Pope Francis
presaged a revolution in the running of the Catholic church when, at
the weekend, he announced the formation of an eight-strong panel of
cardinals from all parts of the world who are to advise him on
governance and the reform of the Vatican.The Italian church historian Alberto Melloni, writing in the Corriere della Sera, called it the "most important step in the history of the church for the past 10 centuries".
For the first time, a pope will be helped by a global panel of advisers who look certain to wrest power from the Roman Curia, the church's central bureaucracy.
Several of the group's members will come to the job with a record of vigorous reform and outspoken criticism of the status quo.
None has ever served in the Italian-dominated Curia in Rome and only one is an Italian: Giuseppe Bertello, the governor of the Vatican City State.
The panel will be headed by one of the most dynamic figures in the Catholic leadership: Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras and head of the global charity Caritas Internationalis. A polymath who plays the saxophone and piano, Maradiaga has trained as a pilot and speaks six languages. Like Pope Francis, he has long been a tenacious critic of economic inequality.
In an interview with the Italian television news service Tgcom24, Maradiaga said his group would "certainly" be tackling the ever-controversial Vatican bank.
The remaining members of the group were each chosen to represent one of the six continents. They include Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who imposed a "zero tolerance" policy on clerical sex abuse in his archdiocese of Boston, and George Pell, the archbishop of Sydney, who gave an unusually forthright interview before the election of Francis in which he said the leaking of the former pope Benedict's correspondence last year had identified "substantial problems" that needed to be addressed "in a real way".
Another formidably savvy member of the panel will be Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, the archbishop of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the 1990s, he was handed the responsibility of overseeing his country's transition to democracy following the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
A statement from the Vatican said the group would not be meeting until October. But it added that Francis was already talking to its members.
The statement said they had been entrusted with drawing up a scheme "for revising the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus", which dates from 1988 and was drafted by Pope John Paul II. The last thoroughgoing shake-up of the Curia, however, was by Pope Paul VI more than 40 years ago.
Pope Francis appeared to be doing more than just initiating a much-needed bureaucratic reform. A global panel of mostly diocesan archbishops will give some real meaning to "collegiality": the idea that the church's pastoral leaders should have a role in its overall governance. Collegiality was enjoined by the Second Vatican Council which ended its work in 1965, but only very partially implemented under Paul and the charismatic, but autocratic, John Paul.
Maradiaga said: "Above all, we shall be giving first-hand information in contact with the bishoprics – perspectives other than those that get to the Holy See."