Pope Francis Takes on the Catholic Bureaucracy

Financial Times
December 26, 2014

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0ed5cf7c-8447-11e4-bae9-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F0ed5cf7c-8447-11e4-bae9-00144feabdc0.html%3Fsiteedition%3Dintl&siteedition=intl&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bishop-accountability.org%2FAbuseTracker%2F#axzz3N1zoGJVk

When Pope Francis moved out of the papal apartments into a priestly commune upon ascending to the throne of St Peter last year, he Fsaid it was not so much because they were a luxurious affront to his determination to make the Catholic Church once again an advocate for the poor. The papal suite was, he said, like an “inverted funnel”, keeping people whom he regards as the real church out of its aloof institutions.

That comment from the 78-year-old pontiff was an early sign of his determination to make the Church more open, inclusive and accountable. And that ambition was on full display again this week when he scolded members of the Vatican bureaucracy in a harshly worded Christmas greeting that listed “15 ills” weakening their mission — from narcissism to hypocrisy and even “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

Pope Francis is giving his two-millennia-old institution the biggest shake-up since the Second Vatican Council convened by John XXIII in 1962-65. Vatican II tried to bring the Church into easier alignment with its modern flock, but its flames of reform flickered and died. Decades of papal intolerance ensued, with John Paul II and Benedict XVI enforcing narrow and defensive dogma. But Francis says the Church must now find a “new balance” or collapse “like a house of cards”. In particular, it cannot “insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive measures”.

His attempt to shift debate away from sexual morality might be seen as tactically astute after the avalanche of evidence of priests sexually abusing children in their care — a scandal the Vatican was criminally slow to address. Yet untold millions of Catholics have drifted away from the Church not just because of that but because its obsession with personal morality is so at variance with the lives they live. One of Pope Francis’s first actions was to replace Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Holy See, who said the media was responsible for the impression that the Church was obsessed with sex. Pietro Parolin, his replacement, promptly observed that celibate priests are a clerical tradition, not a doctrine.