After a meeting earlier this month of the presiding board of the the
Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women
(CLAR), a transcript of the Pope’s words was made by those present; a translation can be found here.
From his remarks, I found myself (as have others) homing in on the
following words: “… it is difficult. In the Curia, there are also holy
people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of
corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The ‘gay lobby’ is
mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…
“The reform of the Roman Curia is something that almost all Cardinals
asked for in the Congregations preceding the Conclave. I also asked for
it. I cannot promote the reform myself, these matters of
administration… I am very disorganised, I have never been good at this.
But the cardinals of the Commission will move it forward. There is
Rodríguez Maradiaga, who is Latin American, who is in front of it, there
is Errázuriz, they are very organised. The one from Munich is also very
organised. They will move it forward.”
The Munich connection is worth a second look.
According to Sandro Magister,
as well as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, who is a
member of the commission, there is also a certain Thomas von
Mitschke-Collande, who was the manager of the Munich branch of what
Magister calls “the most famous and mysterious company of managerial
consulting in the world” (McKinsey & Company, an American global
management consulting firm that “focuses on solving issues of concern to
senior management.”)
In matters of the Church, Magister says, this Mitschke-Collande
“knows his stuff. Last year he published a book with a title that was
hardly reassuring: ‘Does the Church want to destroy itself? Facts and
analyses presented by a business consultant.’ The diocese of Berlin
turned to him to get its accounts back in order, and the German
episcopal conference asked him to draw up a plan to save on costs and
personnel.
The proposal, which [Pope Francis] welcomed enthusiastically,
was made to him by Fr Hans Langerdörfer, the powerful secretary of the
German episcopal conference, a Jesuit.” So it appears that
Mitschke-Collande has in fact been appointed to sort out the Roman
Curia’s notorious functional inefficiencies: a good and indispensable
thing to do.
But can the Roman Curia actually be reformed (rather than
simply reorganised) by a management consultant expert? The problem seems
to be more than one of managerial disorganisation, though no doubt it
would be helpful to get things moving a little more smoothly.
But how
will he diagnose and solve the deeper, more spiritual problems of
corruption and intrigue that have caused such scandal in recent years?
What about that “gay lobby”, which Pope Francis says definitely exists?
And what exactly is the function of the commission of eight cardinals
the Pope has appointed to “advise him in the government of the
universal Church and to study a plan for revising the apostolic
constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus”?
They are Cardinal Oscar
Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who will coordinate
the whole operation; Cardinal Guiseppe Bertello, governor of the
Vatican City State; Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, the
retired Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of
Bombay, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo
Pasinya of Kinshasa, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and
Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney. They, says Pope Francis,
will also “move it forward”, the reform of the Curia, that is.
But how can they? They don’t meet until October, and they are chosen
to represent the whole world, they live at the four corners of the
globe: the problem is in Rome. No doubt they will be crucial in revising
the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia.
But isn’t there a more
urgent problem? What will revising Pastor Bonus do to cure the wicked
corruption which undoubtedly helped to overwhelm poor Pope Benedict,
bringing his pontificate to a tragically premature end? Don’t heads need
to roll now? We need these people out, quickly, we need a
purge of the guilty men. We need, surely, someone who knows the curia
but is not of it, preferably an Italian, someone committed to reform who
can actually sweep the place clean.
We need a Godly hit man. That “gay
lobby” for instance: someone must know who these people are: why can’t
they simply be fired? The trouble seems to be that there is nobody on
the spot with both the authority and the will actually to do the deed.
The obvious person to do all this on the Pope’s behalf ought surely
to be his secretary of State, his “prime minister”: but if Sandro
Magister is right (and he usually is, it seems) the present incumbent,
Tarcisio Bertone, is a part of the problem: a year or two after the
election of Pope Benedict he wrote an article
describing Bertone sardonically as “the man who was supposed to help
the Pope”. It is generally supposed that he is on his way out; it has
not gone unnoticed that he was not appointed to Pope Francis’s new
commission.
So, who will replace him? It will be a key decision in all
this, perhaps the key decision. The name that keeps on
occurring to me is that of Cardinal Angelo Scola, who is supposed to be
the papabile the curial Cardinals least wanted to be elected Pope,
precisely because of his apparently rather fierce views on curial
reform. He sounds ideal: but what do I know?
The Holy Father is obviously not rushing into the reform of the Roman
Curia, and I have no doubt that he is wiser than I am in all this. He
is, it seems, getting to know his Curia personally, not least
importantly in the Casa Santa Marta.
Perhaps I am being unduly
impatient; perhaps, too, there is a touch of culpable vengefulness in my
strong desire to see those who betrayed Pope Benedict struck down and
sent far away from Rome to desolate parishes in swamps and industrial
wastelands where they will have to do some real pastoral work rather
than spending their every waking hour plotting against each other before
enjoying a leisurely lunch in the Borgo Pio.
The trouble is, of course,
that though this might turn some of them into holy priests and save
their souls, it would not in the case of others be fair on their people.
In those cases, their bishop would need to keep a close eye on the
situation.
Either way, the thing has to be done; and it can surely only be done
on the spot by a single strong man loyal to the Pope and with his
authority to act (rather than by a commission of distant cardinals at
the ends of the earth).
I hope and pray it will be done soon, so that
the Holy Father does not have this problem on his shoulders as well as
all the other cares of his office. He urgently needs it: and he deserves
nothing less.