The Vatican’s puzzling recipe for paralyzing gridlock

Two wonky stories out of the Vatican in the space of a week may give casual observers more than ample occasion for head scratching. They may also give more than a passing impression that Pope Francis and his chief lieutenants in the Roman curia don’t really have a plan and are mostly reacting to developments.

One was a strange Motu proprio – that’s Latin for “on his own initiative” and is used to express the legal fiction that the pope is doing something without prompting – that declared all assets owned by curial departments or entities they control to be the property of the Holy See. That law didn’t really change anything or say anything that wasn’t – on paper, at least – already true.

The thing is, there are dozens of outfits – from big local Roman operations such as the papal basilicas to charitable arms, cultural associations, and other similar operations – that nominally belong to the Holy See and are therefore subject to papal control, but mostly operate without any real oversight.

The question is: Why would Pope Francis feel the need just now to remind everyone who’s boss?

One wonders whether there hasn’t been some squirrelly behavior in some department or other, some pushback against Vatican attempts to exercise control after many years of “salutary neglect” that gave people the impression they actually owned the stuff they had to hand.

Earlier this month, Francis made his special commissioner for St. Mary Major, one of the papal basilicas, appointed in the wake of persistent rumor regarding shady financial management (among other things) into a permanent position, even though he left in place the fellow nominally in charge of the basilica.

There is something quintessentially Roman and imperial about the way Francis goes about such things. Octavian Caesar, better known as Caesar Augustus, famously left the trappings of Rome’s old constitutional republican government in place, while slowly but surely accruing all real power to himself and effecting a careful balance of institutional, personal, strategic, and psychological pressures and interests to assure that real power would stay with the person of the emperor.

(Augustus was moderate, temperate, and mostly reasonable in his management of affairs and in his exercise of both power and authority. His immediate successor, Tiberius, was less so. Tiberius’s successor was a fellow called Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known to history by his childhood nickname, Caligula.)

The other curious act of governance was a rescript Francis granted to his liturgy czar, Cardinal Arthur Roche, who has been having some trouble corralling bishops apparently reluctant or even unwilling to implement Francis’s 2021 restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass.

Now, if you didn’t know the Traditional Latin Mass was still a going concern, you’re not alone. The number of Catholics devoted to the older forms of worship is miniscule. The number of Catholics more than vaguely aware that the Latin Mass is still – or once again – a thing in the life of the Church is vanishingly small.

That’s only one of the reasons many Vatican watchers were surprised when Francis, in July of 2021, basically uprooted and threw out his predecessor, Benedict XVI’s signature 2007 liturgical reform, which gave broad permission for priests to celebrate sacraments and other rites according to the liturgical books promulgated in 1962 by Pope John XXIII.

Folks devoted to the older rites have not had an easy time of it since Pope Paul VI replaced the old books wholesale in 1969. Pope Benedict’s decision in 2007 to extend broad permission to priests who were willing to celebrate the sacraments according to the older disposition went a long way toward bringing “traditionalists” back into the life of the Church.

There have been a few trouble spots, where die-hard traditionalists have tried to do things their way, torpedoes be damned. And there are pockets of zealous devotees who don’t care much for the Second Vatican Council or the liturgical reform that followed it. Some of them make lots of mostly unpleasant noise on the internet.

For the most part, however, Catholics who prefer the older forms have gone about their lives quietly. Since 2007, when Pope Benedict gave broad permission for the celebration of Mass and other rites in the older ways, traditional Catholics have slowly integrated into the life of normal Catholic parishes, or set up permanent digs in specially designated churches.

When Francis walked back Benedict’s liberalizing reform, he cited “defense of the unity of the Body of Christ,” as his motive, and said he was “constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors.”

He also said, “[I]t is up to the Bishop,” to regulate the liturgy and apply the new rules according to their best lights. “It is up to you,” Francis told the bishops, “to authorize in your Churches, as local Ordinaries, the use of the Missale Romanum of 1962, applying the norms of the present Motu proprio.”

Several bishops—especially, though not exclusively, in the United States—looked around their jurisdictions and saw relative peace. So, they granted permission for things to continue pretty much as they had been going. It seems Roche didn’t much like that, so he issued a series of clarifications around Christmas of 2021, ostensibly in response to queries he’d received from prelates regarding how they should behave.

Some bishops took Roche’s clarifications to heart. Others figured they were well within bounds in granting dispensations of their own accord—there was nothing in the pope’s 2021 law that said bishops had to ask permission and the pope had told the bishops it was up to them—and, in any case, the bishops had good reason to think they had Church law on their side.

In fact, more than a few legal eagles wondered whether Roche hadn’t overstepped his bounds when he told bishops to ask his office for permission before granting the kind of broad dispensations that left things largely as they had been. Roche really didn’t like that. It appears he liked people talking about it even less.

Roche took the extraordinary step of responding to some canonical speculation in that regard, telling the Where Peter Is blog, which had reached out to him for comment on a Feb. 10 analysis piece in The Pillar, “It is an absurdity to think that the prefect of a dicastery would do anything other than exercise the wishes of the Holy Father.”

“The article in The Pillar,” Roche said, “is not really an attack on me but on the pope’s authority.” He called the wonky analysis piece “an astonishing act full of hubris.”

A few days later, Roche was in to see the pope. A day after that, the Vatican press office released a new law, in the form of a papal rescript—a sort of ad hoc clarification quickly given—that confirmed Roche’s understanding of his powers and told the world’s bishops that they would have to come asking before granting broad permissions to traditional groups or the priests who care for them.

To be perfectly frank, this whole contretemps probably won’t make much difference on the ground. In nuts-and-bolts practical terms, it will take time for bishops to take stock of things and to draft the letters—if any write them at all—and more time for Roche’s small outfit to receive and consider them.

Then, there will be back-and-forth over plans to implement whatever orders come down from Roche’s office. It’s a safe bet that bishops who dispensed with alacrity will find it necessary to seek written permission from Rome for each minor detail and every miniscule adjustment of whatever plans eventually emerge.

Temporizing is another ancient Roman art, one that is mother’s milk to bishops everywhere.

“Reform on the go.” That is how veteran Vatican watcher Andrea Gagliarducci dubbed Pope Francis’s approach to reshaping the Vatican and the Church. That description is of a piece with what close papal advisor Antonio Spadaro SJ has called the pope’s “open and incomplete” leadership style, by which he means to say that Francis prefers to “start processes” rather than “occupy spaces” in his approach to things.

“If one has the answers to all the questions,” Pope Francis told Spadaro in a 2013 interview published in the Jesuit-run La Civiltà Cattolica, “that is the proof that God is not with him.”

Such an approach necessarily leads to processes of trial and error, which will sometimes seem, from the outside in, like taking two steps forward and three steps back. Willingness to walk that way may engender serious pastoral dynamism. When it comes to governance, on the other hand, it is frequently a recipe for paralyzing gridlock.

Catholic World Report