Vatican 101

All the Pope's Men : The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks
by John L. Allen, Jr.

A fascinating and enlightening look at the world's oldest and most mysterious institution, written by an American journalist with unparalleled knowledge about the Vatican's past and present.

The sexual abuse scandals that shook American and British Catholicism in 2002 brought to light a long-standing cultural gap between the English-speaking Catholic world and the Vatican. In Rome, the crisis was often seen as an attack on the Church mounted by money-hungry lawyers, a hostile press, and liberal activists who used it as a way to turn attention on such concerns as celibacy, women's ordination, and lay empowerment. When the Vatican struck down the U.S. bishops' draft for handling allegations of sexual abuse, many saw it as an attempt to curb an independent American Catholic church. Yet, as time passed, it became clear that the Vatican's well-founded concerns about due process were shared by most liberal U.S. bishops and canon lawyers.

All The Pope's Men is a lucid, in-depth guide to the sometimes puzzling, often incomprehensible inner workings of the Vatican. It reveals how decisions are made, how papal bureaucrats think, and how careers in the Roman Curia are shaped. It debunks the myths that have fed the distrust and suspicions many English-speaking Catholics harbor about the way the Vatican conducts its business, explains who really wields the power, and offers entertaining profiles of the personalities, historical and present-day, who have wielded that power for good and for bad. A thoughtful analysis of the recent sexual abuse crisis sheds light on how the Vatican perceives the Church in the United States.

Balanced, lively, and filled with Vatican history and lore, All The Pope's Menprovides the general reader with an authoritative picture of the highly charged relationship between the Vatican and the richest, most influential national Catholic church in the world today.

Chapter 1

If you mill about St. Peter's Square long enough, you will eventually see a black Mercedes sedan exiting from the Vatican, bearing a cardinal or a gentleman of His Holiness to some important engagement. (The "gentlemen" are Italian laymen, often from noble families linked to the papacy for centuries, who help the Pope greet visiting dignitaries and assist at other ceremonial occasions.) The passenger is usually seated in the rear, dressed to the nines, projecting an air of worldly power and importance. One can sometimes be forgiven for straining to see the connection between such affectation and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world-weary Romans, who have seen it all over the centuries, have developed a kind of gallows humor for resolving the tension between the high ideals of the Church and its human realities. For example, those sedans from the Vatican bear license plates that read "SCV," which stands for Stato della Citt del Vaticano, Vatican City State. The Romans, however, say that it really means Se Cristo vedesse . . . If only Christ could see.

Similar jokes at the expense of the human side of the Vatican are legendary. Monsignor Ronald Knox, an Anglican who joined the Catholic Church, once famously quipped: "On the barque of Peter, those with queasy stomachs should keep clear of the engine room." (Barque is an antiquated word for boat. Thus "barque of Peter" is an old, but still venerable, metaphor for the Catholic Church.) Here's another classic. Question: Why is Rome such a spiritual city? Answer: Because so many people have lost their faith in it. Even popes sometimes get in on the cynical act. Beloved roly-poly Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) was once asked how many people work in the Vatican, to which he is supposed to have replied: "About half."

Yet the Catholic Church, like any social movement, needs an institution with which it can organize its common life. Without an institution, a social phenomenon dies. It's not enough for Roman Catholics merely to have the Pope as a symbolic figurehead. The Church needs structures with teeth in order to make decisions, and to keep its 1-billion-strong worldwide membership in some kind of basic unity. Decisions have to be made about what the Church teaches, how it worships, and what position it's going to take on important issues. Thus the Catholic Church needs a central administrative system through which information can circulate, contacts can be maintained, and decisions can be communicated and enforced. If Roman Catholicism did not have the Vatican, it would have to invent it.

This was what Pope Innocent III meant when he wrote to the bishops of France in 1198: "Although the Lord has given us the fullness of power in the Church, a power that makes us owe something to all Christians, still we cannot stretch the limits of human nature. Since we cannot deal personally with every single concern—the law of human condition does not suffer it—we are sometimes constrained to use certain brothers of ours as extensions of our own body, to take care of things we would rather deal with in person if the convenience of the Church allowed it." Pope Sixtus V was equally candid in 1588 in Immensa aeterni Dei: "The Roman Pontiff, whom Christ the Lord constituted as visible head of his body, the Church, and appointed for the care of all the Churches, calls and rallies unto himself many collaborators for this immense responsibility . . . so that he, the holder of the key of all this power, may share the huge mass of business and responsibilities among them—i.e., the cardinals—and the other authorities of the Roman Curia, and by God's helping grace avoid breaking under the strain."

The aim of this book is to explain how the Vatican thinks, not to focus on its structures. Yet those structures influence the psychology and culture, so some understanding of terms such as Vatican, Holy See, congregation, superior, and so on is essential. This chapter covers that basic ground, laying out the vocabulary one needs to have and offering an organizational overview that will at least hint at who's who and what's what. Think of this as a basic survey course in college that lays the foundation for more advanced study, a kind of Vatican 101. This will be quick and, for experts, frustratingly schematic. Readers wishing a deeper treatment will want to consult the classic on the subject, La Curia Romana: Lineamenti Storico-Giuridici by Niccol~ del Re, published by the Vatican Publishing House in 1998. It is a comprehensive work, truly the best resource for this material, and much of the highlights in this section are drawn from Re's book. For those who don't read Italian, the best resource in English is Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church, by Fr. Thomas J. Reese, editor of the Jesuit-run America magazine.

THE POPE

A properly theological understanding of the Pope as the successor of St. Peter and the instrument of unity for the Church is offered in chapter 5. Here we'll take a more functional approach, asking what does the Pope do? One good way of answering that question is to consult the Code of Canon Law, which is the supreme law of the Catholic Church. Its answer is clear: the Pope is the man on whose desk the buck stops. Canon 331 describes the papacy this way: "The office uniquely committed by the Lord to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, abides in the Bishop of the Church of Rome. He is the head of the College of Bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the Pastor of the universal Church here on earth. Consequently, by virtue of his office, he has supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, and he can always freely exercise this power." To use the language of political science, the Pope holds full executive, legislative, and judicial power in the Catholic Church. There are no "checks and balances" as in a modern secular state. It's often said that the Catholic Church is not a democracy, and from a canonical point of view that's right on the money. (This leads to the old joke that the Catholic Church is an absolute monarchy tempered by selective disobedience!) That should not be understood, however, in the pejorative sense that the Church is not accountable to anyone. The Church has its own system of accountability, and we will say more about that later.

Yet to put the accent on the Pope's power is, in a sense, to put the cart before the horse. Many non-Catholics don't realize, for example, that the Catholic Church had popes for nineteen hundred years before it had a formal dogma of papal infallibility. The Church has clarified the powers of the papacy over a long historical process, which implies that the Church knew what the Pope's job was well before it could list all the tools popes need to do it. The papacy is in the first place an idea, the conviction that Christ commissioned Peter to be the head of his Church, and that this role is passed on through time to Peter's successors. As the successor of Peter, the Pope is the agent of unity who holds the Catholic Church together across space and through time. The powers of the office are the institutional expression of this spiritual and sacramental identity.

Copyright © 2004 by John L. Allen, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

John L. Allen is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public Radio. He is the author of The Rise of Benedict XVI and All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, The Nation, and many other publications. His Internet column, "The Word from Rome," is considered by knowledgeable observers to be the best single source of insights on Vatican affairs in the English language.