A Cheerful Pope Francis Reveals Readiness to Reform Vatican

By Tony Barber
Financial Times
July 10, 2014

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No sacrilege is intended in comparing today’s Roman Curia under Pope Francis with the Central Committee of the now-defunct Soviet communist party under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

Just as Mr Gorbachev subjected the grey-suited apparatchiks in Moscow to withering criticism of their party’s ossified mentality, so the Pope is putting his skullcapped prelates on alert that their encrusted habits fall short of modern requirements. Whether they like it or not, root-and-branch reforms are coming to the Vatican bureaucracy.

In this context, an overhaul of the Vatican’s financial and media operations that was announced this week is only the tip of the iceberg. The larger objective is to reshape the Curia, as the Pope underlined in a speech last December in the Sala Clementina, a Renaissance hall of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

“When professionalism is lacking, there is a slow drift down towards mediocrity. Dossiers become full of trite and lifeless information?.?.?.?The Curia’s structure turns into a ponderous, bureaucratic customs house,” the Pope said, using what was almost Gorbachevian language.