All the Pope's Men (14 page)

Objectivity

Tensions are generated in any bureaucratic system when a higher level of authority intervenes with a lower one. When the United States federal government issues a new regulation, for example, legislators and agency personnel at the state level frequently grouse that “the feds don’t understand our situation." The same lament will come from branch managers in a corporation, local commanders in the army, and anybody else who ever finds himself or herself in the position of taking orders from on high. Thus it is also in the Catholic world whenever the Holy See issues a directive, or responds in the negative to some request from a local church. Then, too, voices will be heard complaining that “the Vatican is out of touch," that it is absurd that officials thousands of miles away in Rome, living in a different culture and speaking a different language, should make decisions about a local church.

Seen from Rome, on the other hand, local officials sometimes seem too close to the local scene to think straight. Every professional knows the dangers of getting too close. One reason editors at newspapers read stories before they’re published is because sometimes journalists get sucked into the drama they’re covering, losing their objectivity and taking sides. Editors may have to pull them back, remind them of their obligations to balance. Similarly, pastors and even bishops can sometimes be overwhelmed by political pressures or personal sympathies into fudging the teaching or discipline of the Church. Naturally, some degree of pastoral flexibility is appropriate in trying to resolve complicated human situations. How much is too much, however, is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s probably true that the closer one is to the situation, the greater the danger of losing perspective.

Moreover, Vatican officials are generally not out of touch, ignorant of local situations, in the sense critics often mean. Actually, the officials of the Holy See tend to be quite well informed about affairs in local churches, especially the larger ones. Every dicastery of the Roman Curia has at least one American on the staff, for example, and often that individual has responsibility for tracking issues in the English-speaking world within that dicastery’s area of competence—liturgy, doctrine, clerical discipline, or whatever the case may be. The official usually also has the informal responsibility of explaining American situations to colleagues who may from time to time be called upon to deal with them or simply when conversations come up around the water cooler. With the Internet they’re able to read the American press each morning, at least the
New York Times
and often their local paper as well, and they see U.S. bishops when they happen to be in Rome, thus keeping up to date on the latest developments. With 377 American bishops, someone is always in town. At the Villa Stritch, a residence funded by the U.S. bishops’ conference for Americans in the Curia, dinner conversation is often about the latest news back home, so these men probably discuss American church affairs far more than the vast majority of priests who actually live in the United States. They also may from time to time participate in meetings and conferences in the States on their issues.

All this means that Vatican officials usually have an acute sense of the issues, the players, and the trends in the local church. The same point, to greater or lesser degrees, could be made about the Germans, the Indians, the Argentinians, and the other nationalities represented in the Curia. One
monsignore
who works in a congregation of the Roman Curia put it this way: “It’s a chronic misunderstanding that the Roman Curia is a monolithic institution that has trouble understanding local cultures. They don’t realize how many different cultures are present here to bring about a truly Catholic perspective. We’re usually very well informed about their situation, but we may just have a different perspective on it."

What might that different perspective be? In a word, objectivity. Seen from a Vatican point of view, the passions surrounding a particular issue sometimes have the effect of overwhelming rational judgment. It is precisely the benefit of having some distance from the “rattle and hum" that allows the Holy See, its defenders argue, to bring a more objective, a more serene, judgment to the matter. Thus Vatican officials would insist that they are not isolated in the negative sense that critics intend, that is, ignorant of local realities. There is, however, a positive kind of isolation they believe comes with their office, which is being insulated from the political and cultural pressures that tend to intrude on sober reflection when one stands too close to the flame. In other words, sometimes seeing and acting on the truth requires distance. That’s why they believe the Holy See is often capable of an objectivity that eludes local pastors.

One classic example of how this works was offered by the American sexual abuse crisis. In Dallas in June 2002, the American bishops adopted a set of norms that relied on a bishop’s exercise of administrative authority to remove accused priests from ministry. In part, the bishops opted for this route because their experience of canon law courts in Rome had been that procedures tended to drag out for long periods, and in some cases, procedural strictness had led to orders of reinstatement for at least a few accused abusers. The bishops wanted to be able to promise the American public swift and sure justice, and adopted a program that relied on their stroke of a pen to impose final judgment. At the time a small knot of bishops voiced concern that this amounted to “hanging priests out to dry," treating them as guilty until proven innocent, but in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Dallas this argument cut little ice. After the norms were issued, priests’ groups and canon lawyers voiced fears that the bishops had in effect tried to resolve one injustice, which was sluggishness in responding to accusations of sexual abuse, with another injustice, which was a rush to judgment against priests.

In fact, the fierce debate over Dallas was in one sense unnecessary, because it was abundantly clear that the Holy See never had any intention of approving the norms as written. They did not wish to embarrass the American bishops (recall the
bella figura
), so instead of saying a flat no, they invited the bishops into a mixed commission made up of four officials from the Holy See and four U.S. bishops to produce a set of norms. What resulted was a streamlined canonical procedure that sped up the administration of justice but also preserved the priest’s due process rights. Most observers, even those normally cynical about the motives for Vatican interventions, tend to grant that in this case the system worked. In Vatican circles, the evolution of the American norms has now become a
locus classicus
for why review of local policy at the level of the universal Church is so important.

Rumors in June 2002 had it, in fact, that some American bishops voted for the Dallas norms in order to satisfy public demands for dramatic action with the expectation that Rome would intervene. Whether that’s true or not, it does illustrate a point familiar to anyone who works inside an institution: sometimes it’s easier to let a higher level of authority make an unpopular decision. Teachers rely on principals to run interference with complaining parents, reporters sometimes fall back on editors to explain why certain stories turned out the way they did, and soldiers explain to disgruntled citizens that they’re only following orders. Likewise, in some cases bishops will submit a case to Rome when they know full well how it will shake out, but they’d rather have people blame the Vatican for bringing the hammer down. It is a tendency that irritates some Vatican officials, who feel that bishops ought to have the courage of their convictions, but everyone recognizes that it happens. Distance, the theory goes, buys the Vatican precious insulation from local reaction.

There are two other senses in which the value of objectivity is a key that unlocks Vatican behavior. The first concerns Vatican documents. Whether a particular text is issued by the Pope or by one or more of the dicasteries, it is almost always treated as a document of the Holy See rather than the product of individual authors. Journalists and Church insiders enjoy speculating about who actually wrote them, and in some cases authorship becomes an open secret. The Pope’s September 1998 encyclical,
Fides et Ratio
, for example, is known around Rome as “Fisichella et Ratzinger" because two of the most important contributors were Bishop Salvatore Fisichella and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. When
Dominus Iesus
appeared in September 2000, its primary authors, Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz and Salesian Fr. Angelo Amato, joined Ratzinger at the press conference presenting the document. (Ocáriz is the vicar general of Opus Dei, while Amato has since become archbishop and secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.) Even in these instances, however, the Holy See never officially acknowledges individual authorship, because it does not want the authority of the document to depend upon the personal qualities of its authors. Its authority depends upon the fact that it has been duly promulgated. Its authority, in other words, is objective rather than subjective. This is the same reason that documents from dicasteries are usually signed by both the prefect and the secretary. The idea is that its authority is dependent upon its due issuance, not the personality of any one figure. (The prefect and secretary are expected to sign the document, by the way, even if they voted against it in the plenary assembly.)

The second way in which objectivity is relevant to understanding Vatican behavior has to do with secrecy. Many times the Vatican comes under fire because it will not release the case files that have given rise to controversial judgments. For example, censured theologians such as Hans Küng and Charles Curran have long complained that despite the fact the Vatican monitored their work for decades, launching investigations that ended in disciplinary action, they have never been allowed to see their own files. Küng, in an interview with me, compared the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the KGB on this basis. Or to consider another instance, the Vatican has never released the results of its eight-month investigation into a 1998 Swiss Guard murder-suicide, despite repeated appeals from the mother of the corporal who, according to the Vatican reconstruction, shot his commander and his wife, then himself. To observers outside the Vatican’s world, denying people the right to see information that concerns them directly seems arrogant and almost incomprehensible.

Aside from privacy concerns, the primary logic of nondisclosure is to protect the objectivity of those who must make judgments based on this information. If case files were a matter of public record, then pressure could be brought to bear to try to sway those judgments one way or the other. Lobbying and spin would be the result. The classic example, which still looms large in the Vatican’s collective imagination, is the 1967 publication by the
National Catholic Reporter
and
Le Monde
of the majority report from Paul VI’s birth control commission, which had supported a change in Church teaching. Pope Paul decided against this proposal, and the publication of the commission’s report subjected the pontiff to withering public criticism for “ignoring" his own advisors. The culture of the Holy See resists exposing its decisions to the pressures of public relations or interest group politics, neither of which are viewed as reliable means for arriving at truth. The refusal to turn over files, even to people directly concerned, is thus to the Vatican’s mind not about covering up the truth, but, on the contrary, about a different concept of how best to foster fair and impartial judgments. From the Vatican point of view, parliamentary inquiries in which conservatives treat liberals as guilty until proven innocent and vice-versa, with the outcome hinging on who has the most votes, may be more transparent than procedures in the Holy See, but that’s hardly any assurance they’re more equitable.

Populism

Of all the values listed in this chapter, this one may be the most difficult for many outside observers of the Vatican to understand or accept. People are accustomed to thinking of the Holy See as “the world’s last absolute monarchy," a place where a tiny ecclesiastical aristocracy makes decisions based on their own vision of how the Church and the world ought to be run. Whether this is considered a good or a bad thing will vary with the observer, but there is a measure of truth to such perceptions. Vatican officials are not subject to the same democratic scrutiny as personnel in other governments, nor to the commercial pressures of the bottom line faced by the corporate sector. At the same time, however, Vatican personnel by and large do not see themselves as imperialists imposing their will on the rest of the Catholic Church. In many instances, the exact reverse is the case: they see themselves defending the people against elites running roughshod over their rights. Vatican officials perceive themselves to be the last line of defense for the “simple faithful" against avant-garde theologians who would betray the faith, against experimental liturgists who risk transforming the Mass into something profane or banal, or against ecclesiastical bureaucrats, including bishops, who fancy themselves above the law. They see themselves, in other words, as populists.

One sometimes hears diocesan bishops complain about being pushed around by junior curial officials when they come to Rome on their
ad limina
visits, about being treated like altar boys. Part of this is a generational dynamic. No man in his sixties who is a senior leader of a major international organization enjoys coming to headquarters and being questioned by someone in his twenties or thirties. Part of this, undeniably, is the fact that certain curial officials are a bit drunk on their own power and enjoy asserting themselves, often in ways that exceed their actual authority. Yet in most cases curial officials are loathe to confront bishops (recall what was said above about reverence for authority), and will do so only in order to vindicate the rights of lower clergy or laity when there has been what seems to them a clear abuse of power. In other words, it is sometimes not a bureaucratic power play, but a rather idealistic insistence upon equality before the law, that leads a curial official to push around a bishop. In such a case, the bishop’s complaint about process may ignore the deeper question of whether the Vatican was right on content.