UPDATE: Here is Tom Reese's evaluation: He is a tough critic. Few points for good intentions.
Pope Francis reforms the Vatican Curia. Here’s hoping he’s not done.
Reforming the Vatican bureaucracy should not be a rare, revolutionary event. It takes nine months for a woman to produce a baby. It took nine years for the Vatican to birth a new document reforming the Roman Curia. Perhaps the Vatican would act more quickly if there were more women working there.
Potentially the biggest change in “Praedicate Evangelium” is its opening of top positions in the Vatican to laypeople. This could have monumental impact if truly implemented. Theoretically, the secretary of state, the highest official after the pope, could be a laywoman. A woman theologian could be prefect of the Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith. This will upset those who believe that only the ordained can exercise the power of governance in the church.
There are other problems, however, in employing laity in the Vatican.
Having laypeople in top jobs will not magically change the church for the better. Laypeople bring their own values and baggage to their jobs. As parishioners know, lay ministers can be just as clerical and authoritarian as priests.
The second issue is money. How is the Vatican going to pay for qualified lay specialists and executives?
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These are some of the beginning takes on the document, which has only been made available in Italian. Seeming it was directly published on the Web Site so that it could not be leaked enabling others to give it an immediate spin. Expect more analysis in the days ahead.
Pope Francis announces major overhaul of Roman Curia (CNS)
After 9 years, Francis reorganizes Vatican with focus on evangelization, roles for laypeople (NCR)
With Pope Francis’ reform of the Roman Curia, nine years of work is coming to fruition (America)
Pope Francis is drawing on Vatican II to radically change how the Catholic Church is governed (more detailed article from America)
My analysis
1. Most notably, the document states that "any member of the faithful can preside over a dicastery," an update to the 1988 constitution, which specifically stated that Vatican dicasteries are headed by a "cardinal prefect or the presiding archbishop." (from NCR)
I agree with Rocco that this is the biggest change since it essential does away with the old Canon law notion that only bishops and priests can be involved in governance (Benedict even added a provision in canon law saying that deacons could not be involved in governance.
So, in theory a woman could head the Dicastery for Bishops. The way Francis has gotten around this is to say that the Curia exists for the service of the Pope and Bishops, and that nothing is final until it has been "seen" by the Pope. The Document has softened the change by saying that individual dicasteries can have greater requirements, and the dicasteries need to revise their current rules. So what is now called the Congregation for Bishops could request the Pope that its head needed to be a bishop.
This has implications for dioceses. Right now the Vicar for Clergy is always a priest or bishop but the same logic would apply. A woman could represent the bishop in his relationships with the clergy since all final decisions are really the bishops, i.e. he could overrule her. So the Pope is opening almost all the diocesan bishop's cabinet positions to laity.
2. While the Secretary of State still remains the top dog as the coordinator and personal representative of the Pope, the Dicasteries are conceived as equal partners which means that they have to now coordinate among themselves. Looks like the Secretary of State is headed toward being what in most dioceses is called the moderator of the Curia.
3. The Discastery for Evangelization which will have two sections, one for missionary lands and other for rest of the world, will be headed by the Pope himself. Before Vatican II this was true of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So now rather than being inwardly oriented toward maintance of doctrine, the Curia will be outwardly oriented toward Evangelization under the personal leadership of the Pope. Only a few dioceses have established a Vicar for Evangelization. Cleveland is one of them, headed by a young priest whom Betty knows and admires.
Just think if a diocese is reorganized with a lead Vicar for Evangelization dedicated both to internal parish renewal as well as mission to the world, perhaps led by a woman religious, all the rest of the diocesan offices led by lay men and women, and with many parishes and organization led by lay administrators. Of course. in recent years many lay people have taken on roles in parish and diocesan life. However , they have only been secondary, the real ruling club has been the priests. That could all change at the diocesan and parish level. And certainly as long as there are not many vocations to the priesthood it will almost certainly have to go in this direction.
The analysis that I am looking forward to will be that of Tom Reese, who has already told us what to look for
ReplyDeletehttps://religionnews.com/2022/02/09/four-things-to-look-for-in-francis-reform-of-curia/
The Vatican Curia will never be truly reformed as long as the top positions must be filled by cardinals and bishops.
Popes also need more freedom to pick their teams. Officials appointed under a previous pope are not always flexible enough to get on board with the new pope’s priorities. All new CEOs need a management team that is loyal to them and their goals. They also don’t always get the right mix the first time and therefore need to replace people who don’t work out.
All of this is very difficult to do when the management team is made up of cardinals and bishops, who are still treated like princes and nobles, no matter what Francis says. To remove a cardinal or bishop from a curia job, you have to find him another job in the Vatican or make him head of an archdiocese in his home country.
Having bishops working in the Vatican is theologically problematic since a bishop without a diocese is like a shepherd without sheep. Vatican officials need to see themselves as staff to the pope as head of the college of bishops and not as part of the hierarchy.
Having laypersons in charge of Vatican departments (now to be known as "dicasteries") could have some practical implications. In my view, its chief importance is symbolic, insofar as it indicates the church is recognizing, at its highest institutional levels, that laypersons can govern the church.
ReplyDeleteAt least in the US, most dioceses already are far ahead of Rome in having laypersons in key positions. Francis's reform should give this further impetus, and perhaps open up more diocesan positions to laypersons.
It would be great if this could somehow lead to qualified and competent laypersons being formally put in administrative charge of parishes. It's unfair both to priests and to parishioners to have a single priest pastor saddled with administrative responsibility for two or three parishes.
I suppose underlying this is the notion that clergy are for pastoral ministry - a notion that Francis surely approves of. This cuts against what Ratzinger had insisted, that administrative control is intrinsic to ordained ministry (but not lay ministry, even though all the baptized are priests, as well as prophets and kings).
It's already happening, because there isn't any other choice. The Chancellor in our archdiocese is a deacon. The vice chancellor/judge is a lay woman. There aren't enough priests to fill these positions, they have to prioritize priests for the ministries that actually require them.
DeleteIn the western part of the state, which is another diocese, there is a deacon who is an administrator of three rural parishes. On most weekends they just have Communion services. There may be more than one situation like that; I know about that one because these parishes are up the road from my hometown. Which still has a resident pastor, but he is shared with another, smaller parish.
Our pastor here is a priest who used to fill some chancery positions. We are glad to have him, I hope he likes it here, because we nearly didn't get a resident priest last time the rotation came up.
Of course, the church has long had women religious in administrative authority; priests are simply chaplains. That has long been rationalized as that the bishop is ultimately in charge in terms of religious orders of diocesan right, and the Pope is ultimately in charge in terms of religious orders of pontifical right. In the last case it has only had any practical significance when Rome decides to investigate women religious.
ReplyDeleteI hope good fruit comes of this reorganization. I admit it's not immediately clear that renaming and combining departments is going to make a significant difference, at least in the short term. If Francis wants the church to become less focused on maintaining itself, and more of an outward-facing, evangelizing church, it will require much more than a new org chart. That is not to say a new org chart isn't necessary. But much more fundamental renewal will be required in addition to this administrative reform.
ReplyDeleteUnder the umbrella of "more fundamental renewal", synodality surely occupies a prime place.
At this morning press conference
ReplyDeleteExplaining the significance of Pope Francis’s reform of the curia, which allows the laity to lead Vatican departments, Jesuit Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda stressed that the “power of governance in the Church does not come from the sacrament of Orders” that happens at priestly ordination, but from “canonical mission,” meaning, the faculty granted by the Roman pontiff on any given issue.