that elicited the pope's now-famous "Who am I to judge?" line about gays.)
However the Ricca case shakes out, anyone tasked by Francis with implementing reform probably can expect any skeletons lurking in his closet to be at risk of exposure.
A hot autumn
Though Francis is not taking the usual August break at Castel Gandolfo, most observers don't expect him to start rolling out significant structural reforms until the fall.
One highly anticipated decision is who he'll name as his secretary of state -- a position that, albeit diminished by Francis' tendency to reach outside the Vatican system, still packs considerable punch.
To date, the pope has not tipped his hand.
Many observers believe Italian Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, a veteran diplomat and currently head of the Vatican City State, is in pole position. Given Francis' capacity for surprise, however, conventional wisdom may not apply.
Francis also will soon face important choices to head flagship dioceses.
In Cologne, Germany, Cardinal Joachim Meisner is 79, while Cardinal Antonio Rouco Varela in Madrid and Cardinal Francis George in Chicago both are 76 -- all beyond the customary retirement age.
Francis has laid out the kind of bishop he wants. In a speech in Brazil, he said, "Bishops must be pastors, close to people, fathers and brothers, and gentle, patient and merciful."
Bishops must be "men who love poverty, both interior poverty, as freedom before the Lord, and exterior poverty, as simplicity and austerity of life," he said. "Men who do not think and behave like 'princes.' Men who are not ambitious, who are married to one church without having their eyes on another."
The question is whether he can find flesh-and-blood prelates to match that vision, a defining challenge in a church where personnel often is policy.
The Roman stage thus seems set for what the Italians call un autunno caldo -- a "hot autumn."
The trick for Francis, it would seem, is to keep the reform fires burning without making the pot boil over.