Does the Church really need a new “Pastor Bonus”?

Edward Condon, who, if you’ll remember, broke the news about Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s letter about the question of consent to the processus brevior, has a piece at the Catholic Herald about Francis’s ongoing project of Curia reform:

Rereading Pastor Bonus, it is hard to see where that document could be meaningfully changed to prevent the kind of financial chicanery we are reading about, other than by the creation of a Secretariat for the Economy, which has already been done. Pastor Bonus outlines what the various Vatican departments are and what matters they deal with, it is not the curial equivalent of a civil service code; that does exist and is called the General Regulations of the Roman Curia, and about the reform of this we have heard next to nothing.

While the reordering of the curial departments might be useful in some respects, like the creation of one department to handle everything pertaining to the laity, it cannot prevent or address ongoing abuses by those who work in those departments.

Pope Francis has spoken strongly and often of his disapproval of careerism in the Curia, yet we have seen sadly little, if anything, done to discourage it. While the C9 group of cardinals was drawn from around the world and could at least have represented an outside perspective for reform, this has not carried over into actual curial appointments. The most high profile appointments under Francis have continued to go to career Vatican civil servants, including Cardinal Parolin, as Secretary of State, and Cardinal Mamberti as head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican Supreme Court, to say nothing of the highly controversial appointment of Mgr Ricca to the IOR, or Vatican Bank. All of these appointments were made by Francis under advice from the very Curia he is trying to reform, with the ridiculous consequence that he has had to write to his own Secretary of State reminding him to run the Church according to the rules.

(Emphasis supplied.) If you’re especially interested in the Church’s administrative regulations, the General Regulations of the Roman Curia are available in Italian here. We have remarked a couple of times that the project of sweeping reform of the Curia, so much on the cardinals’ minds as they prepared for the conclave, seems to have fallen into second or third prominence on the Holy Father’s agenda. Certainly, the promised rewrite of Pastor Bonus has not appeared. And on this issue, Condon’s point is pretty sound: where could Pastor Bonus be improved? We’re not so sure.

Certainly, codifying, for want of a better word, the competence of the Fidelis Dispensator entities would be nice, as would long-term clarity on the role of the Council of Cardinals. And, if the Holy Father does erect a super-congregation for family, laity, and life, as he promised at the Synod, it would be nice to have its competence codified. But, in the main, as Condon notes, Pastor Bonus only sets out the competence and jurisdiction of the various dicasteries, and even then only in very broad terms. The implementation of that competence and jurisdiction comes in other sources of law. For example, one has to consult sources other than Pastor Bonus to figure out what the penal jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is—an important issue if one is worried about allegations of heresy, for example—especially the so-called Substantive Norms.

A brief digression: we have long complained that the Church’s sources of law are remarkably opaque, and that real transparency will not be possible until all the faithful can access, in a language they can understand, all of the relevant law. In the United States, most states make not only statutes and regulations but also judicial decisions available for free via the internet. (The federal government is very good about statutes and regulations, but less good about many judicial decisions.) In addition to the states’ publications, private services like Westlaw and Lexis provide access to statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions at all levels. Compare that to the Church of Rome, which makes some things available, but not all, and not always in widely spoken languages. (Italian is not widely spoken outside Italy, as some Synod fathers noted.) One big gap is the relative unavailability of Rotal jurisprudence, which provides hugely important glosses on the relevant canons, especially in matrimonial cases. The Vatican’s website is also a mess, which is a problem when it comes time to access important legal documents.

Put it like this: while “apostolic constitution” is a term of art, it is helpful to think of Pastor Bonus as a constitution for the Curia. And, as with any constitution, it deals in broad strokes. The detail work comes later and elsewhere. So, the question is, really, whether the broad strokes of Pastor Bonus need to be replaced with the broad strokes of another document. And that is not so clear. But even if Pastor Bonus needs to be replaced by a new document, it is not clear that that fixes the problem of the Curia. Condon again:

While a new version of Pastor Bonus will be an interesting, and probably helpful, development in the governance of the Church, it is not going to be the panacea of reform many are hoping for. If we ever hope to see real transparency in the governance of the Church, there needs to be reform, not of the Vatican departments, but of those working in them.

(Emphasis supplied.) On this point, given the Holy Father’s stringent Christmas speech to the Curia, it seems that Holy Father agrees.

You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

David Mills, writing at Aleteia, has “A Marxist Lesson for Breeding Catholics.” His argument opens (and boils down to):

Only the affluent will find being open to life easy. For us, another child means an adjustment downward, but he doesn’t tip the family into poverty, or into deeper poverty. He may mean giving up a vacation if the family’s wealthy, or the Thursday family dinner out if the family’s middle class. Her arrival won’t mean giving up food, or rent or the parochial school that can make all the difference to his older siblings’ future.

Most of us who write about these things can afford to be romantic about them. Those in the Catholic chattering classes who compose warm glowing stories about the beauty of the Catholic teaching—as I have here, for example—tend to forget that we write from privilege. We forget what Marxism 101 would teach us, that we see the world from a specific place in society and favor its interests, and without great effort will be blind to the perspectives and interests of others, especially the poor.

There is in much Catholic writing on married sexuality a reflection of bourgeois good feeling; it treats the Catholic teaching as a pure blessing, with formulaic nods to its difficulty, when for others, not so privileged as we are, it can be a burden and a threat. Catholics who write and speak on sexuality tend to be perky.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink removed.) He goes on in this vein for a little while, coming to this conclusion:

It can’t be acceptable, from the Catholic point of view, that the marital act is so strictly bound by economic status that husbands and wives can enjoy the divine gift of sexual union only if they can afford the result. The Catholic teaching is not for the middle and upper classes alone.

We the comfortable, who speak so romantically of being open to life—because for us, with our privileges, it is a romance—could find ways to make it a romance, and not a terror, for others too.

(Emphasis supplied.)

The comments, perhaps predictably, have a roughly bimodal distribution. For our part, we think, on one hand, Mills’s comments are sort of trivial: yes, financial stability and reasonably good health may make the material and physical aspects of children easier; yes, the financially stable and reasonably healthy may have a particular set of biases that informs how they approach Church teachings; and, yes, Catholic commentators on these issues can be, as an acquaintance noted elsewhere, a little glib—even, horribile dictu, a little perky—about these issues. On the other hand, as another acquaintance noted, Mills seems to miss an obvious issue in this context: the extent to which the Church proposes solutions to the problems he identifies. We think that the Church’s social teaching—especially the Church’s economic teaching—provides important solutions to and conceptual frameworks for the problems Mills identifies.

Consider first this passage from Quadragesimo anno,

In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family. That the rest of the family should also contribute to the common support, according to the capacity of each, is certainly right, as can be observed especially in the families of farmers, but also in the families of many craftsmen and small shopkeepers. But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman. It will not be out of place here to render merited praise to all, who with a wise and useful purpose, have tried and tested various ways of adjusting the pay for work to family burdens in such a way that, as these increase, the former may be raised and indeed, if the contingency arises, there may be enough to meet extraordinary needs.

(Emphasis supplied and footnote omitted.) One can, if one is so inclined, also look to Rerum novarum itself for further guidance on the role of a just wage in supporting a family. But wherever one looks, the point is largely the same: workers are entitled to a just wage, suitable to permit those workers to support their families. And it seems to us that in this principle is the solution, at some level, to Mills’s basic problem regarding wealth and openness to life. Put another way, Mills says it cannot be acceptable to the Church that economic circumstances restrict couples’ openness to procreation according to God’s plan. And it isn’t acceptable. The Church says that workers are owed a just wage, and a just wage ought to be sufficient to support a family, if perhaps a little frugally. If economic circumstances are such that one cannot support a family, then it seems to us that one not being paid a just wage.

To expand upon this issue briefly: the question of just wages (or living wages or what-have-you) is politically a sensitive question in the United States today. However, it is, we think, safe to say that most jurisdictions have not adopted a living wage, and to the extent that a living wage is a just wage, those jurisdictions have not adopted a just wage. However, we acknowledge that following Quadragesimo anno, it is an open question whether a living wage is always a just wage, especially if the condition of the business (employer) is not taken into consideration in arriving at a living wage. However, in many cases, a living wage may approximate fairly reasonably a just wage. In this regard, therefore, these jurisdictions have failed to follow the teachings of the Church (or, more precisely, they have permitted employers to deviate from the demands of justice). And if this failure has caused the consequences Mills identifies—that is, economic circumstances chilling parents’ openness to procreation according to God’s plan—then it seems to us that those jurisdictions have a double responsibility to rectify their failure.

Mills also identifies a risk—to his way of thinking—for affluent Catholic parents:

The affluent for whom the Catholic teaching is not a great burden can fall to the temptations of their class, one of which is to think of their children as lifestyle accessories. The Catholic just has more of them than his secular and Protestant neighbors and can feel a little proud of it. It is easy to feel smug when you can say that you have X number of children when speaking to someone who has X minus 2 or X minus 3 children. You can feel that God rewarded your obedience and sacrifice by giving you more “toys” than your friends have.

(Emphasis added.) Now, consider this passage from Laudato si’:

A misguided anthropocentrism leads to a misguided lifestyle. In the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I noted that the practical relativism typical of our age is “even more dangerous than doctrinal relativism”. When human beings place themselves at the centre, they give absolute priority to immediate convenience and all else becomes relative. Hence we should not be surprised to find, in conjunction with the omnipresent technocratic paradigm and the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests. There is a logic in all this whereby different attitudes can feed on one another, leading to environmental degradation and social decay.

(Hyperlinks and footnote omitted and emphasis supplied.) It seems to us that the problem of children-as-reward—we have long called children in such unfortunate situations “trophy children”—is very much of a piece of the “misguided anthropocentrism” and “practical relativism” that puts the individual ahead of all others, including one’s children. In this case, the attitude Mills identifies has a certain spiritual dimension, especially since whether one has children and how many is a matter fundamentally left to God’s designs, but to the extent that one views one’s children as a reward or something like that, that attitude is essentially anthropocentric. While this insight is not as concrete as Pius’s discussion of just wages and their relationship to proper family life in Quadragesimo anno, it must be said that Francis provides a framework to think about the phenomenon of trophy children. Within this framework, it may well be possible to arrive at more concrete discussions of the problem.

In sum, the doctrinal issues that Mills identifies—particularly the economic pressures on procreation—are addressed, more or less directly, in the Church’s social teaching. Other issues can be understood better, if not solved, through other themes in the Church’s teaching. Now, we acknowledge that these doctrinal issues are not entirely Mills’s point, which is that healthy and wealthy Catholics tend not to understand that the Church’s teaching on procreation may be daunting to less healthy, less wealthy folks. However, it seems to us that the glibness, as one of our acquaintances put it, of some Catholics toward the question is a function of an incomplete understanding of the Church’s teaching on these issues.

Keeping all my secrets safe in Rome

Edward Pentin has a good summary of Vatileaks II at the Register. He spends a little time talking about the relationship of the scandal to George Cardinal Pell, the Holy Father’s prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy:

Sources have told the Register that Msgr. Vallejo promoted Cardinal Pell for the position of prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy and that the Spanish priest hoped to become its secretary. Instead, due to an “incompatibility of functions,” that position went to Msgr. Alfred Xuereb, the former Maltese private secretary of Benedict XVI.

Some have seen this as a possible indirect attack on Cardinal Pell, whose financial reforms have drawn opposition, especially in parts of the Curia and the Italian media. But a spokesman for the cardinal insisted that was not the case. “The reforms are moving forward,” he told the Register, and the arrests are “the effect of the reforms that are being put in place.”

“The leaking of documents isn’t acceptable in any government, and it’s not acceptable here,” he said. “The Church is getting its house in order.”

(Emphasis added.) The question we have—and if anyone would like to leak anything to us, well, we’re flattered—is whether the leak of what appears to have been an early draft of the Cardinals’ letter to the Holy Father during the Synod has any connection to the Vallejo-Chaouqui situation.

On the absence of the Divine Office

At Opus Publicum, Gabriel Sanchez makes this point,

What the Byzantine Rite has not lost, and the Roman Rite surely needs, is the central importance of public prayer to the life of the Church. For most Catholics, that prayer is the Mass and only the Mass. If there is ever anything “more” it is typically a para-liturgical devotion such as the Rosary or a novena. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but for most of Church history reciting the Divine Office in choir was as natural as serving Mass. Today, unfortunately, that is simply not possible for most parishes to carry out all of the time, but why can’t more Latin churches strive to serve hours like Vespers and Compline at least some of the time? The easy answer is, “Because there’s no demand for it.” But the chances are there will never be a demand unless the clergy, in concert with dedicated members of the laity, create one.

(Emphasis supplied.)

The Divine Office has always occupied a tricky place in the Latin Church. Everyone agrees that the Church has to pray the Office as its public prayer, though precisely how has, as nearly as we can tell, always been a matter open to discussion. Callewaert, in his De Brevarii Romani Liturgia, outlines admirably the Apostolic origins of the Divine Office and traces its development from the days of the persecution of the Church through the reforms of Pius X. It makes for interesting reading. Of course, you know the rest of the story: the reforms continued apace through Pius XII and John XXIII’s pontificates with the help of Annibale Bugnini and his clique of liturgists, and culminated in Paul VI’s Liturgia Horarum, which bears little resemblance even to John XXIII’s Breviary, which itself was a revision of Pius X’s Breviary, which was in its turn a revision of Pius V’s Breviary. (It is passing strange that people who get incensed about the implications of Quo primum for the Mass almost never get incensed about the implications of Quod a nobis for the Office.) However, throughout this development, the laity participated regularly in the Divine Office, as Sanchez notes.

In fact, if there was one constant in the Church’s liturgy between Pius V’s Quod a nobis in 1568 and Paul VI’s Laudis canticum in 1970—a time of almost 400 years—it was that the breviary was constantly tinkered with. (Think of Urban VIII’s hymns, for example.) Benedict XVI in Summorum pontificum and its instruction Universae Ecclesiae reinstated the Breviary of John XXIII, apparently because Archbishop Lefebvre decided for some reason to stick with the books in force in 1962 (even though the Bugnini-driven reforms really started in 1955 with the revised Holy Week rites and Cum hac nostra aetate and continued with the 1960 Breviary and 1962 Missal). The upshot of all of this is that, notwithstanding the Church’s centuries of tinkering with the Breviary, the faithful have at least two Church-approved options: the 1960 Roman Breviary and the 1970 Liturgia Horarum, as updated, which is its own thing. (We will omit discussion of the traditional Benedictine Office.)

But with two Church-approved options, it should be easy as pie for any parish to provide congenial celebrations of the canonical hours regularly. Got a parish where the high altar was never jackhammered out, where the hymnals smell of incense, and where the choir calls itself a schola? Great. Offer sung second vespers of Sunday according to the 1960 books. Got a parish where Paul VI’s Mass is celebrated ad orientem in Latin and where “the reform of the reform” has appeared more than never in the bulletin? Super. Offer sung vespers according to the Liturgia Horarum on Wednesday nights. Got a parish full of felt banners and the rushing sounds of the spirit of Vatican II? Recite Morning Prayer according to the English Liturgy of the Hours on Fridays before Mass. Right? Something for everybody.

Also, the Office would be little but lay participation in most parishes. While a priest or deacon ought to lead celebrations of the Office, the laity still have significant roles in the Office—especially if the Office is sung. For example, unless one is at a monastery or a seminary, it is unlikely that the antiphons, psalms, and canticles could be chanted without substantial help from the laity. Furthermore, the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours provides rubrics for celebrations in the absence of a cleric, if it comes down to that. In other words, the Office provides, really, more opportunities for lay involvement in the liturgy, if that sort of thing is important to you.

But, as Sanchez notes, nothing doing. Laity still prefer para-liturgical—or quasi-liturgical, we suppose—devotions like the Rosary and the clergy does not appear to want to push the Divine Office in either of its forms. There are, in essence, two forms of the Office, which, between them, appeal to almost every sensibility, and neither of which are especially widely used. Why? We think there are essentially three reasons. One, the Liturgia Horarum, which most clerics use these days, practically begs to be recited either privately or in common with other clerics and all at once. Two, most parishes simply don’t have a deep enough bench, musically, to support a sung Office, even one or two days a week. And three, the Mass, having been reconceptualized as a communal celebration ordered toward the reception of the Eucharist, has sucked all the air out of the room as far as the laity are concerned. But these are just guesses.

What we talk about when we talk about the Pope

David Mills, at Ethika Politika, writes “The Bitter Sons Speak,” a piece criticizing some the Holy Father’s critics. His point?

Francis can be criticized and criticized strongly. The critics I’m talking about distinguish themselves from other critics by reading Francis as unscrupulous prosecuting attorneys, who care only to get the conviction and the maximum sentence. They say nothing in his favor, unless they say it as the beginning of a sentence that ends in a sharp criticism.

Words they would have quickly posted on Facebook had Benedict said them they leave unreported, because those words would disturb their narrative about Francis. This is true of some of the more moderate critics, who protest their loyalty to the pope. The “presence of an absence” suggests what they really feel.

Nothing he can do, short of saying what they would say were they him, will change their minds. I was wrong to hope that they might grow out of it.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) For our part, we think that some of the Holy Father’s critics do go far too far. Asserting that the Pope is a Peronist economic dilettante bent on the destruction of the capitalist West goes too far. (For one thing, such an argument assumes that the capitalist West, which has taken every available opportunity to toss Christ and His Church out of public life and replace them with disordered individualism, is good in and of itself. A highly debatable proposition at best and flatly false at worst.) Likewise, there are some commentators who are, probably, inflexibly opposed to the Holy Father, or at least inflexibly reflexively suspicious of him. This is all true, and we have not found such commentary to be always spiritually improving. Or even merely spiritually non-harmful.

We have written here previously that it is pretty obvious that the Holy Father does not especially like traditionally minded Catholics. If his public statements are to be credited, it seems to us that he seems them as rule-quoting scolds who do not always (often?) mean well. Father John Hunwicke has wondered whether this is simply the Holy Father inviting traditionally minded Catholics to a rough-and-tumble debate, where, after some stringent language, everyone goes out together afterward for cocktails and laughs, or whether the Holy Father is putting everyone on notice. Perhaps that explains it. However it is clear that people speculate on why the Holy Father expresses himself this way. Likewise, instead of criticizing these critics as “bitter sons,” Mills ought to ask why they feel the need to express themselves this way.

We think there are fundamentally three reasons:

  • One, the internet breeds flamboyant, hyperbolic expression. This is so obvious as to require no further comment.
  • Two, in any small, ideological community—and traditional Catholicism is at least that—there is an impulse to make ever more hyperbolic declarations of orthodoxy, either to be heard among people who all think more or less the same way or to fit in with the group. Call it a positive feedback loop.
  • Three, people are really scared right now.

Mills goes on to say,

The critics don’t speak as disappointed or worried sons. They don’t read the pope with deference and humility, as an adult son listening to his father. My own father rarely gave advice, but when he did, I listened to him carefully. I stifled my desire to object or contradict and even when after much thought I still disagreed, I tried to find ways in which he was right, because he was a wise man who loved me. He was not infallible, but as I look back now, he was right more often than I saw then.

Even Francis’ bitterest critics should speak of him the way one speaks of a father when one has to be publicly critical, which is far less often than his critics think: To say what you have to say but not more, and certainly not bitterly, and to say the hardest things in a way to protect his good name. What you say of him you say of yourself and your family and for that family’s good name you are jealous. That is especially true when that family is the Church, into which you want others to enter.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) Fair enough, for people motivated by the distorted sense of liberty that the internet provides and for people who are simply proving that there is no more more traditional than they this side of Cardinal Ottaviani. But not so fair for people who are genuinely worried—genuinely afraid—of what they see in the Church today. Maybe some of those fears are unreasonable, though it is fairly clear that Francis personally likes the Kasper proposal, whether or not he feels free to implement its strongest form, but that’s a different conversation than the one Mills is having.

And as long as we are lecturing the critics of the Holy Father for their lack of charity, perhaps we should also be charitable toward the critics.

The spy who prayed for me

We were pleased to see Andrea Tornielli connect the dots at Vatican Insider. Just as we predicted Chaouqui and Vallejo are probably going to advance the narrative that they are helping Francis implement “real” reforms:

The two individuals responsible for leaking the documents, claim they acted in order “to help the Pope”, to “win the war” against cliques that opposed change and transparency. But Francis can’t have been overjoyed by their generous help, given that he gave his personal approval for the arrests of this odd couple, whose involvement in the whole affair did not surprise many in the Vatican.

(Emphasis in original.) But Tornielli has a long passage that draws all the threads together. We’ll quote it in full:

There are two dates that point to the origin of this last ditch effort linked to the old Vatileaks scandal. Even back then, in a series of anonymous newspaper interviews, Francesca Chaouqui backed the “poison pen letter writers”, corroborating the importance of the letters leaked by the former Pope’s butler.

The first is 18 July 2013. Francis published a motu proprio for the establishment of the commission on economic and administrative problems of the Holy See (COSEA): Vallejo was appointed secretary and to the surprise of the team in charge of screening accounts and management problems in Vatican offices and dicasteries, Chaouqui was also nominated thanks to her friend, the monsignor. Her appointment was immediately seen as too convenient: the young woman wrote a series of insolent tweets against Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and former minister Tremonti (she would later deny having written hem, claiming hackers had got into her account, only to then delete them after they had been online for months). She made no attempt to keep her links with gossip website Dagospia a secret and made completely unfounded conjectures about Benedict XVI allegedly having “leukaemia”. In an interview published on the online version of Italian news magazine L’Espresso, she announced she had access to “confidential” Vatican “papers” and that she was a good friend of Nuzzi’s. But controversies soon died down and due to the nature of her role, Chaouqui was able to freely come and go from Saint Martha’s House.

The second date is 3 March 2014. On this day, having established the Secretariat for the Economy and nominated Australian cardinal George Pell as the new Prefect, Francis announced the name of the dicastery’s number two man. Instead of appointing Vallejo Balda, as Pell had requested and believed to be certain, right up until the last moment, the Pope surprised everyone by choosing Alfred Xuereb. This came as a big blow to the Vallejo-Chaouqui duo. The Spanish prelate was convinced the position was in the bag. He had even imprudently confirmed it on a Spanish radio programme. No appointments for “commissioner” Francesca Immacolata either: while five COSEA members took up their positions in a new Vatican body, the Council for the Economy, she was left empty-handed. From this moment on, the PR woman and her tunic-clad talent scout felt they were “at war” and identified Pell as their great enemy. The friction between the Secretariat for the Economy, the Secretariat of State and the other dicasteries of the Holy See was no figment of the imagination. Francis himself intervened on a number of occasions to cut back certain powers and clearly outline duties. But for this odd couple “at war”, this was not enough.

(Emphasis in original.) As we supposed, the narrative is going to be that Chaouqui and Vallejo, honked off at being frozen out of Cardinal Pell’s Secretariat for the Economy and Cardinal Marx’s Council for the Economy, and concerned that the entrenched forces in the Curia were thwarting Francis’s reforms, went to friendly journalists to get critical information public. And this narrative is pretty common. A lot of whistleblowers are both disgruntled at being passed over for internal promotion and concerned with what they’re seeing.

However, the difficult thing for this narrative is what Magister made clear all the way back in 2013: Chaouqui was right in the middle of the original Vatileaks scandal.

But like heaven above me

Today, the Vatican City State arrested, following an investigation by the Vatican City’s police, Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Dr. Francesca Chaouqui for leaking financial documents. These arrests precede the publication of a couple of new books, which promise Vatileaks-style bombshells. Both Vallejo and Chaouqui were members of the Pope’s commission on financial reforms (COSEA, if you’re really into Vatican politics), which studied the Vatican’s finances closely and recommended reforms. One may remember, notwithstanding the Year of Divorce and Remarriage, that one of the important issues for Francis, at least in the Conclave talks, was the reform of the Curia and the Vatican’s finances. Vallejo and Chaouqui were in the middle of that, which is, presumably, why they had access to the financial information. What you may have missed was a piece, by Sandro Magister, which Rocco Palmo tweeted earlier today, as we were just learning about the Vallejo-Chaouqui arrests, and which is positive chock full of information about the Vallejo-Chaouqui connection in the context of Vatileaks:

it was maintained that Paolo Gabriele, the butler of Benedict XVI arrested and sentenced for stealing from the pope a an enormous number of confidential documents that were later given to the press, was not the only one in the curia to have acted in that way, but like him and after him there were others still in action, including a woman.

The “revelations” relative to this affair did not give the names of the protagonists. Including the latest and most spectacular anonymous interview, published in “la Repubblica” on March 7, 2013, a few days before the conclave that elected pope Bergoglio.

The interviewee, however, was a person so talkative as to swear up and down that she was the informant for the articles in “la Repubblica”: Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, 32, of a Moroccan father and Calabrian mother, residing in Rome, married, employed in public relations from 2007 to 2009 in the international law offices of Pavia & Ansaldo, then from 2010 in the offices of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, and finally since 2013 in the offices of Ernst & Young, with a vast network of real or boasted relationships with journalists, politicians, businessmen, prelates, cardinals.

When, during those days of conclave, the identity of the anonymous informer of “la Repubblica” also came to the attention of the substitute secretary of state, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, he protested to the newspaper. Which in effect stopped publishing any more articles visibly traceable to the Chaouqui “source.”

(Emphasis added.) But how would a character like Chaouqui get into the Vatican, much less onto the pontifical commission considering the most sensitive matters? She had (has?) sharp elbows, which don’t serve anyone especially well in the Vatican, as near as we can tell. For example, John Allen, among others, report that she rubbed Francis the wrong way by hosting a sumptuous party on Vatican property for the canonizations of John XXIII and John Paul II. More than that, Chaouqui alleged that Benedict XVI had leukemia, and she picked a fight with Cardinal Bertone back in the days when Cardinal Bertone was not a man to pick fights with. (Ask Archbishop Viganò.) One may wonder, then, who Chaouqui’s patron was. After detailing some of Chaouqui’s connections to the Vatileaks butler, Magister goes on to report:

Supposing, then, that Francesco did not personally know Francesca Chaouqui, who convinced the pope to appoint her to a role of such high responsibility?

The most likely hypothesis leads back to Monsignor Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, secretary of the prefecture for the economic affairs of the Holy See and since July 18 also secretary and factotum of the newly created commission of which Francesca Chaouqui is a member.

(Emphasis added.) But, how would Chaouqui and Vallejo know each other? Well, Magister tells us this, too:

It is said that Francesca Chaouqui belongs to Opus Dei, on a par with Monsignor Vallejo Balda. But it is not true.

It is certain, however, that she frequents Roman residences of Opus, including the one inhabited by the numerary Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the unforgotten spokesman of John Paul II.

Vallejo is an Opus Dei priest and Chaouqui runs in Opus Dei circles. As easy as pie. A piece of cake. You may have already clicked through to Magister’s piece. But if you haven’t, you have a surprise coming. It was published on August 26, 2013. Two years ago. More than two years ago. And Sandro Magister documented a connection between Vallejo and Chaouqui in the context of, you guessed it, Vatileaks.

Tornielli has alleged that Vallejo helped Chaouqui put together that canonization party that miffed the Holy Father. The Holy Father—as some folks have learned—is not a man to annoy, apparently. When it came time to implement the financial commission’s recommendations, both Chaouqui and Vallejo found themselves without chairs when the music stopped. When it came time to appoint officials of the Secretariat for the Economy (i.e., early March 2014), Vallejo found himself passed over in favor of Msgr. Alfred Xuereb, the Maltese secretary to the Pope and a holdover from Benedict’s household, even though everyone (including George Cardinal Pell) expected Vallejo to be appointed secretary. Likewise, Chaouqui didn’t make the cut for a seat on the Council for the Economy, which has a significant lay presence (and which is led by Reinhard Cardinal Marx). We suspect that it will be suggested that Chaouqui and Vallejo, honked off by being left out of the party, decided to start leaking the documents. Undoubtedly someone will say that they were motivated by their frustration at seeing the Curia thwart Francis’s financial reforms. Or something.

Magister’s piece, of course, hurts this narrative badly. If Magister is right—and he’s pretty right as it is—Chaouqui was a Vatileaks source well before Francis issued Fidelis Dispensator et Prudens (on February 24, 2014), established the new financial entities, and passed over Chaouqui and Vallejo for prominent positions everyone seemed to think they’d get. Chaouqui was a Vatileaks source before Francis was even elected. And Vallejo and Chaouqui were friendly well before that.

Some people say the sky is just the sky

Father Lombardi, who is fast earning the title “long-suffering,” has issued an interesting statement on Scalfari’s editorial to Edward Pentin. Let’s look at the statement in full:

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told the Register Nov. 2: “As has already occurred in the past, Scalfari refers in quotes what the Pope supposedly told him, but many times it does not correspond to reality, since he does not record nor transcribe the exact words of the Pope, as he himself has said many times. So it is clear that what is being reported by him in the latest article about the divorced and remarried is in no way reliable and cannot be considered as the Pope’s thinking.”

Father Lombardi said he would not be issuing a statement about the matter as those who have “followed the preceding events and work in Italy know the way Scalfari writes and knows these things well.” Over the past two years, Scalfari has written several such articles following conversations with Pope Francis, each of which has drawn controversy.

(Emphasis supplied.) We have said elsewhere: this is a very funny way of saying “The Pope never said anything like that to Scalfari.” What this statement is, to our eye, is a long way of saying, “Scalfari generally makes things up. Don’t listen to him.” That’s some denial.

We have some brief questions, then:

  • Did the Pope say it or not? Saying Scalfari is generally not to be believed is not the same thing as saying that Scalfari fabricated the quote in question.
  • Perhaps more to the point, why does the Vatican, if it “know[s] the way Scalfari writes,” not insist on producing and making available a verbatim recording of interviews with Scalfari? If Scalfari is such an inveterate fabricator, surely a prudent person would prepare his own record of the interview to avoid precisely this problem.
  • Perhaps even more to the point, why does the Holy Father agree to speak with Scalfari, knowing—as everyone who works in Italy knows, apparently—that Scalfari is going to fabricate quotes and attribute them to him? More than that, why does the Holy Father agree to speak with Scalfari when the Holy Father has been burned very publicly three or more times?

Edward Pentin himself asks this last question:

This exchange appears no different, which raises the question: why does the Pope continue to speak to someone such as Scalfari, and discuss such sensitive subjects with him, when he knows he is unreliable but likely to report his words without reference to a recording or transcript?

Why, indeed? It seems to us that there are fundamentally two possible answers. One, the Holy Father does not care that he’ll be misquoted. There are a lot of possibilities, but given Fr. Lombardi’s comments, one assumes that it’s because he personally likes Scalfari and is inclined to indulge his impressionistic interview style. Two, the Holy Father views Scalfari as useful for getting deniable ideas out there. If people like the idea, nothing need be said. If people don’t like the idea, well, it’s Scalfari and he makes things up.

Why deny the obvious, child?

Rorate Caeli reports that Eugenio Scalfari, one of the Holy Father’s (apparently) favorite journalists, has quoted the Holy Father, albeit in an editorial, to the effect that,

It is true — Pope Francis answered — it is a truth and for that matter the family that is the basis of any society changes continuously, as all things change around us. We must not think that the family does not exist any longer, it will always exist, because ours is a social species, and the family is the support beam of sociability, but it cannot be avoided that the current family, open as you say, contains some positive aspects, and some negative ones. … The diverse opinion of the bishops is part of this modernity of the Church and of the diverse societies in which she operated, but the goal is the same, and for that which regards the admission of the divorced to the Sacraments, [it] confirms that this principle has been accepted by the Synod. This is bottom line result, the de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask will be admitted.“

(Emphasis in original.)

Douthat on the Douthat affair

We have been working, not very hard, honestly, on a piece about the Douthat affair—primarily about Fr. James Martin’s hate masquerading as charity response—and we may yet publish it. However, for now, it should be noted that Ross Douthat himself as responded. He comes admirably to the point:

First, because if the church admits the remarried to communion without an annulment — while also instituting an expedited, no-fault process for getting an annulment, as the pope is poised to do — the ancient Catholic teaching that marriage is “indissoluble” would become an empty signifier.

Second, because changing the church’s teaching on marriage in this way would unweave the larger Catholic view of sexuality, sin and the sacraments — severing confession’s relationship to communion, and giving cohabitation, same-sex unions and polygamy entirely reasonable claims to be accepted by the church.

Now this is, as you note, merely a columnist’s opinion. So I have listened carefully when credentialed theologians make the liberalizing case. What I have heard are three main claims. The first is that the changes being debated would be merely “pastoral” rather than “doctrinal,” and that so long as the church continues to saythat marriage is indissoluble, nothing revolutionary will have transpired.

But this seems rather like claiming that China has not, in fact, undergone a market revolution because it’s still governed by self-described Marxists. No: In politics and religion alike, a doctrine emptied in practice is actually emptied, whatever official rhetoric suggests.

(Emphasis supplied.) Well worth reading in full.