Vatican Diary / Promotions, Demotions, Surprises

The Chiesa
December 19, 2012

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350387?eng=y

An assessment of the latest appointments in the curia. More powers for the pope's secretary. More positions for focolarini and Sant'Egidio. A head rolls at the pontifical council for culture. The strange case of the new dean of the Rota

VATICAN CITY, December 19, 2012 – At the upcoming feast of Epiphany, Benedict XVI will consecrate as bishop, together with other prelates, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, his personal secretary since 2003, recently appointed prefect of the pontifical household.

Gänswein will keep his previous position, and will continue to live in the pontifical apartment. This signifies that, after the tempest of Vatileaks and the conviction of the butler Paolo Gabriele, Benedict XVI - with a gesture that seems to have no precedent - has confirmed, or rather redoubled, his trust toward his closest coworker.

In effect, looking at the latest pontificates, no churchman had ever taken on the positions of personal secretary and prefect of the pontifical household. With John Paul II, in fact, his personal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz was made only “adjunct” prefect, and appointed bishop in 1998 at the age of 59, to be elevated in 2003 to the dignity of archbishop.

That a secretary of the pope should become bishop is nothing new. Nonetheless, before the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla this appointment had always come in the course of the following pontificate. This is what happened with the secretary of Pius XI, Carlo Confalonieri, appointed archbishop of Aquila in 1941 at the age of 48, and made a cardinal in 1958; with that of John XXIII, Loris Capovilla, appointed bishop of Chieti in 1967 at the age of 52; and with that of Paul VI, Pasquale Macchi, appointed prelate of Loreto in 1988 at the age of 65.

Gänswein was immediately appointed archbishop at the age of 56 and a half; therefore at a slightly greener age compared to Dziwisz. But, as has been seen, Confalonieri and Capovilla were younger at the time of their episcopal appointment.

It was with John Paul II that his secretary was made a bishop during the pontificate, in a move that prompted more or less veiled criticisms inside and outside of the Roman curia. Few, perhaps, could have imagined that Benedict XVI would imitate his predecessor in this area. And yet that's exactly what happened.

* Thus, until today, the Roman curia has not at all undergone the restructuring and downsizing that not a few were prognosticating at the beginning of the pontificate of Joseph Ratzinger. The only office suppressed so far has been, this year, the pontifical commission for the cultural heritage of the Church.

Strongly desired by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, this suppression had the result of demoting the vice president of the same commission, the Benedictine abbot Michael John Zielinski, considered by Ravasi to be too traditionalist, making him a simple office manager of the congregation for divine worship.

Few noticed this unusual demotion, just as, on the contrary, there was no stir over the promotion of Daniela Leggio as office manager of the congregation for religious. With her, it is the first time that a laywoman has attained this position in a Roman congregation (where, however, a sister has been present since 2004 as undersecretary). In the past a laywoman, Paola Fabrizi, had become office manager at the pontifical council for Christian unity,while the current office manager at the Fabbrica di San Pietro is another laywoman, Maria Cristina Carlo-Stella.

* 2012 marked the arrival in the curia of a leading representative of the Comunità di Sant’Egidio, Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, as president of the pontifical council for the family, precisely while the founder of the same Comunità, Andrea Riccardi, was a minister in the Italian government, he too with responsibility form the family. Paglia, who is on track to become a cardinal at an upcoming consistory, has already demonstrated that he has in this matter a less intransigent attitude than his predecessors, cardinals Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, a Colombian, and Ennio Antonelli, a focolarino.

The focolarini are currently the ecclesial movement most represented at the summit of the Roman curia, thanks in part to the appointment, last November, of Monsignor Angelo Vincenzo Zani as secretary of the congregation for Catholic education and as archbishop (he too will be consecrated by the pope on January 6). Zani joins the other spiritual children of Chiara Lubich present in the Vatican: Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, prefect of the congregation for religious, Archbishop Luciano Suriani, head of the personnel office of the curia, and Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, substitute of the secretariat of state, across whose desk pass all of the most delicate practices of the governance of the Holy See.

* In 2012, Archbishop Joseph William Tobin left the Roman curia. After only two years as secretary of the congregation for religious, he was sent back to his country to head the archdiocese, not cardinalate, of Indianapolis. Tobin has not yet been replaced, and from the profile of his successor it will be clear, among other things, what the stance of the dicastery may be with regard to the progressive sisters of the United States. The apostolic visitation, which was organized by Cardinal Franc Rodé, with the arrival of the focolarino successor Braz de Aviz and of Tobin himself seemed to have run into a dead end.

* Another who left Rome this year was Charles J. Scicluna, the inflexible promoter of justice of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith in trials involving "delicta graviora," including sexual abuse perpetrated against minors by clerics. Scicluna has been appointed auxiliary bishop of his native island, Malta, and it has not yet been announced who will be the new promoter of justice of the former Holy Office. In any case, he will be able to continue to make his voice heard and his influence felt in Rome: shortly after the episcopal consecration came his appointment as a member of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, a rare case of a simple auxiliary bishop with a role of this level in the curia.

Also in regard to the judicial policy of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, it will be interesting to note what will be the attitude of the new prefect, the German archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who has replaced the American cardinal William J. Levada, who was in perfect harmony with the intransigent stance of Scicluna.

* 2012 also saw the appointment of the new dean of the Roman rota in the person of Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto. A surprising appointment for various reasons, including the fact that Pinto himself - as shown by the documents made public by the pope's former butler - seems to have played a not indifferent role in fostering the (unfounded) accusations of homosexuality that exploded in the Dino Boffo case in 2009.

Pinto, who was afterward appointed president of the court of appeal of Vatican City-State, recently garnered attention for the excessive praise he lavished upon Vatican cardinal secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, in the address given in his presence on November 8 for the inauguration of the 2012-2013 academic year of rota studies.

In that inaugural address Pinto, in exalting the peculiarity of the rare secretaries of state not career diplomats and belonging to religious congregations, compared Bertone to the figure of one of his predecessors in the nineteenth century, the Barnabite Luigi Lambruschini, secretary of state with Gregory XVI.

Forgetting that in a 2006 interview in "30 Days," at the mere mention of the name of this predecessor of his, Bertone had reacted by exclaiming:

"For heaven's sake, don't compare me to Cardinal Lambruschini, who may have been a holy man, but was also, politically, a reactionary through and through!"

* This wraps up some of the most significant appointments in the curia in the year that is coming to an end.

But in 2012 there were also confirmations, which however, according to praxis, were not announced in the bulletin of the Press Office, but only in the "Acta Apostolicae Sedis," the official Vatican gazette.

Here are the latest confirmations entered into the records:

- on June 9, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri was confirmed for another five years as prefect of the congregation for the Oriental Churches;

- on June 19, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, of Opus Dei, was confirmed for a five-year term as secretary of the pontifical council for the interpretation of legislative texts;

- the same day, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran was confirmed for an analogous period as president of the council for interreligious dialogue;

- also on June 19, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli was confirmed for five years as president of the council for social communications;

- on the same day, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio was confirmed as president of the council for legislative texts “until the age of 75”;

- On July 3, Father Anthony Ward was confirmed as undersecretary of the congregation for divine worship with the formula "donec aliter provideatur": until otherwise provided.

* As for the Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican “bank” that since May 24, 2012, has been without a president, the selection of the successor of the ousted Ettore Gotti Tedeschi has been focused on a non-Italian “of proven competence and spotless reputation.” A selection that is not easy, given the legal firestorm in Germany that in recent days has hit the management of Deutsche Bank, of which the current interim president of the IOR, Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz, was administrator delegate.

In 2013 is also expected the appointment of a "prelate" to act as a liaison between the IOR and the supervisory commission of cardinals, a position vacant since 2010.

And also for the presidency of the Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria, it is expected that Cardinal Attilio Nicora will make way for a successor.