On July 29, 2024, Francis appointed two new archbishops: he appointed Msgr. John Joseph Kennedy to the position of Secretary for the Disciplinary Section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) and Msgr. Philippe Curbelié to the position of Undersecretary of the same Curia ministry, while the other Secretary of the DDF, Msgr. Armando Matteo, a theologian esteemed by the Pope, has never held the episcopal dignity. His colleague, Msgr. Philippe Curbelié, is therefore subordinate to him, even though he is an Archbishop. This is far from being an isolated case.
The Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization is the Pope, and he has two Pro-Prefects. As Andrea Gagliarducci explains in MondayVatican, “One, Luis Antonio Tagle, is a cardinal, and the other, Rino Fisichella, is an archbishop.”
Likewise, when the section for migrants and refugees was created within the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, it was provided with two Undersecretaries, one of whom was made a Cardinal, Michael Czerny: the Dicastery is headed by a Cardinal, one section of which has two Undersecretaries, one of whom is a Cardinal, the other a simple priest.
However, Gagliarducci recalls, “In the Vatican’s curial system, Secretaries are Archbishops. At least, they have been,” until the current pontificate. The journalist mentions the “asymmetric government” put into place by Francis. According to him, the Pope “has shown that he considers episcopal appointments more like a military rank than part of the dignity of a specific role” in the government of the Church.
In this hypothesis, a Bishop would be for the Pope a cleric “who is called to swear fidelity to the Church and obedience to the Pope. If the cardinal is the strategic consultant, the bishop for the Pope is the colonel in battle, faithful to his general.”
The cardinalate thus takes on an honorary form, “that also serves to send messages to the world and create a basis of representation.” And Andrea Gagliarducci remarks that the government of the Church “is centered on the Pope, now more than ever.” Under previous pontificates, the fact of conferring the episcopate on prelates exercising senior curial charges underlined their role as collaborators with the Bishop of Rome in the government of the universal Church.
Conversely, in the current asymmetrical governance, “the choices are ad personam. [...] In that case, the asymmetric Curia also leads to an inverted episcopal dimension, in which the mission the Pope gives counts, not the episcopal ordination itself.”
But is this not the opposite of the episcopal collegiality of Vatican II? That is in fact exactly what is happening: the Constitution Praedicate Evangelium that reformed the Curia, and the legal and theological justification given by Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda—now Cardinal Ghirlanda—seriously called into question the origin of jurisdiction in the Church.
The Question of the Origin of the Power of Jurisdiction in the Church
We have previously commented on this question of jurisdiction. This section is taken from an earlier article from FSSPX News. The principal problem is that in the external forum, many of these roles require the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction delegated by the Pope.
However, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, by divine right, can only be received by clerics, as old Canon 118 reminded us. They do not receive it by ordination, but by the conferment of an office by their superior. Only the pope receives this power directly from Christ, and in its fullness.
Lumen Gentium modified this doctrine, asserting that, for bishops, jurisdiction is not received from the pope but from the sacrament of Holy Orders itself. This error, condemned by the Church up to and including Pius XII, reiterated many times in later documents and by the new canon law, creates the other error of collegiality and the much vaunted synodal praxis.
How then, from a modernist point of view, can the systematic attribution of jurisdiction to the laity [and the mismatched rank of Curia appointments] be resolved? Fr. Ghirlanda, one of the most important Roman canonists, surprisingly explained this during the presentation of Praedicate Evangelium.
The prefect of a dicastery, explains the Jesuit, “has no authority because of the hierarchical rank with which he is invested,” but because of the “power” he receives from the pope. “If the prefect and the secretary of a dicastery are bishops, this should not lead to the misunderstanding that their authority comes from the hierarchical rank they receive, as if they were acting under their own power.”
“The vicarious power to exercise an office is the same whether it is received from a bishop, a priest, a consecrated man or woman, or a lay person.”
In unequivocal terms, Fr. Ghirlanda concludes: “the power of governance in the Church does not come from the sacrament of Holy Orders, but from the canonical mission.” With this sentence, the Jesuit Ghirlanda cancels the error of Lumen Gentium in the blink of an eye, as if nothing had happened… but with the aim of including the laity in the exercise of the power of governance – which is contrary to divine law.
John XXIII initiated his reforms by consecrating the cardinals of the Curia who were not bishops. The canonists explain that the Curia must above all be composed of bishops, to show the participation in the “solicitude of all the churches” which belongs to each of them by his ordination and his membership in the college of bishops.