I’ve seen a lot of news articles mentioning reform, but nothing saying just what the reform involves. Could anyone help shed some light on this? Are there any reliable sources giving a basic outline of what these reforms could be?
I don’t know of a single source that gives an overview of this topic. There are a number of areas where there have been criticisms of the curia, its organization, and its actions. We don’t know what reforms will occur, because those decisions haven’t been made yet. It’s likely to be a big process because it’s a big and complex organization, and planning is important to avoid mass confusion when transitioning from the current organization.
If you’re American, one way to look at this is by analogy with the US government. There are umpteen federal agencies, and sometimes these agencies say conflicting things, or pursue conflicting goals. If you’re the president, you can certainly work closely in a crisis with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, etc to coordinate their actions and harmonize their different approaches. But that’s a lot of work, especially if there are bigger issues you ought to be dealing with, which is often the case in a crisis. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security was created, to centralize decisionmaking and clarify the lines of authority.
The Vatican also has a number of different organizational bodies, called dicasteries (
List at Wiki). Some are congregations, like the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Others are councils, like the Pontifical Council for the Family, or the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers. All of these bodies are headed by prefects, presidents, etc, and all have various 2nd and 3rd rank officials and supporting staff. All of these people have their own ideas about how to do their jobs, and about how their dicastery fits into the work of the Vatican. Considering all this, it should not be a surprise that many have described the curia as bloated, fractious and inefficient.
A few areas where there have been specific criticisms in the last couple decades:
- The priest sexual abuse crisis. The process of reporting and disciplining priests who are thought to pose a risk to the faithful is much improved from years ago, but the breadth of the issue and the urgency of changing the process was not widely recognized at the Vatican for a number of years during John Paul’s pontificate. I think this was in part because all the little curial fiefdoms were operating independently, not communicating. Because of that, and general bureaucratic inertia, it took a long time for the process to be reformed. Even if this topic has been adequately addressed for now, other topics the Church should be addressing will face similar uphill climbs through the organizational quagmire.
- Vatican Bank scandal. I haven’t followed this story as closely, so I’ll leave it to you to look up online. What I recall is that the Vatican Bank has not kept up with international financial standards, especially those dealing with transparency designed to discourage money-laundering. This is probably for the same reasons as above, but it makes the Church look like it’s in league with criminals.
- Public and media relations. The pope is usually trying to communicate a message to the faithful and to the rest of the world. But managing the message is a skill. Reporters are like a pack of dogs. Ignoring them won’t make them go away, but setting out a nice dish for them will sometimes make them bark a bit less about the garbage out back. And if you are going to put out something smelly, at least have it wrapped up properly so it doesn’t make a huge mess when the bin gets knocked over. Case in point was in 2009 when Benedict lifted the excommunications of senior SSPX officials. What Benedict didn’t know, because of poor communication within the Vatican, was that one of those bishops had publicly questioned the truth of the Holocaust. It should have been a nice story about how the shepherd was gently trying to bring his wayward sheep back into the fold, but instead the story was one of a former Hitler Youth pope restoring communion with a possible anti-Semite. That was perhaps the worst example, but the communications strategy in recent years has been generally poor.* VatiLeaks. The details of this are so Byzantine that it’s difficult to grasp it all, but from what I gather there were two different factions within the Vatican. One faction felt that the other was acting contrary to the interests of the pope and the Vatican, and in fact illegally. So what did the first faction do? They leaked to the press confidential papal documents that portrayed the second faction in a bad light. Finding such documents wasn’t tough, because this also involved the Vatican Bank, which I already mentioned was having some difficult issues. What we don’t really know is how big the factions were - the first faction definitely included the pope’s butler, but it seems likely that at least one or two higher officials were somehow allied with him - though that doesn’t mean they approved of this criminal act. Whatever. There will always be politics in organizations of men. But VatiLeaks suggests that the first faction felt so disempowered that they didn’t feel proceeding in the normal approved way was an option. That’s either a dysfunctional system, or really poor human resources to hire and maintain such employees.
