(Current and past) Vatican Secretaries of State

[Peter_J]

I’m going out on a limb a little bit here, but it seems to me there’s a pattern.

2012:
The Star:

Bertone’s detractors say he has packed the Curia with Italian friends. Some see an attempt to influence the election of the next pope and increase the chances that the papacy returns to Italy

1998:
Chiesa:

Cardinal Angelo Sodano hinted to these married priests to “make a return to their homeland,” i.e. Ukraine, without taking into account that they had always lived there and that what really moved were the borders, in the redrawing of boundaries after World War II. In the Vatican, Cardinals Achille Silvestrini and Edward Cassidy took up their defense, and Sodano cancelled the order.

Shall we call this “an abundance of Italian patriotism”?

 

[Hesychios]

As I recall there was recently (I think 2011) a call by the Italian synod of bishops to ban married Romanian Catholic priests from Italy as well. Italy does not have overlapping episcopal jurisdictions for separate Sui Iuris churches like the USA does, these priests are quite dependent on the local ordinaries.

I don’t object to the idea that the Pope should be from the hierarchy of Italy, or even that the electors should be restricted to the hierarchy of Italy, but that does not fit in well with the modern ecclesiology where the Pope is thought of as much more than the patriarch of Rome.

That there should be politicking and engineering to try to rig an election to assure the selection of a person of any certain ethnic background strikes me as rather distasteful, but it wouldn’t be the first time in church history that that sort of thing has happened.

 

[cradlecatholic5]

Sad to say, politics are everywhere