Strange things have been happening at the Vatican this year. Beginning
in January, documents written by high-level figures in the Catholic
Church began finding their way into the Italian press, many of the
letters to the pope denouncing instances of corruption and complaining
about the direction and management of the Church.
When a book full of leaked documents, Sua Santità
(His Holiness), was published in late May, the Vatican took the
extraordinary step of arresting the pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, a
humble but trusted member of the papal household, and announced that
officials had found numerous papal documents at Gabriele's apartment
within the Vatican.
At the same time, the Vatican Bank, under
investigation for money laundering (charges the Vatican denies), fired
its president, a respected Catholic banker, listing among the reasons
for his dismissal allegations that sounded a lot like leaking: "Failure
to provide any formal explanation for the dissemination of documents
last known to be in the President's possession." Immediately after his
firing, the former bank president hired his own bodyguard service and
wrote a private memorandum to the pope, which he wished to disseminate
"in case something should happen to him."
Power struggles and
scandal are nothing new in the Vatican. Pope Alexander VI, for one, was
accused of poisoning his enemies and sleeping with his daughter, the
infamous Lucrezia Borgia. But until now the pope had been able to count
on the loyalty and discretion of his inner circle and a hermetically
sealed culture of silence, discretion, and secrecy that has often been
compared with that of the Kremlin at the height of Soviet power. Now the
last and most ancient of the world's absolute monarchies is suddenly in
the fishbowl culture of the 21st century, where the most-trivial and
the most-important details alike become transparent.
The job of
managing this transition from secrecy to openness has fallen to Father
Federico Lombardi, the pope's official spokesman, a Jesuit priest who
wears a uniform of simple black pants and a black shirt with a white
collar. When I met him this summer in Rome at the end of another long
day at Vatican Radio, he had the deeply exhausted look of a man bearing
the weight of the world on his shoulders. A thoughtful and
kindly-looking man who trained as a mathematician, Lombardi now finds
himself in the much messier world of media, in which appearance and
reality, rumor and fact can all get mixed up in an impossible tangle.
For
an organization famous historically for keeping its internal business
as private as possible, the Vatican has gone out of its way since the
scandal broke this spring to be as open and accountable as possible.
Having been embarrassed by constant leaking, the Vatican has clearly
decided to go on the counteroffensive, releasing information in
anticipation of events so that it is not constantly caught off guard by
embarrassing revelations.
Lombardi has been giving nonstop press
briefings since Paolo Gabriele was arrested on May 24; at an August
briefing, he even took the extraordinary step of making public the
indictment papers against Gabriele. The Vatican promised that his trial,
set to begin September 29, would be made public (immediately after the
May arrest, all the pretrial documents were posted on the Vatican press
office's Web site).
Also indicted but on lesser charges was a computer
technician, Claudio Sciarpelletti, who is seen as a minor accomplice in
the misappropriation of documents.
Suddenly, the word transparency,
which was hardly pronounced during the first two millennia of the
Catholic Church's history, is on everyone's lips at the Vatican, in what
amounts to a kind of Copernican revolution -- an attempt on the part of
an essentially medieval institution to join the Internet age. One
medieval pope described himself as "the judge of all men who can be
judged by none."
The current Vatican has begun in recent years to
accept, painfully, that this is no longer the case. If it does not want
to be defined by others, the Church must respond to and even court
public opinion, using modern media to shape its message.
Since he
took the job as papal press officer, in July 2006, Lombardi has been
dealing with one public-relations disaster after another. Just two
months into the job and a year into the term of Pope Benedict XVI, born
Joseph Ratzinger, Lombardi found himself in Germany, Ratzinger's
birthplace where the pope was about to deliver a speech that contained
this sentence: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and
there you will find things only evil and inhuman."
The phrase was a
learned quotation of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor in a long address
on faith and reason, but journalists examining advance copies of the
speech could see that, coming out of the mouth of a contemporary pope,
the quote would seem like a frontal assault on Islam.
They warned
Lombardi, but the pope went ahead with his prepared speech, and a public
firestorm followed, exactly as predicted. Then there was the 2009
fiasco in which the pope lifted the excommunication of four right-wing
bishops, one of whom turned out to be a Holocaust denier.
Lombardi had to endure 2010, known at the Vatican as the annus horribilis,
during which hardly a week went by without new shocking revelations of
child abuse by ordained priests and, perhaps far worse, complicity among
higher-ups in the Church principally concerned with covering up the
scandal, silencing victims, and transferring predator priests rather
than removing them from positions in which they could do further harm.
With some justification, people at the Vatican felt that Benedict was
getting a bad rap: he was the first pope to deal somewhat forthrightly
with the pedophilia issue, and the worst abuses had occurred during the
reign of his predecessor, the soon-to-be-sainted John Paul II.
Yet
Lombardi had to stand up day after day and take his lumps, as the crisis
risked defining Benedict's papacy and seriously undermined the Church's
credibility.
* * *
Lombardi
gets high marks from almost everyone in the Vatican press corps for his
honorability, honesty, and integrity, but as he himself acknowledges,
the Vatican has not ever had a media strategy: the pope does as he sees
fit, and Lombardi tries to explain his words or actions after the fact.
And
Lombardi speaks for an elderly and not particularly charismatic pope: a
78-year-old theologian at the time of his election, now 85 and
increasingly infirm; a scholar with more-solitary habits than his
predecessor. Lombardi is also dealing with a new media environment.
Dozens of Vatican news Web sites named Whispers in the Loggia, Vatican
Insider, and the like, pick up and report on Vatican scuttlebutt that
traditional media rarely, if ever, did. Victims of priestly sexual abuse
have their own Web sites and can organize online; copies of court
decisions, grand-jury reports, and compromising documents make their way
around the world instantly.
In this environment, not having a
media strategy is no longer a viable option -- a reality the Vatican
implicitly recognized this summer when it appointed a journalist, Greg
Burke, the Fox News correspondent in Rome (and a member of the Catholic
religious order Opus Dei), as the Vatican's director of communications, a
position that never existed before. It is one of a series of decisive
moves the Vatican has made in response to "Vati-leaks": The new director
of the Vatican Bank took the unusual step of inviting journalists to
the highly secretive institution's offices and discussed the intentions
to comply with modern banking norms. Father Lombardi began his regular
press briefings -- another novelty. During the past year, Benedict
opened a Twitter account. Moreover, since the Vati-leaks scandal broke,
the pope has been calling in a range of Church leaders for much wider
and more regular consultation. The scandal has clearly served as a
wake-up call: a sign that the pope is trying hard to regain control of a
Church that has begun to seem badly adrift. The pope has even made some
effort to seek out the views of people outside the Roman curia -- the
Vatican equivalent of going beyond the Beltway.
* * *
The
Vati-leaks scandal is fascinating on a number of levels. First, there
is the mystery element: Did the butler do it? And if so, why? Did he
have accomplices? Were they inside or outside the Church? Then there are
the contents of the documents themselves, which provide a glimpse into
the exercise of power within the normally closed world of the Vatican's
highest levels.
"One way to understand this situation is to
think of the Vatican as a medieval or Renaissance court," says Father
John Wauck, an American priest with the Opus Dei movement and a former
student of Renaissance history. It is a world in which one person, the
pope, makes the important decisions and people jockey for the ear of
that one person.
The scandal has strained some of the odd
contradictions of the Vatican: it is the smallest independent nation in
the world, with a territory of 109 acres and a population of more than
800 people, and yet it is nexus of a transnational Church present in
virtually every nation, with an estimated 1.2 billion adherents. It is
thus simultaneously one of the largest and most important entities in
the world and one of the smallest.
But is a tiny medieval court
capable of governing an institution of such great scope and complexity
in the current age? "I wouldn't bet against it," Father Wauck said.
"Find me another institution that has lasted 2,000 years."
The
Vati-leaks scandal has accentuated the already serious problem of the
chasm between the Church and its people, between the hierarchy composed
almost exclusively of elderly white men in their 60s and 70s living in
the isolation within the Vatican walls and the 1 billion Catholics in
the world contending with much more basic, day-to-day problems of life
and of faith.
The anxiety in the Vatican in the wake of
Vati-leaks is palpable. One interview subject insisted that I remove my
computer and my tape recorder from his office before we began talking
for fear, I suppose, of being surreptitiously recorded. Another source
insisted on the phone that he knew nothing about Vati-leaks, but agreed
to see me if we might discuss other topics -- then, as soon as we sat
down, he launched into a highly knowledgeable discussion of the scandal.
There are rumors that Vatican security -- after all of these
embarrassing revelations -- is at an all-time high. People are nervous
about communicating anything of substance on the phone or through email.
"Remember, you can't quote me by name!" one priest told me. "If you do,
they'd send me to Central Africa tomorrow!"
Although there is
much we still don't know about Vati-leaks, several things are already
quite clear. Among the likely speakers at the trial are high Church
officials who testified for and against Gabriele, who in the indictment
papers are identified simply as X or Y. The court proceedings should
give us a look at the inside workings of the papal court in a trial that
appears to be without precedent at the Vatican. "The Vatican tribunal
is open and has handled other cases, a small theft or something, but
nothing of this kind that I'm aware of," Lombardi told me in a phone
interview in September. The tribunal is likely to deal in a
circumscribed fashion with the legal position of Paolo Gabriele. But the
mere fact of a public trial is an expression of the Vatican's desire to
show its new spirit of openness. As for showing the inner workings of
the Vatican itself, the documents may tell us much more.
No one
disputes the authenticity of the documents themselves. No one I spoke
with believes that the butler acted principally on his own initiative.
And no one believes that he was simply being bribed or manipulated by
members of the press into stealing documents. If the press had been
controlling this operation, you would expect lots of juicy details about
the pope and his personal life: his favorite TV programs, whether or
not he falls asleep in meetings or has to wear adult diapers at night.
"But there is none of this among the documents released, in fact nothing
against the pope at all," one priest told me. "This suggests that Paolo
Gabriele did not think he was acting against the pope, to whom he is
very attached. The documents released were almost certainly chosen by
someone -- or a group of people -- highly knowledgeable within the
church, for they all pertain to church policy." Gianluigi Nuzzi, the
principal journalist who broke the story in Sua Santità, insists
that he spoke with several Vatican officials, not merely one, and that
it was they, not he, who took the initiative. The other journalist who
has published the most leaked documents, Marco Lillo of the daily
newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano (The Daily Fact), told me the same thing.
The
Vatican in its indictment chose to cast some doubt on this idealistic
motivation. The documents revealed that Gabriele had allegedly
misappropriated some expensive gifts offered to the pope: a Renaissance
translation of Virgil's Aeneid, a gold nugget, and a check for 100,000
euros, which, because it was made out to His Holiness the Pope, would
have been impossible for him to cash or deposit. Gabriele acknowledged
taking them but says he was planning on giving them back. The indictment
also summarized the results of two psychiatric examinations. The court
psychiatrists found Gabriele sound of mind and able to stand trial, but
one of them found elements of "grandiosity" and "paranoia." Gabriele
himself admitted having a flair for "intelligence" work, suggesting he
may be a bit of a Walter Mitty, enjoying the spy craft of Vati-leaks.
The decision to include this material in a document distributed to the
public implies a desire on the Vatican's part to paint this as a case of
individual pathology.
Commenting on the investigation, Greg Burke,
the new communications director, insisted that Vati-leaks, "is not a
cancer. It's an injured toe that will heal. The body is healthy."
* * *
But if the pope's butler is the toe, there is clearly much more to this scandal.
Seen
as a whole, the Vati-leaks documents have a common denominator: they
describe a series of failed efforts at cleaning up aspects of Church
life -- the finances of Vatican City, the Vatican Bank, and relations
with Italian politics. And precisely because the leakers had lost an
internal power struggle, they appear to have released the documentation
of their struggle as their only weapon left, like the parting shot of a
retreating army.
The principal target of the leakers is the
current Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is
seen by his critics as concentrating too much power in his own hands and
of not using it wisely or well.
"There is no room for internal
criticism or debate, all power is concentrated in a single place," one
letter to the pope states. "In various positions, people are nominated
to positions where they play the contradictory role of both supervisor
and those being supervised ... One sees the demoralization of honest,
dedicated officials who are genuinely attached to the Church, leading
one to believe that the Pope is not aware of what is happening."
Bertone's
supporters insist that this moralizing language masks a naked power
grab, the resistance of members of the Vatican old guard, composed
mainly of the diplomatic corps, against the encroachment of outsiders --
the real reformers, Benedict and Bertone himself.
Traditionally,
the high levels of the Vatican bureaucracy are manned by members of the
Church's diplomatic corps, generally graduates of the elite Pontifical
Ecclesiastical Academy (Pontificia Academia Ecclesiastica) in
Rome. It is like the Vatican's foreign service, and rather than becoming
parish priests its graduates train to work within the Vatican itself.
"These men chose a career, and they regard the Vatican as theirs," one source very close to Bertone told me.
Although
he spent 25 years in Rome as the head of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was something of an outsider in the
Roman curia, of which he is not particularly fond. Bertone is also a
former academic, a longtime professor of Canon Law who was Ratzinger's
trusted deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "They
are personally quite close," one source says. "Bertone was with
Ratzinger when his sister was sick and dying, and helped out in all
sorts of ways from being a friend to doing the dishes."
This
pope is a scholar, a rather timid and solitary man, who doesn't see that
many people and is not that involved in the day-to-day management of
the Church. Karol Wojtyla, at least before he got sick, was an extremely
sociable person. "He always had six people at lunch, another six at
dinner," one source told me. "He met with bishops, Cardinals, papal
nunzios; he had a feel for the pulse within the Church." Benedict is
more likely to have dinner alone with someone like Wojciech Giertych, a
Polish-English Dominican priest, who is the official Vatican theologian.
As a former professor of theology, Ratzinger much prefers discussing
theology to daily Vatican business.
"The pope does not meet with
the members of his government -- the equivalent of his cabinet -- but
twice a year," said one ecclesiastical source. "Can you imagine a
president who only held cabinet meetings twice a year? One reason for
all this letter-writing and all this leaking is that there are not
normal channels of communication." The pope has traveled much less than
his predecessor and focused on writing and publishing books.
Many
of the documents that have been leaked are direct appeals to the pope
from high-level figures within the Church and attempts to buck the
authority of Bertone, who began traveling widely overseas, acting almost
like a surrogate for the pope. The secretary of state was generally
someone who stayed in Rome and made the machinery of the Vatican
administration run. So when things went badly, many in the Church would
blame Bertone. Nor did Bertone endear himself to other Italian cardinals
when he arrogated for himself the lead role in managing the Vatican's
relationship with Italian politics, something that has traditionally
been handled by the Italian Conference of Bishops.
Bertone is
particularly close to Gianni Letta, the right-hand man of Silvio
Berlusconi, Italian prime minister from 2008 until last November and for
much of the past 18 years.
The Church's close association with
Berlusconi became a source of increasing tension as details began to
emerge about his private life: his separation from his (second) wife in
2009, stories of bunga bunga orgies involving professional
escorts and teenage girls, and, finally, a criminal prosecution for
frequenting an alleged underage prostitute. He denies any wrongdoing,
and the trial is pending.
The Church has been in a tricky
position. On the one hand, Berlusconi could hardly seem a less suitable
partner: a twice-divorced self-described playboy who has promoted
through his private television stations a culture of pure materialism
and erotic titillation -- the antithesis of everything the Church stands
for. And yet, as the leader of a center-right government, Berlusconi
has given the Church almost everything it has asked for on a legislative
level: increased support for private religious schools even as public
school budgets are cut, continued tax breaks on the Church's
non-religious property, some of the most restrictive legislation in
Europe on issues like artificial insemination, adoption and stem cell
research, fierce opposition to living wills, end-of-life procedures and
gay marriage.
As long as Berlusconi kept his private life
private, the Church was prepared to close its eyes and hold its nose.
But when the lurid details spilled out into the public arena, it became
increasingly difficult to ignore. A split appeared to develop between
the Conference of Bishops, who are closer to parishioners, and the
leaders walled off in the Vatican, who were reluctant to abandon a
political ally who had delivered so much in recent years.
The editor of the Conference of Bishop's daily newspaper, L'Avvenire,
a man named Dino Boffo, became one of the few voices in the Church to
speak out, criticizing Berlusconi's unbecoming conduct in a series of
stinging editorials. Shortly afterward, Boffo found himself the object
of a vicious attack by the Berlusconi family newspaper, Il Giornale,
which outed him as gay and reported that he had been forced to plead
guilty in a sexual harassment suit. Under the pressure of a massive
press campaign, Boffo resigned.
This story would have simply
been another chapter in the sleazy history of the Berlusconi media. But
what came out demonstrates how tangled relations have become between the
Vatican and Italian media. One of the two documents that Il Giornale
published -- the supposed police file about Boffo's sexual orientation
-- turned out to be a fake. And Boffo disputes the charge. In defending
his decision to publish, the editor of the paper, Vittorio Feltri,
insisted that he had received the dossier from high-level sources inside
the Church itself. And that he had consulted with "a personality in the
Church whom one must trust because of his institutional role."
In
the documents published in Nuzzi's book, Boffo makes clear in a series
of letters to the pope's secretary that he blames Bertone and the editor
in chief of the Vatican daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano
for the leak of the false documents. Boffo quotes Berlusconi's chief
spokesman telling journalists off-the-record, "We did Bertone a favor."
The idea, according to the letters, was a desire on Bertone's part to
weaken the position of the Conference of Italian Bishops, reassert his
own control over the Vatican's management of Italian politics, and
punish the Conference for daring to criticize Berlusconi in their
newspaper.
Along with a full telling of the Boffo affair, His Holiness documents a furious power struggle over the management and finances of the Vatican City itself.
The Vati-leaks crisis in fact began last January, when an Italian TV program called The Untouchables
revealed the contents of a set of letters written by a powerful Vatican
official, Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò, denouncing corruption in the
affairs of the Vatican itself. In 2009, Viganò took over the job of
overseeing the expenses and income of the small Vatican state, known in
Italian as the governatorato, with a budget of over $300 million a
year, which involves everything from the considerable income of the
Vatican Museums to maintaining the enormous physical plant of the
Vatican palace and gardens to dealing with suppliers and contractors.
Viganò,
who has a reputation as a rigorous manager, inherited a Vatican
administration operating at a loss. By cutting costs and eliminating
what he called "obvious situations of corruption," he produced a surplus
within a year.
Despite -- or perhaps because of -- his
successful cost-cutting measures, Viganò was called to a meeting with
Bertone, who informed Viganò that he was being removed from his post and
sent as papal envoy to Washington. Viganò then took the quite
exceptional step of trying to go around the secretary of state and
directly to the pope himself, trying to reverse the decision of his own
order of transfer. "Holy Father, my transfer right now would provoke
much disorientation and discouragement in those who have believed it was
possible to clean up so many situations of corruption and abuse of
power that have been rooted in the management of so many departments,"
Viganò wrote to the pope on March 27, 2011.
One of the things that set him off was a press campaign, again appearing in the Berlusconi family newspaper, Il Giornale,
which preceded his defenestration. As resistance to his management grew
inside the Vatican, a series of unsigned articles began to appear in
the paper, clearly written, in Viganò's view, by someone with intimate
knowledge of the Vatican. Viganò suspected that it was someone close to
Bertone. Whatever the case, someone inside the Vatican was feeding
stories to ll Giornale to grease Viganò's fall from power, just as they had in the Boffo affair.
What
is common to these episodes is that Vatican leaking did not start or
end with the Vati-leaks scandal. The furious letter-writing activity of
both Boffo and Viganò was stimulated by what they perceived to be
well-placed leaks from within the Vatican leadership itself. Leaking has
become the weapon of choice in contemporary Vatican warfare.
* * *
Anonymous
letters, damaging dossiers, and poison penmanship are old staples of
Vatican intrigue. The big difference is that all this material was once
kept rigorously private -- its power derived from its mere existence and
the potential threat of being made public. In the 1930s, for example,
the Vatican was trying to restrict the activities of Padre Pio, a monk
from Puglia who claimed to have received the stigmata and who was
developing a cult following, all of which Church authorities viewed with
extreme suspicion. After the Vatican ruled that Padre Pio could no
longer perform mass in public and ordered that he be transferred to a
distant mountain retreat, followers of the Pugliese monk cooked up a
meaty dossier that contained the alleged sexual and moral peccadillos of
the region's clergy. A member of Pio's inner circle printed up copies
of the dossier and brought them to a meeting at the Vatican. The result
of the encounter was the Vatican bought up all copies of the dossier and
lightened the restrictions on the suspect friar with the stigmata, who
is now one of the Church's leading saints.
That was an example
of the old way of doings things at the Vatican: avoiding scandal at all
cost and keeping everything under the cloak of silence. Silence suited
the Church perfectly. In the case of Padre Pio, it allowed the Church
maximum flexibility. The Vatican could continue to assemble evidence
against him should they later need to eliminate him while leaving open
the option -- because the battle had remained private -- of later
embracing Pio as a revered saint, as the Church ultimately decided to
do. The contemporary world doesn't permit this. The scabrous details of
the struggle between the Vatican and Pio would probably have been all
over the Internet in no time.
The
traditional aversion to scandal at all cost was notoriously -- and
disastrously -- at work throughout the decades in which the pedophile
priest scandal built and built. Starting in the 1980s, the reaction of
Church officials was uniformly and appallingly similar in every corner
of the planet -- whether in Louisiana, Ireland, Belgium, Australia,
Austria, Malta, Phoenix, Boston or Los Angeles: deny there was a
problem, blame the victims, transfer the perpetrators, and try to keep
everyone quiet. When the victims sued, or the perpetrators threatened to
make trouble, the strategy was pay them off and seal the court records.
I remember a friend of mine who worked at the Vatican telling me in the
early 1990's: "You wouldn't believe the amounts of money the Church is
spending to settle these cases!" If that was well known to my friend, a
middle-level functionary, it was well known to anyone in the Vatican
hierarchy who cared to know. In the U.S., the costs were reaching the
hundreds of millions and would eventually surpass $2 billion. Of course,
if the Church had dealt honestly with the problem then, it might have
limited the impact of the scandal and the cost of litigation -- not to
mention the seemingly overlooked goal of protecting children left at
risk and healing those already harmed.
The lesson of both the
pedophilia scandal and Vati-leaks is that the Church can no longer
control information about itself. In the past, when police arrested
priests who were acting out, they generally took the matter to the local
bishop, and newspapers often chose, out of deference, not to write
about it. Changes in public opinion -- anger and outrage over wrongdoing
in the Church -- and in information technology make it impossible to
keep the lid on scandal.
There is much the Church can and has
begun to do in this direction: adopting international banking standards;
providing more information about internal finances; instituting better
procedures for investigating and punishing wrongdoing among priests and
nuns.
But transparency is not as easy a matter for the Catholic
Church as it might be for secular organizations. A corporation or branch
of government can actually gain in public legitimacy and consensus
through greater transparency, issuing detailed data about their
operations and finances, publishing the minutes of their meetings, and
instituting freedom of information laws. "Sunshine is the best
disinfectant," Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said of
corruption. But there is a limited amount of sunshine the Vatican can
allow into its walls without violating its very nature. Absolute
monarchies are willfully opaque and mysterious; they are an archaic and
charismatic form of leadership that derive much of their power from
their mystery, unapproachability, and unknowability. In democracies, we
expect national leaders to issue exhaustive medical and financial
records. In Thailand -- one of the last monarchies with genuine power --
anyone can be prosecuted for criticizing the king or disclosing
information about his health or finances.
The pope -- with his
golden mitre and ermine-lined robes sitting upon a throne -- is part and
parcel of this tradition. Although human, the pope is thought to have
been filled with the Holy Spirit on his election and to become
infallible (at least in some things). The Catholic tradition rests
heavily on the appeal of mystery. The priest was traditionally a
special, higher being, celibate and richly dressed in ancient garb. He
celebrated mass with his back to the congregation, swinging urns of
incense and repeating the liturgy in an ancient, incomprehensible
tongue, Latin, which served as a kind of magic incantation. The holy
communion that ends each mass is itself a kind miracle -- it is not a
symbolic reenactment of the last supper but the wafer and wine that the
priest serves to his humble parishioners is supposed to be, quite
literally, the body and the blood of Christ. Too much transparency --
the equivalent of placing a Webcam on the Pope and his cardinals --
would strip away layers of mystery. It would be like pulling away the
curtain at the end of The Wizard of Oz, revealing that the awe-inspiring figure we first see in Oz's throne room is nothing but a frail and highly fallible old man.
"The
problem is that journalists only pay attention to the tiny part of the
Church that is in the Vatican and ignore the tens of thousands of
priests and nuns out in the world doing good work," the pope's
spokesman, Father Lombardi, said with a resigned air. And it is quite
true. Over the years, I have met extraordinary men and women who have
sincerely given their lives to help others: feeding the poor and healing
the sick. Just before coming to Rome, I visited a parish on the
periphery of Florence, a neglected poor part of the city with bleak
public housing projects, few services, and a largely immigrant
population. But it has an extremely vital church -- an inexpensive
prefab structure that looks like a warehouse building or an airplane
hangar built in the hot and dusty empty lot between two high-rise
public-housing buildings.
The priest, Alessandro Santoro, is
trying to translate the life of Christ into contemporary terms: he lives
in a small apartment in public housing like his parishioners, and he
has a job doing manual labor (like his parishioners) on top of his
priestly duties. Yet he has created an extremely dynamic parish church
that hums with activity, a preschool and Sunday school, language classes
for immigrants, a shop for products made by his parishioners and even a
small publishing house. Santoro has created a significant microfinance
project for his community, gathering some 160,000 euros in charitable
contributions that can then be used as interest-free loans to people in
the community. The lenders can withdraw their money when they need or
want it but in the meanwhile the money is made available to others in
the community. "So far we have a perfect record of 190 loans repaid on
time for a total of 400,000 euros," Santoro explained. The visit was a
refreshing contrast with the world of power and money conjured up by
Vati-leaks: an example of someone trying (apparently with success) to
put Christian principles to work in life.
But it is impossible
to ignore the Vatican hierarchy, just as Father Alessandro has been
unable to ignore it. In 2009, he was removed from his position in
Florence when he celebrated the marriage of two parishioners, one of
whom was a transsexual. "This person was born a man but had a sex change
operation 30 years earlier in England years before it was possible in
Italy," Santoro told me. "She was registered as a woman according to
Italian law, and the couple had been legally married in Italy. They were
good members of our congregation, and when they asked to be married in
the Church, I didn't see how, in good conscience, I could say no."
Almost immediately, Santoro was sent off for several months of
reflection and penitence. In the meanwhile, the congregation rebelled
and refused to cooperate with Santoro's replacement. After a standoff
lasting nearly a year, Santoro refused to repudiate his actions but the
bishop restored him to his post amid admonitions not to repeat his
error. Santoro is delighted to be back with his old parish but lives a
bit on edge in tension with his bishop.
"The Church has a single
model of family that it considers acceptable: husband, wife and
children. But 80 percent of my parishioners live in violation of Church
doctrine," Santoro explains. "They are divorced, unmarried couples that
live together, gay couples, children with different fathers. But they
are my people, my family. I love them and I have no intention of
treating them any differently from the rest of the congregation ...
There is a terrible distance between what the Church preaches and the
real lives of people. The Church has to reduce this distance or die."
The
call for transparency goes hand in hand with a desire for greater
dialogue between the community of believers and the Church hierarchy.
The Internet world is a world of fragmented authority, of transparency,
and one in which 3 billion users expect to participate and have their
say. The Catholic Church is a top-down organization run from Rome with
an unquestioned authority at its head. "Roma locuta, causa finita,"
"Rome has spoken, the case is closed," is a phrase often attributed to
Saint Augustine, indicating that the word from Saint Peter's settles
every argument.
The Vatican leadership is aware of this problem,
but also very much believes that a Church that compromises too much to
suit public opinion will weaken its own foundations. In a recent
interview explaining the need to crack down on the main association of
American nuns, The Leadership Conference of Women Religious [LCWR],
Cardinal William Levada (Ratzinger's successor as the head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), said: "Too many people
crossing the LCWR screen, who are supposedly representing the Catholic
Church, aren't representing the church with any reasonable sense of
product identity."
But holding the line on strict orthodoxy, as
John Paul II and Benedict XVI have tried to do, has not reversed the
negative trends for the Church: the dwindling number of aging priests
and nuns, lower attendance at mass, and a growing majority of believers
in the U.S. and Europe who are not convinced by the Church's teachings
on contraception, divorce, premarital sex, the ordination of women,
married priests, and gay marriage. A recent study by the Pew Forum on
Religion & Public Life showed that lapsed Catholics are now the
third-largest denomination in the U.S. after practicing Catholics and
Baptists. (Overall numbers are up because of immigration from Latin
America, and in the rest of world because of population growth in the
developing world. But numbers and enthusiasm in the U.S. and Europe are
low.) "Don't you think the leadership knows that its doctrines on birth
control, divorce, homosexuality are out of step with the life that
hundreds of millions of Catholics lead?" one Bertone supporter I spoke
with told me. "The pope is trying to change things, but he has to move
slowly. The times for an ancient institution like the Church are
necessarily slow."
On the one hand, Pope Benedict has reinforced
forms of traditional liturgy: relaxing the prohibitions on performing
Latin masses, and reviving the papal vestments and pageantry that had
fallen out of use. At the same time, he shows signs of flexibility and
gentleness that belie his old nickname as "God's Rottweiler." In fact,
he quietly undid one of Pope John Paul II's strictest -- and cruelest --
initiatives: refusing to let priests who have decided to marry be
released of their priestly vows and remain members of the Church in good
standing. Benedict allowed the use of condoms by male prostitutes in
Africa in order to limit the spread of AIDS -- 30 years after the
beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, yes, but a big concession for a pope
known for his orthodoxy. On a visit to Milan this summer, shortly after
the Vati-leaks scandal hit its peak, Benedict went out of his way to
reach out to divorced Catholics, calling their condition "one of the
great causes of suffering for the Church today, and we do not have
simple solutions." He insisted, however, that the Church "must do
everything possible so that such people feel loved and accepted, that
they are not 'outsiders' even if they cannot receive absolution and the
Eucharist."
What does appear to be the case is that,
paradoxically, the Vati-leaks scandal appears to have energized the pope
and the Vatican leadership. The pope has broken out of his solitude,
and appears to be taking a more active role in important Vatican
business. He has reached out to cardinals from other parts of the world
in a clear sign that he does not intend to remain prisoner of the Roman
curia. The very fact of a public trial on such a delicate matter --
quite apart from what its proceedings may reveal -- reflects a newfound
commitment at the Vatican to transparency.
There are two ways
that the Catholic Church can interpret its mandate to become more open.
One is a more limited form of transparency, seeing it essentially as a
matter of better communication: providing information more quickly and
readily so as to better shape the way the Church's story is told. A
second and more radical way of thinking of transparency would be to
embrace the bottom-up nature of the Internet world, to encourage greater
internal democracy and engage in dialogue with the community of
believers.
While the Vatican has clearly begun to adopt the
first course, it is very unlikely to embrace the second and more
expansive view of transparency, disappointing its liberal critics and
followers. The retired Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria
Martini, who died in late August, left an interview from his deathbed as
a kind of last testament to the Church. It was a surprisingly frank
call for radical change. "We need to ask ourselves whether people are
listening to the Church's teachings on sexual matters. Is the Church an
authority in this or only a kind of media caricature? ...The Church is
200 years behind. Why doesn't it shake itself off? Are we afraid? Why
fear instead of courage?"
And yet. The fact that Martini found
the courage to speak so candidly only posthumously demonstrates that
substantive dialogue within the Church is still a difficult, slow-moving
proposition. As the current trial illustrates, the Church's traditional
pace of change does not suit it to the age of the Internet.
