Trouble, Right Here in River (Tiber) City

I haven’t had a chance to finish the next piece I am preparing and a friend sent me this Reuters article by Philip Pullella.  I think that it is somewhat off but as a person who has lived in Rome a considerable period of time over the last twenty years, I don’t think it is totally off base.  I will comment on it in future entries.  Meanwhile, thanks to my friend Chris for sending along the article and to my buddy Greg for the great photo. 

"It is a total mess," said one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke, like all others, on the condition of anonymity.

The Machiavellian maneuvering and machinations that have come to light in the Vatican recently are worthy of a novel about a sinister power struggle at a medieval court. 

Senior church officials interviewed this month said almost daily embarrassments that have put the Vatican on the defensive could force Pope Benedict to act to clean up the image of its administration - at a time when the church faces a deeper crisis of authority and relevance in the wider world. 

Some of those sources said the outcome of a power struggle inside the Holy See may even have a longer-term effect, on the choice of the man to succeed Benedict when he dies. 

From leaked letters by an archbishop who was transferred after he blew the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, to a leaked poison pen memo which puts a number of cardinals in a bad light, to new suspicions about its bank, Vatican spokesmen have had their work cut out responding.  

The flurry of leaks has come at an embarrassing time - just before a usually joyful ceremony this week known as a consistory, when Benedict will admit more prelates into the College of Cardinals, the exclusive men's club that will one day pick the next Roman Catholic leader from among their own ranks. 

"This consistory will be taking place in an atmosphere that is certainly not very glorious or exalting," said one bishop with direct knowledge of Vatican affairs. 

The sources agreed that the leaks were part of an internal campaign - a sort of "mutiny of the monsignors" - against the pope's right-hand man, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. 

Bertone, 77, has a reputation as a heavy-handed administrator and power-broker whose style has alienated many in the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the central administration of the 1.3 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church.

He came to the job, traditionally occupied by a career diplomat, in 2006 with no experience of working in the church's diplomatic corps, which manages its international relations. Benedict chose him, rather, because he had worked under the future pontiff, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office. 

"It's all aimed at Bertone," said a monsignor in a key Vatican department who sympathizes with the secretary of state and who sees the leakers as determined to oust him. "It's very clear that they want to get rid of Bertone." 

Vatican sources say the rebels have the tacit backing of a former secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, an influential power-broker in his own right and a veteran diplomat who served under the late Pope John Paul II for 15 years.  

"The diplomatic wing feels that they are the rightful owners of the Vatican," the monsignor who favors Bertone said.  

Sodano and Bertone are not mutual admirers, to put it mildly. Neither has commented publicly on the reports. 

WHISTLE-BLOWING ARCHBISHOP 

The Vatican has been no stranger to controversy in recent years, when uproar over its handling of child sex abuse charges has hampered the church's efforts to stem the erosion of congregations and priestly recruitment in the developed world. 

But the latest image crisis could not be closer to home. 

It began last month when an Italian television investigative show broadcast private letters to Bertone and the pope from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former deputy governor of the Vatican City and currently the Vatican ambassador in Washington. 

The letters, which the Vatican has confirmed are authentic, showed that Vigano was transferred after he exposed what he argued was a web of corruption, nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to contractors at inflated prices. 

As deputy governor of the Vatican City for two years from 2009 to 2011, Vigano was the number two official in a department responsible for maintaining the tiny city-state's gardens, buildings, streets, museums and other infrastructure, which are managed separately from the Italian capital which surrounds it. 

In one letter, Vigano writes of a smear campaign against him by other Vatican officials who were upset that he had taken drastic steps to clean up the purchasing procedures and begged to stay in the job to finish what he had started. 

Bertone responded by removing Vigano from his position three years before the end of his tenure and sending him to the United States, despite his strong resistance. 

Other leaks center on the Vatican bank, just as it is trying to put behind it past scandals - including the collapse 30 years ago of Banco Ambrosiano, which entangled it in lurid allegations about money-laundering, freemasons, mafiosi and the mysterious death of Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi - "God's banker." 

Today, the Vatican bank, formally known at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), is aiming to comply fully with international norms and has applied for the Vatican's inclusion on the European Commission's approved "white list" of states that meet EU standards for total financial transparency. 

Bertone was instrumental in putting the bank's current executives in place and any lingering suspicion about it reflects badly on him. The Commission will decide in June and failure to make the list would be an embarrassment for Bertone.  

ITALIAN POPE?  

Last week, an Italian newspaper that has published some of the leaks ran a bizarre internal Vatican memo that involved one cardinal complaining about another cardinal who spoke about a possible assassination attempt against the pope within 12 months and openly speculated on who the next pope should be. 

Bertone's detractors say he has packed the Curia with Italian friends. Some see an attempt to influence the election of the next pope and increase the chances that the papacy returns to Italy after two successive non-Italian popes who have broken what had been an Italian monopoly for over 450 years.  

Seven of the 18 new "cardinal electors" -- those aged under 80 eligible to elect a pope -- at this Saturday's consistory are Italian. Six of those work for Bertone in the Curia. 

Bertone, as chief administrator, had a key role in advising the pope on the appointments, which raised eyebrows because of the high number of Italian bureaucrats among them.  

"There is widespread malaise and delusion about Bertone inside the Curia. It is full of complaints,"  said the bishop who has close knowledge of Vatican affairs. 

"Bertone has had a very brash method of running the Vatican and putting his friends in high places. People could not take it any more and said 'enough' and that is why I think these leaks are coming out now to make him look bad," he said. 

POPE "ISOLATED" 

Leaked confidential cables sent to the State Department by the U.S. embassy to the Vatican depicted him as a "yes man" with no diplomatic experience or linguistic skills and the 2009 cable suggests that the pope is protected from bad news. 

"There is also the question of who, if anyone, brings dissenting views to the pope's attention," read the cable, published by WikiLeaks. 

The Vatican sources said some cardinals asked the pope to replace Bertone because of administrative lapses, including the failure to warn the pope that a renegade bishop re-admitted to the Church in 2009 was a well-known Holocaust denier.  

But they said the pope, at 84 and increasingly showing the signs of his age, is not eager to break in a new right-hand man.  

"It's so complicated and the pope is so helpless," said the monsignor. 

The bishop said: "The pope is very isolated. He lives in his own world and some say the information he receives is filtered. He is interested in his books and his sermons but he is not very interested in government."

Hello, The Building Is on Fire, Anyone Noticing?

Quin Abbey in County Clare--a fitting symbol of the

fact that The Irish Church is in ruins, but this time

because of its own abuses of power.  Will the American
Church be far behind?

One gets into the most fascinating conversations here in Rome.  A Vatican friend of mine was discussing his hopes that the new Nuncio to Dublin, the American Archbishop-designate Charles Brown (Charlie Brown? An Archbishop’s name?  amusing) would be able to smooth things out a bit with the strained Dublin-Vatican relations.  Ireland recently closed its embassy to the Holy See.  While the reasons given were “cost cutting,” observers could not but note the diplomatic crisis that had led the Vatican to recall its ambassador several week earlier.  Moreover the Irish government has apparently said that it will not issue a formal invitation to Pope Benedict XVI to attend next year’s Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and that if the Holy Father wished to come he could do so “as a private citizen.”  Who would have foreseen such a turn of events that once Catholic Ireland would turn on the papacy?  Well, Daniel O’Connell for one who in the 19^th century, when the Holy See was supportive of British colonial policy towards Ireland, warned that “Ireland will always be Catholic but may not always be Roman.”  But even O’Connell could not have—nor would have wished to have—foreseen the day when the Irish all but gave up their faith.  This “national apostasy” is not about the sex-abuse crisis—that is just the “frosting on the cake.”  This is the result of a long tradition of the Irish clergy trying to exercise power and control over public life.  The Irish have long resented clerical interference in their lives.    During the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century many of the Irish clergy, and especially the friar orders, were very supportive of the Irish people in their struggles to free themselves from colonialism but the episcopacy and prominent secular clergy invariably favored the British upper classes.  Once Ireland won its independence from Britain, (1921 or 1949, depending on one’s (Irish) political views), the Catholic Church dominated public life to the point where the Irish Constitution prohibited not only divorce but even contraception.  These sectarian features were done away with in the 1970’s but the clergy continued to exercise undue influence in the most minute of local matters such as the appointment of village school masters or the opening and closing of pubs.  Clerical interference in secular matters built up a huge sea of resentment towards the institutional Church.  The situation of the Church in Ireland now is desperate with very few vocations and rapidly dropping Mass attendance.  This is not just a Catholic problem however as attendance at Church of Ireland parishes, and Methodist and Presbyterian chapels is no better.  The issue is secularization, a disillusionment with religion.  You may recall from my posting this past Tuesday about the gentleman on the plane and his not wanting his children to be exposed to religion which he saw as a negative force in society.  And there are reasons why people have such strong feelings on this matter; it may be worth our while as Catholics to look at those reasons and examine our collective conscience. 

       Speaking of secularization, another tidbit that got dropped this afternoon from a Dutch friend of mine is that Dutch dictionaries no longer carry “Catholic” words such as tabernacle, thurible, miter, font, or confessional.  This is perhaps even more alarming as it represents a clear pushing of religion to the margins of society when you take its vocabulary out of public use.  It is hard to believe here in Rome with a church on every corner and votive shrines in the alleys between but secularization is fast overtaking European society—and America is not long behind.    Wise church leadership would look at the reasons and forces that are pushing religion out of the public square and do something about it, but then a Church as fractured as the American Church has allowed itself to become is having its energy drained by internal squabbles and is in no shape to face external crises.  Que peccato as they say here in Roma. 

Origins of Radical Catholicism XIII The Apostolic Delegation, part 1

For the first century of its existence the American hierarchy enjoyed a tremendous amount of autonomy with very little oversight from Rome. According to the website of the Archdiocese of Baltimore:

“In its relationship with the Holy See (Archbishop John) Carroll wished a measure of autonomy for the American Church. Although he overcame his initial distrust of the Congregation of the Propaganda, he was not overly generous in the information he supplied the Roman authorities nor overly conscientious in following their directives. At the same time, he instilled in his spiritual children a deep loyalty to the pope as a symbol of unity.”

The bishops and archbishops who followed John Carroll were not much different in jealously guarding their semi-autonomy from Rome. There were a number of reasons for this.   In the first place, the world of the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries was not a highly communicative world.  Rome was far away—a message to the papal curia would take six to eight weeks to reach Rome and six to eight weeks to return—not to consider the time it would take to shuffle from one curial desk to another.  Six, eight, ten months, a year would not be an unreasonable amount of time for an issue to be dealt with—and then what if there were a need for clarification and the second or even third round of letters.   No, it made much more sense to deal with issues at home and not refer them to the Holy See.  If some question needed to be resolved, a bishop could always consult his metropolitan Archbishop and one Archbishop could confer with two or three others.    Secondly, there were no diplomatic relations between the American Republic and the Holy See that would have stationed a permanent papal representative in the United States.  In the third place, unlike England where the Venerable English College in Rome—often with a “Cardinal Protector of England” in residence—could serve as a conduit of information between the Church in England and the Holy See, the Americans—neither government nor Church—had a permanent presence in Rome until the establishment of the North American College in 1859 and even then neither the Holy See nor the American bishops turned to it for any purposes other than education of clergy.  In 1853 the Nuncio to Brazil, Gaetano Bedini, stopped in Washington on his way to take up his post and he made a report back to Rome suggesting the appointment of a Nuncio to the American Republic, but nothing ever came of it.  I cannot imagine what Bedini was thinking in recommending such a move.  A Nuncio would have required reciprocal diplomatic relations and, as you may remember from the blog on the Know-Nothings, this was a period of rampant anti-Catholicism in which it would have been politically impossible for the United States to consent to diplomatic ties to the Holy See.   In fact, Archbishop Bedini’s visit had stirred anti-Catholic demonstrations protesting his temporary presence.     

In 1879 George Conroy, Bishop of Ardagh in Ireland, visited the States on the occasion of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Gibbon’s of Baltimore receiving the pallium.   Conroy also made a report to the Holy See, suggesting an Apostolic Delegation but only if the Apostolic Delegate were an American.  (A Nuncio is the papal representative to a nation; an Apostolic Delegate is his representative to a Church within a nation with which the Holy See does not have diplomatic relations.)  Conroy picked up on the xenophobia of Americans and realized that a European Archbishop would be seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the American people, Catholic or otherwise.    If an American could not be found who could serve in this role, then Conroy thought only a temporary Delegation—a sort of periodic visitation—should be sent.  In 1886 the Holy See sent Monsignor Paolo Mori to inquire about the possibility of Diplomatic Relations between the Holy See and the American Government.  Such a move would have meant a nunciature; it was not a possibility of course since with the loss of the Papal States there could not have been even a masque of diplomatic relations between governments and it would have meant (at least in popular perception) establishing ties with the Roman Catholic Church, something constitutionally questionable and politically out of the question.   

With Conroy’s visitation it became clear to at least some of the American bishops that the period of benign neglect was at an end and that the Pope’s commissioning an Apostolic Delegate was only a matter of time.  Mori’s mission, though unsuccessful, confirmed it. The liberal party decided to be proactive on this so that the Delegate, once appointed, would be favourable to their point of view.   Gibbons had to go to Rome the same year that Mori visited the States and he sized up the situation.  In 1889 the Holy See sent Francesco Satolli as its representative to the centenary celebrations for the appointment of the first bishop in the United States—John Carroll—in 1789.  Satolli returned to Rome and reported to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, that the American bishops (or at least those whom he consulted) were in favour of a Delegation as a means of improving communication with Rome.  Unfortunately it is not known which bishops, other than Gibbons, that Satolli consulted, but it can be surmised from the way things played out, and from the preeminent role of Gibbons in the whole event, that it was the liberal wing.  Cardinal Rampolla wrote Gibbons and asked him to bring perhaps two of the more prudent Archbishops with him to Rome for some consultation. Then Rampolla added a rather curious note advising Gibbons not to tell the Congregation Propaganda Fide about this proposed meeting between the Americans and the Secretariat of State.  Given that Propaganda Fide had oversight of the American Church, Rampolla’s request is most strange.  Hmmm, it seems that they may play politics in Rome as well.  Fancy that.  More to come.    The image today is John Carroll, the first Catholic Bishop in the United States