Another Prelate For Whom Being An Apostle Is An Ill Fit

Cardinal Bertone--just because

Pope Francis wants to rough it, 

why should the rest of us suffer.

Pope Francis decision to live in a two-room suite in the Santa Marta Guesthouse rather than occupy the nine-room papal suite in the Vatican Palace has chided many bishops—not, however, Archbishop Myers of Newark or Bishop Tebartz-van Elst (formerly of Limburg)—into looking at their own living arrangements.  Ironically the papal suite in the Apostolic palace is not as opulent as one might think, and Francis’ rationale for continuing at the Domus Sanctae Marthae (as it is officially known) was not to avoid luxury but to avoid isolation.  Francis compared the papal apartments to an inverted funnel—spacious but with narrow entry—meaning that while the apartments were large they narrowed the pope’s world because living there kept access of people to him highly limited.   Pope Francis wants to have people around him and prefers the more open atmosphere of the guesthouse.

While other prelates have begun—often for some with embarrassment and for others with reluctance—to scale down their princely residences, one brave soul among the College of Cardinals has decided to raise the banner of resistance and flaunt his ecclesiastical princedom right in the face of the Holy Father.  Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro Bertone, SDB, former papal Secretary of State, has taken over two apartments—each somewhat spacious in its own right—in the Vatican San Carlo Palace to create a supreme Vatican bachelor pad for himself.  Bertone was brought in by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 to replace Cardinal Angelo Sodano as Vatican Secretary of State.  Sodano’s administration had been tarnished by allegations of corruption on various levels, most notably failures to deal effectively with issues of clerical sexual abuse and  financial issues concerning the Vatican Bank, and Bertone was seen as a “reform” candidate.  Benedict sincerely wanted to clean up the Vatican mess but was unable to do so as was demonstrated by the episode last year of the papal butler stealing incriminating documents from the pope’s desk to leak them to journalists.  Bertone turned out to have no cleaner hands than his predecessor, however, and had strong ties to Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the former head of the Vatican Bank, who was ousted in 2012.  The bank’s integrity was called into question under Tedeschi’s administration for money laundering and lack of transparency.  Bertone was also anxious to restore Italian control over the Curia and his appointments to key posts tended to advance disproportionately his fellow Italians.   In a similar vein, he also has been accused of a sort of nepotism for having advanced a remarkable  number of Salesians of Don Bosco—the religious congregation to which he himself belongs—to posts in the hierarchy. 

Bertone was considered a quite possible successor to Benedict in the Conclave of 2013 and when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected as Francis I, Bertone “took an early retirement.”  In fact he was pushed out in Francis’ determination to clean out the “old-boys” network in the Roman Curia, a network built in part by Bertone as Secretary of State.  This fall from power delighted Cardinal Sodano whose own forced retirement from the Secretariat of State had made room for Bertone and who never forgave Bertone for his own loss of place.  In fact, as a sort of ecclesiastical Cheech and Chong, both these men tarnished the office once held by such notable Secretaries of State as Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII), Mariano Rampolla, Dominico Tardini, Amleto Cicognani, and Pietro Gasparri.  But they had all belonged to an age of diplomats and statesmen and a Church had had not only the trappings of royalty but ministers that could equal a Metternich or a Talleyrand or a Pitt.  Of course, what Jesus would think of that is another question, but the above named were all great Secretaries of State.

Having lost his post, Bertone is no admirer of Pope Francis and once his new home is renovated—and will be ten times the size of Francis’ suite—he will be able to look down—literally—from his roof-top terrace on the humble papal hotel room where the Successor of the Apostles sleeps at night.   Now most Cardinals, Bishops, and priests—including Archbishop Myers and Bishop Tebartz-van Elst—do not have a vow of poverty.  Only members of religious orders take a vow of poverty.  The Holy Father is a religious—a Jesuit—and has a vow of poverty.  Cardinal Bertone also is a member of a religious congregation—the Salesians of Don Bosco—and as such has a vow of poverty.  This new 6500 square foot “apartment” is not a shabby home for this son of Don Bosco with a “vow of poverty.”  I wonder what Don Bosco would think of it?  I wonder if that even every crossed the good Cardinal’s mind.  

Papal Resignations IV

Well, we have seen some previous resignations, so now let’s look at this papal resignation.  It was a shocker when I turned on the news last Monday morning at 5:30 AM to be greeted with an announcement that the pope was resigning.  As a historian I never expected to see this.  I remember the 1978 election in which Karol Wojtyla was elected as John Paul II—the first non-Italian pope in over 450 years and what a bombshell that was, but it was small news compared to a papal resignation. 
One of the most obvious things to Vatican watchers is that this resignation caught not only me but the papal household by surprise.  While a few close aides undoubtedly had some heads-up on it—someone had to check the text for Benedict’s Latin; he’s good but even a good Latinist knows to get his work checked out before he does an official document—it was clear from his confusion that Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s Press Secretary wasn’t in on the secret.  The poor man didn’t know whether to **** or go blind talking to the press Monday, obviously unprepared for such an announcement.  And Jesuits hate to be unprepared.  They rarely are.  And then all this confusion about a conclave and when it can begin and how it gets convoked with Cardinals tripping over one another to make the necessary plans.  Indeed the timing was not thought out and the announcement would appear to be somewhat spontaneous as the timing projects a conclave on the eve of Holy Week, a time that most of the Cardinals have responsibilities in their home dioceses.  Had Benedict consulted anyone he would have been advised to have done this either a month earlier or made it effective for after Easter.  No, while Benedict may have given the matter thought for some time, the actual decision was clearly somewhat spur-of-the moment and without consultation of his top officials.    
So what is the story?  My hunch is that Benedict was well aware of the fact that the papal power has drifted into the hands of Curial officials and that he had become unable to reassert papal control over his own bureaucracy.  The only possibility for the pope to be allowed to be pope is for a younger and more energetic man to come in and shake up the curial apparatus.  If you remember some earlier postings I have brought up rumors that Cardinal Bertone, the papal Secretary of State, had managed to consolidate the day to day running of the Church into his office, leaving Benedict to be the face but not the guts of the papacy.  Moreover, while Bertone was put in place to clean up the corruption of his predecessor, Cardinal Sodano, it seems that his ambition for power has, displayed Lord’s Acton’s famous principle that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  (See entries for June 7, 2011, February 15, 16, June 4, June 10 2012)
Josef Ratzinger, like all of us, has his shortcomings.  He probably has fewer of them than most of us.  He certainly has fewer failings than I.  But one thing Benedict has and has in plenty is integrity.  I suspect that it is this integrity that led him to personal decision to move aside and let someone come in and try to regain control of the Church’s central apparatus.  If he found himself unable to lead the Church into the paths he believes the Church must follow, Benedict would see the need to resign rather than to maintain the charade that he was pope while decisions were being made in his name but with which he could not agree.  More in the next posting

Trouble Right Here in River (Tiber) City II

Melozzo da Forli: Angel Playing a Lute
The only angels in the Vatican are in the
the art museum

Yesterday’s posting was an interesting article by Philip Pullella and published by Reuters claiming that there is an internal war, or as Pullella puts it “a sinister power struggle”  going on in the Vatican for control of the Catholic Church.  It talks of corruption, intrigue, financial irregularities, prelates backstabbing one another, plots to control the next papal election and even a possible attempt on the pope’s life.  If you have read various entries on this blog—especially about the medieval and renaissance papacies (see entries for  January 15, April 18, June 6, 9, 18,  2011)—you will know as we pray: sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper in saecula saeculorum, or in the vulgar tongue: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. 

      At the root of the problem seems to be a deep ideological division between Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the current Secretary of State and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the previous Secretary of State.  (Papal Secretaries of State are more like Prime Ministers in terms of the power they hold; they are not just Foreign Ministers as in our country.) 

     Sodano ran a notoriously corrupt machine when he was in office.  He protected Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, from his accusers who were charging him with sexual abuse of seminarians. In the event the Maciel saga was far more sordid than anyone had ever thought. (see entries for June 2, Sept 22, October 27, 28, 2011)  Not only were the charges of abuse against young men substantiated, but Maciel apparently fathered two illegitimate children.  Maciel threw vast amounts of money at Vatican officials to not only shield himself from investigation but to enhance his reputation and influence.  Cardinal Sodano was a key player in this scheme, protecting the wayward priest even from the reaches of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) who was one of the few in the Vatican who seemed genuinely interested in cleaning up the sex abuse crisis and restoring the Church’s reputation.  Bertone’s appointment to replace Sodano was seen as an attempt to clean up the Vatican, but as power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, Bertone now seems to be no better than his predecessor. 

      As Benedict has aged word has it that Bertone has eased the reins of power from the pope’s hands into his own.  The debacle surrounding the Vatican’s turning down the re-election of Dr. Lesley-Anne Knight as Executive Secretary of Caritas International (see entry for June 7, 2011) shows just how much power the Holy Father has ceded, willingly or unwillingly, to Cardinal Bertone.  According to Pullella (and common gossip in Rome) Bertone is stacking the College of Cardinals with his cronies as he readies for the next papal election.   He certainly has pushed forward a disproportionate number of his fellow Salesians (the Religious Congregation to which he belongs) to various posts in the hierarchy.  It’s Bertone’s Church these days.  

      I remember when Benedict was elected that a priest being interviewed from Rome by RTE (The Irish National Television Station) referred to the Curia as “That rats’ nest of pezzi grossi monsignors.”  It evoked a reaction from several commentators but to those of us who live in Rome, it was an understatement, almost an euphemism.  We had hoped that the change of regime would sweep it clean.  Benedict, or rather Cardinal Ratzinger, was—for all his harshness—one of the few prelates with an unquestioned integrity.   Nevertheless, I have thought from the get-go that the election of Benedict was a poor choice.  Despite stories to the contrary, he wanted the election and he worked hard to get it.  I was living in Rome during the final years of John Paul’s papacy and one could see then-Cardinal Ratzinger slowly and patiently (and much less conspicuously than Bertone today)  constructing the machine that would carry a conclave in his favor.  I said that Cardinal Ratzinger was a man of integrity and I don’t believe he was seeking the papacy for power but rather that I think he believed that John Paul had taken the Church down some paths that needed to be corrected, if not reversed.   He was painfully aware that John Paul was weak theologically.  He saw John Paul as far too open both to other religions and to other Churches within the Christian fold.  (As a historian, I prefer not to use the theological distinction between “churches” and “ecclesial communities.”  It may be theologically precise, but it’s snotty.)  I think Benedict had some ideas on Liturgical Reform he wanted to implement as well. He seems to have wanted to restore a Pius XII sort of mysterious majesty to the papacy after the grandfatherly John XXIII and John Paul I, the Hamlet Paul VI, and the ol’ soft-shoe John Paul II.   And he was more ready than John Paul to give room—or I should say “even more room” to the “Traditionalists” who rejected Vatican II in an attempt to corral them back into the Petrine fold.  At the same time, I think he wanted to be somewhat less polarizing than John Paul and use a more dialogical model of reconciliation.  Like most academics, Benedict was naïve and I think he achieved very little of his agenda.  The Church is no better off at the end of his regime than it was when he became Pope.  In fact, I think it is considerably worse.  His olive branch to the Traditionalists has been met with only more demands from them.  His rigidity on ecumenism and interreligious dialogue has only isolated Catholicism more at a time when secularism has taken up its holy war against the public face of any and all religion.  His liturgical plans have not materialized (and for that I am grateful).  Instead of austere majesty, the Papacy is just sinking into archaic irrelevance.  And even as a lean and hungry Benedict once stood next to an aging and increasingly ineffective John Paul II, now the lean and hungry Bertone  guides the tremulous hand of Benedict.  The Church deserves better.  I don’t mean the Curia Romana or the Papacy deserve better.  Pullella’s article makes it clear that much as in Catherine of Siena’s day, the Curia Romana and its ambitious officials deserve the stench and fury of the everlasting fires.  I mean the Church—you and me, the People of God—we deserve  better. 

The Silencing of the Shepherds 2

Cardinal Bernard Law, former Archbishop

of Boston.  Cardinal Law was made a bishop

under Paul VI but achieved his powerful

status in the reign of John Paul II where he

served as "kingmaker" of American Bishops.

You may remember (see entry for May 22^nd) that after the Americanist crisis of the late nineteenth century Rome instituted a deliberate policy of appointing Roman trained and oriented clergy to be bishops in the United States in a move to eradicate the Americanist ideals that shaped the Catholicism of Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland.  Leo XIII and  his successor, Pius X were distrustful of such American ideas as democracy and the separation of Church and State and the Americanist situation had made them realize just how different the American mentality—Catholic and Protestant—was from the Roman mentality.  A similar reaction happened with the accession of John Paul II in 1978.  One of John Paul’s first major appointment shifts was in June of 1980, just about 20 months after beginning his papal reign, to remove the Apostolic Delegate in the United States, Archbishop Jean Jadot, a Belgian, to a desk-job in Rome.  Unlike most Apostolic Delegates, before and since, Jadot was never made a Cardinal—a sign of John Paul’s displeasure.  The (relatively) liberal hierarchy of the post-conciliar years was due heavily to Jadot’s influence.  Jadot was succeeded as Apostolic Delegate by Archbishop (later Cardinal) Pio Laghi who began replacing progressive American bishops with such stellar figures as Bernard Law in Boston, and John Joseph O’Conner in New York.  To be fair, Laghi also saw Joseph Bernardin appointed to Chicago and Roger Mahoney to Los Angeles.  He replaced the liberal Peter Gerety of Newark with Theodore McCarrick who was, at the time, seen as a strongly conservative prelate but who turned out to be one of the most talented members of the hierarchy (and, as a corollary to talent, one of the most Machiavellian).  Many of Laghi’s bishops were in fact good pastors and it was not “conservativism” per se that got them appointed but their unquestionable fidelity to Rome.  John Paul had no room for dissent.          
       To understand John Paul’s paranoia (and that is not too strong a word) about dissent one must remember his own experience in Poland.  Poland was the one Soviet satellite where the communist government had not been able to seriously damage the Catholic Church.  Unlike Hungary or Czechoslovakia, the Church in Poland remained strong and retained not only the loyalty but the active participation of the vast majority of the population.  Much like Nineteenth-century  Catholic Ireland where the Church grew and remained strong because to be a Catholic was a declaration of national pride in the face of an occupying Colonial Power that represented another religious tradition, the Poles stood strong in their Catholic faith and practice as a sign of nationalism and resistance to the officially atheistic philosophy of their Soviet-dominated government.  To be Polish was to be Catholic!  The cohesiveness of the Church and indeed its strength came from its rigid unity which the Communist regime could not crack.  And this unity was rooted in an unswerving loyalty and obedience, in public and in private—to the Primate, the long-suffering Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (+1981).  Pope Wojtyla, as he was often known both in Poland and Rome, understood Wyszynski’s lesson—if you want a Church strong enough to bring down Marxism and to confront the secularism of the West, you need a Church that moves in absolute unity and uniformity.  John Paul would not risk dissent and was rigid in crushing it.  In 1980 he demanded that all priests and religious withdraw from political office because he would not have the clergy in a position where they might have to disregard their ecclesiastical superiors to perform their civil obligations.  Sister Agnes Mansour, a Sister of Mercy, was ordered by the Vatican to resign from her post as the Director of Social Services for the State of Michigan.  She instead resigned from her religious order.  (The Sisters of Mercy never broke their ties with her and she lived and died within their community.)  Father Robert Drinan SJ, on the other hand, did resign his seat in Congress to comply with the Vatican Directives but he was a greater pain to the authority structures in the Church in his post-Congressional years than he had been serving in the halls of Congress.  Nonetheless, it was clear in the John Paul years that there was to be no room for dissent from Church Authority.  In 2006 Cardinal Angelo Sodano retired as Vatican Secretary of State, a position he had held for sixteen years, serving under two popes: John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  The Foreign Ministers (Secretaries of State) of other European Governments hosted a luncheon in his honor as he was the longest serving Secretary of State among them.  When asked to what he attributed is long tenure he joked “There are advantages to working for a Totalitarian State.”  A  joke yes, but one which was funny only because it is true. 
     To see dissent as disloyalty is a dangerous to any leadership.  Dissent and disobedience are two different realities.  To close off dissent is to deprive leadership of voices they need to hear and monitor, not to punish but to be able to critique their own course.  There is such a thing as loyal dissent and within the Church there are many voices which have been silenced in fear of reprisal.  I recently read William L. Shirer’s work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  (At a friend’s suggestion I had read Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of Beasts and as a historian it left me wanting to know much more in detail how the catastrophe of the Third Reich had come about.)  What struck me most in Shirer’s book was the absolute stifling of dissent by Hitler and his inner circle and how that dissent was to create a bubble of bogus realities around the Reich’s leadership.  This past week I had coffee with friends who are retired military and the discussion came to a comparison of Church and military leadership styles and these officers spoke of the importance of dissenting views having voice in successful military operations.  It is not healthy for us in the Church that responsible voices whether they be bishops, theologians, or competent clergy and laity cannot speak out freely critiquing policies set by a leadership that is not necessarily any more competent, educated, or informed. As Catholics we believe that the Holy Spirit speaks through the Pope, but we do not believe that the Holy Spirit (I will avoid the use of a pronoun) speaks through the Pope alone, much less than the monsignoral desk-jockeys that work down the hall and around the corner from him.  But even more serious for the good of the Church and of souls than sealing off prophetic voices that might raise the inspired cries of “yes, but…” is being left with a hierarchy that “loyalty” has reduced to mediocrity.  The atmosphere of blind allegiance has created a culture of codependence in which voices that were consecrated to be prophetic remain silent in the face of the gross injustices of our contemporary society.  Where are the voices to speak for the immigrant?  For the seniors who are in danger of losing their Medicare and Social Security? For the families who have lost their homes?  For the workers who have seen their jobs go overseas?   For the Earth that is being scourged  by the destruction of its resources, its air and its water?  We have a new translation for the Liturgy when what we need is a prophetic and evangelical message of what it means to be a Disciple of Jesus Christ in this world in which we live.  “What father among you,” Jesus said, “would give his children a stone when they ask for bread.”  And we are asking for bread and being given the stones of silence in the face of a rampant and increasing injustice in our society.  We cannot afford to have shepherds who do not raise a cry when the flock is being surrounded by wolves.  The silence of the hierarchy on any subjects other than protecting the right to life for the unborn and the insuring that the right to marriage is limited to heterosexuals implies that the other pressing issues facing us as Americans are without moral consequence and that is simply a flat out lie in itself.  We need the articulation of a consistent and comprehensive moral program for responsible citizenship even if it does mean that the American bishops risk losing the friendship of their political allies and their establishment pals.