Greg DalyPope Francis’s reform agenda is wide-ranging, writes Greg Daly.
Within seconds of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran’s announcement that in Jorge Mario Bergoglio the Church again had a Pope, it was clear that the new papacy would not be business as usual.
Appearing without the red shoulder-cape worn by his predecessors, Pope Francis smiled down clad in a simple white cassock. Stories claiming that he had spurned the traditional red mozetta, declaring “Carnival time is over”, were denied by Rome, and indeed, the fact that the Holy Father has stood alongside huge images of scarlet-caped predecessors as he has canonised and beatified them should settle any doubts about whether the Pontiff really despises the traditional papal trappings.
Nonetheless, it was clear from those initial moments of his being announced as the first Pope Francis that his was to be a papacy marked by simplicity, as fitting for a Pope who had adopted the name of St Francis of Assisi.
Early stories about him shunning the red shoes – of whatever shade – of his predecessors all too often missed the point that when the likes of Benedict XVI wore bright red shoes, they did so as a reminder that the Pope walks in the footsteps of martyrs. The symbolism had gone unnoticed, however, as Benedict’s footwear had become a distraction, drawing attention away from the depth and gravity of his teaching. For the new Pope, it was clear that symbols that no longer spoke clearly and distracted from the Church’s mission needed to be put aside.
Such pointers towards a new style of papacy are encouraging and intriguing, but Pope Francis was elected by a conclave appalled by the confusion and corruption of the Vatileaks scandals and determined to see curial reform. For Jesuit commentator Fr Thomas Reese, the Pontiff’s more substantive reforms aren’t coming fast enough.
Plan to merge
Criticising how February’s consistory of cardinals focused on reorganising Rome’s 12 pontifical councils, Fr Reese points out that the councils typically lack decision-making authority, and says a plan to merge these into two congregations is something that only cardinals could think important.
“That it took the Council of Cardinals two years to come up with this reshuffling of boxes on the organisational chart simply shows they really don’t know what they are doing,” he says, continuing, “It should have taken two months to develop this plan, not two years. At this pace, Pope Francis will be dead before real reform hits the curia.”
Such an analysis, however, sells the Holy Father short.
One of Francis’ first moves on becoming Pope was to establish a ‘kitchen cabinet’, the Council of Cardinal Advisers, in order to be able to consult on changes in the Roman Curia and the wider Church with a permanent body drawn from around the world. Initially eight-strong but subsequently boosted by the addition of Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the council, sometimes called the ‘C9’, brings a wide range of expertise and views to the papal table, and ensures that while the Pope remains Bishop of Rome his principal advisors are representative of a truly global Church.
Among the Holy Father’s Cardinal Advisers is Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, who has been tasked with sorting out the Holy See’s finances as head of the new Secretariat for the Economy. Having already discovered Rome to be roughly €1.3 billion wealthier than previously believed, the secretariat has now issued a set of procedures obliging every Vatican department head to sign a legally binding declaration confirming that their reports are complete and correct, with each department’s external assets being certified by whichever financial institutions hold them.
Pope Francis has backed the secretariat’s work, deciding against various proposals put forward by other curial cardinals to restrain the secretariat, and signing into law on February 22 a legal framework for Rome’s new financial watchdogs. It is expected that at some point in mid-2015 the secretariat will release Rome’s first ever consolidated financial statement, which will enable the secretariat to provide guidance on reducing and rationalising expenditure, and on better using resources. When people give money to the Church, as Cardinal Pell has said, they expect it to be used responsibly and well.
Another member of the C9 is Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the secretary of which is Rome’s former ‘chief prosecutor’ Msgr Robert Oliver, who has served as promoter of justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Instituted by the Holy Father in March 2014, the commission is uniquely outside the usual curial structure and reports directly to Pope Francis. With most of its work being conducted by working groups between the plenary sessions, the commission is an advisory body tackling such issues as promoting safeguarding and accountability with the Church.
Primarily composed of lay people, including two abuse survivors, the commission cannot but be accountable. Both Irish survivor Marie Collins and Pete Saunders, the British founder of the National Association of People Abused in Childhood, have said that if firm action is not taken within the next two years on such issues as the disciplining of bishops, the likelihood is that both survivors will step down. The public relations damage such resignations could cause should ensure that the commission is every bit as effective as it has the potential to be.
Increased lay involvement is looking like a key change in Francis’s Rome in general, with a succession of firms having been hired to place their skills at Rome’s service. Leading consultancy firm McKinsey & Co has been hired to help modernise the Holy See’s communications operations and accounting firm KPMG has been brought in to raise Rome’s accounting to international standards while Ernst & Young examines management and economic activity within the Vatican State and Promontory Financial Group works to enhance Vatican Bank safeguards against money-laundering and terror financing.
Expertise
While the use of such expertise is not unprecedented, in the past it was far less prevalent and was viewed by many with suspicion, entailing as it was thought to have done a “managerial” approach that could be read as somehow lacking in faith or trust in God. Francis’ willingness to avail of such external expertise, however, reflects a more pragmatic attitude of “test everything; hold fast what is good”.
If the use of largely English-speaking professionals from the business world helps to ‘de-clericalise’ and ‘de-Italianise’ Vatican administration, so much the better. American commentator George Weigel is just one of those who has long argued that the latter is crucial if the curia is effectively to fulfil its role.
That the vicariate of Rome, which runs the Diocese of Rome for the Pope, should be locally staffed is something that Weigel believes goes without saying, but, as he wrote on the eve of the last conclave, “the Roman Curia exists to support the Bishop of Rome in his mission as universal pastor of the Church and its personnel should reflect that global mission”. That Cardinal Pell’s Secretariat of the Economy has English as an official working language is something Weigel would surely applaud.
Fr Reese may have viewed with contempt how curial reforms have begun with the relatively powerless pontifical councils rather than the congregations and dicasteries, but for Weigel, just days before Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis, this was a priority. “As for structure,” he wrote in First Things, “the first order of business is getting the proliferation of pontifical councils under control, merging some, eliminating others, and reducing many of these entities to the in-house think tanks they were originally intended to be, rather than the document-producing bureaucratic machines they’ve become.”
As things stand, it appears that the Holy Father intends to merge together the majority of pontifical councils into two new congregations. A Congregation for Justice and Peace would include secretariats for life and human ecology, for justice and peace, for migrants, for health care, and for charity, while a Congregation for Laity and the Family would include secretariats for laity, for family, for young people, for women, and for ecclesiastical movements.
Aside from reducing the number of high-ranking prelates who would be needed to run Vatican bodies, the planned restructuring should give more prominence in Rome to Catholic social teaching and to the needs of the laity who make up rather more than 99% of the world’s Catholics.
Changes
These changes were discussed at the most recent consistory of cardinals, which took place over two days last month, and which began with Pope Francis explaining how the 165 assembled cardinals – including 20 new ones – would be informed of work done over recent months to develop a new Apostolic Constitution for the reform of the curia, reminding the cardinals that the reform had been “strongly advocated” by most cardinals during the general congregations before the conclave that elected him.
Under the last papacy consistories were one-day affairs, and indeed over recent decades they have typically taken place two years or more apart; under Pope Francis, however, this appears to be changing, with this year’s consistory coming almost exactly a year after last year’s; it appears that in so gathering his cardinals, the Holy Father intends to use the consistory as a kind of annual ‘senate’ to consider major questions in the Church, as indeed consistories were during the middle ages, before becoming largely ceremonial affairs.
In line with Pope Francis’ wish to bring the Church’s peripheries into the centre, the composition of the College of Cardinals is changing. Although it is still demographically unrepresentative of the realities of the modern Church, with more than half of the voting cardinals coming from Europe and North America, despite most Catholics living in the developing world it is telling that, for the second time running, none of the new voting cardinals are from North America, instead coming from such diverse countries as Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), Tonga, Ethiopia, Thailand and Cape Verde. 52% of the cardinals in the 2013 conclave were from Europe, but currently only 45% are, the lowest number ever.
Pope Francis seems to be continuing a trend begun by his predecessor, who, having decided but not announced his resignation, surprised Vatican watchers by calling a small consistory in November 2012, the second of that year, in which he created six new cardinals, none from Europe. This, said Pope Benedict, was a deliberate attempt to reflect how “the Church is the Church of all peoples, and so she speaks in the various cultures of the different continents”.
An important topic in the consistory discussions was how to bridge the gaps between Rome and the Church at a local level, as well as to what extent issues are best dealt with centrally or locally, whether by dioceses or by bishops’ conferences. As Pope Francis recognised in Evangelii Gaudium, the role of the latter is still not as clearly defined as it might be, with such conferences clearly needing both pastoral authority and some teaching authority.
The theological aspect of this needs careful handling, as CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller recently pointed out in an article in L’Osservatore Romano: promoting a correct decentralisation of the Church’s administrative structures is not about giving more power to bishops’ conferences but about allowing them to exercise “the genuine responsibility they have based on their members’ episcopal power of teaching and governance, naturally always in union with the primacy of the Pope and the Roman Church”.
Evangelii Gaudium recognised that the Church has much to learn from our Orthodox brothers and sisters, about both the meaning of episcopal collegiality and their experience of synodality. It may not be insignificant that the theologian Yves Congar, an important influence on Francis according to papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, had drawn upon the Russian Orthodox notion of sobornost – usually rendered as ‘conciliarity’ – in arguing for an enhanced collegiality within the Church.
Senate-style consistories are already going some way to bridge the gap between Rome and the local Church around the world, as is the Council of Cardinal Advisers. Important, too, is the concept of ‘synodality’, which entails the role meetings of bishops have in the governance of the Church. It seems that the Pope hopes synodality can help build unity in the Church, having said of the Synod Fathers before last year’s extraordinary synod that, “I prefer that they yell a few strong words against each other and then embrace, rather than speak against each other in hiding”.
Conflict, for the Pope, is not something to be feared, and properly engaged with, it can lead – with the guidance of the Holy Spirit – to a deep agreement in unity, though not in uniformity. According to Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, the Pontiff wants “a dynamic and permanent synod, not as a structured entity but as an action, as osmosis between the centre and the periphery.”
Fr Reese may go too far in his criticisms of the Pope’s reforms, discounting how much has already changed, but he has a point: a huge amount remains to be done.
What is next remains to be seen, though proposals for term limits of curial appointments could do something to tackle curial careerism and to ensure that curial officials are people with pastoral experience and a genuine knowledge of what Francis calls “God’s holy faithful people”.
Indeed, in Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis even wrote of how he would have to think about “a conversion of the papacy” Citing Pope St John Paul II’s request for help in finding “a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation”, he said “we have made little progress in this regard”.
“Pastoral ministry in a missionary key,” he went on, “seeks to abandon the complacent attitude that says: ‘We have always done it this way’.” It remains to be seen what is next in Pope Francis’ agenda of reform, which, as he told the assembled cardinals last month, “is not an end in itself, but a means to give a strong Christian witness; to promote a more effective evangelisation; to promote a more fruitful ecumenical spirit; to encourage a more constructive dialogue with all.”
St Francis of Assisi was commissioned in the middle ages to rebuild the Church; it seems that 800 years later his papal namesake is determined to follow in his footsteps.