Pope Francis’s “open and incomplete” reform of the Curia

“If the season ended today…” is a favorite of baseball pundits with little to say and nothing to lose. I thought of that throughout last week and over the weekend, as I kept up some correspondence and put off replies to other conversations, while wending my way through fellow Vatican-watchers’ copious and labyrinthine speculation surrounding Pope Francis’s health and the future of his pontificate.

Pope Francis suffers chronically from sciatica. Over the past year or so, he has had a significant length of colon removed. He has a bad knee that doesn’t appear to be getting better, and – something the pope reportedly wants to avoid if he possibly can – may require surgery. Even if those issues weren’t there for him, he’s 85 years old and refuses to take any real down time.

The announcement of a big batch of red hats for late August – I don’t envy anyone who’ll be there – and the first meeting of the full College in seven years, and the recent spate of cancelled trips and other appointments due to ill health, have all been grist for the mill.

One of the things I said to a few people privately, however, was that we need to have longer memories when it comes to pontifical downslides. Pope St. John Paul II, for example, was really sick for a really long time. He was not really running the show for the last five years of his pontificate, and struggled to keep his hand on the tiller during the five years before that. In fact, that’s one of the things that led to the curial mess we have today.

The breakdown in governance during the long decline of Pope St. John Paul II’s powers – a decline, I hasten to add, that only exacerbated trends well established during the more active years of the sainted pope’s globetrotting reign – did not receive any really adequate address during the reign of Benedict XVI.

When the cardinals elected Francis in 2013, they gave him a mandate to reform the Roman Curia. Everyone knew that something needed doing – lots of somethings, maybe all the somethings – and lots of people had at least a few ideas about what, but nobody really wanted the job. At least, nobody really wanted the job, who had a snowball’s chance in Roman August of getting it.

It’s fair to say that, outside the professional cheerleading class, no one is particularly satisfied with the result of Francis’s reform effort. I’d include Francis in the unsatisfied group, by the way: “Reform on the go,” as veteran Vaticanista Andrea Gagliarducci has dubbed it (riffing closely on Pope Francis himself), is by its very nature an “ open and incomplete ” project.

We heard, early on in Francis’s pontificate, about the new pope’s predilection for “starting processes” and “discerning the times” rather than “occupying spaces” – we heard a great deal about all that – but, not to put too fine a point on it: What does it all come to?

“Open and incomplete” could be the language one uses for a brilliantly designed (almost self-perpetuating) institutional attitude of reform that always is on the lookout for things that could use work, coupled with a willingness to try new things. On the other hand, it could be euphemistic wordplay designed to soften if not disguise the fact that the head man has neither a plan nor the desire to get one, let alone bring it to any sort of reasonable fruition.

For years – nearly half a decade – we heard that the draft law reforming the Curia was basically done, and that we’d be seeing it very soon. When that line passed its sell-by date, we heard from several Roman hands – Cardinal Parolin the highest-ranking one of them – that “the reform – de facto – has already been accomplished,” though Cardinal Parolin frequently offered such and similar remarks as asides, or while granting interviews about other things.

In any case, the College of Cardinals will convene for an extraordinary consistory that will follow the ordinary one for the new red hats, during which they will receive a briefing of some sort on the New & Improved Roman Curia ™. Now the reform is passed, they’ll find out what’s in it.

Maybe.

Then, maybe it doesn’t really matter. The whole business seems designed not to work. At least, it appears designed not to work as a governing and administrative apparatus – as a bureaucracy – which is unfortunate, if it is so, because the Roman Curia is just that. Whatever else it is, or may be, the Roman Curia is a bureaucracy, which as such must be able to do things.

Pope Francis’s program, such as it is, appears to have been focused on reforming the bureaucrats, rather than the bureaucracy. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Repetita iuvant, and all that. Having a care for the moral quality and spiritual health of the men in one’s charge is part — the biggest part — of being a pastor and especially a religious superior. Still, believing that one can create a well-ordered bureaucracy by getting holy men to fill curial posts, well, that’s like believing that one can solve the problems of a dysfunctional ball club by putting the best players in the front office.

Also, Pope Francis hasn’t been trying to put holy men in curial jobs (though I’m sure he’s done that), so much as he is trying to put holiness into men who already have offices.

“Holiness” is the goal of Christian life, but it is neither a blueprint for reform nor a plan of government. Bureaucracies need to function, whether the bureaucrats be saints or devils. How it will do what it is supposed to do is anything but clear at this point.

I guess we’ll wait and see.

Catholic World Report