Pope faces tough decisions as Vatican reforms loom

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has spent much of his first month as pope charming ordinary Catholics with his ordinary yet extraordinary papal ways and making clear he is very much the boss when it comes to decisions as small as the shoes he wears to where he rests his head at night.

 

In the coming months, he'll face decisions of far greater import as he responds to demands from cardinals in far-flung dioceses and Vatican officials at home for an overhaul of the Holy See bureaucracy, the dysfunctional family business he inherited one month ago Saturday.

 

Given Francis' governing style and track record, it's likely he'll make these choices with an eye to efficiency, and very much alone.

 

Prelates are demanding term limits on Vatican jobs to prevent priests from becoming career bureaucrats. They want consolidated financial reports to remove the cloak of secrecy from the Vatican's murky finances. And they want regular Cabinet meetings where department heads actually talk to one another to make the Vatican a help to the church's evangelizing mission, not a hindrance.

 

"It just doesn't work either very quickly or very efficiently," U.S. Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said. "Take marriage cases: People shouldn't have to be asked to wait three, four, five, six years to get a response" for a request for an annulment.

 

Francis is meeting daily with department heads and on Friday made an impromptu visit to the secretariat of state, getting a handle on a government that was last reformed by Pope Paul VI a half-century ago and was shown by the leaks of papal documents last year to be infected by power struggles, incompetence and sheer ungovernability.

 

He has made one Vatican appointment so far, naming a member of his namesake Franciscan order to the important No. 2 spot at the Vatican's congregation for religious orders. His most eagerly-watched appointment has yet to come: that of the Vatican secretary of state, who runs the day-to-day administration of the Holy See. Currently, the position is held by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a 78-year-old canon lawyer whose administrative shortcomings have been blamed for many of the Vatican's current problems today.

 

George Weigel, a papal biographer who interviewed then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio last May for his new book "Evangelical Catholicism," said Francis understands well the problems of the Curia, or Vatican bureaucracy. He said Bergoglio "displayed a shrewd, but not cynical, grasp of just what was wrong with the church's central bureaucratic machinery, and why."

 

"I think we can expect the new pope to lead the church in a purification and renewal of the episcopate, the priesthood, the religious life, and the curia, because he understands that scandal, corruption, and incompetence are impediments" to the mission of spreading the faith, Weigel wrote in a recent essay.

 

Francis' austere style and track record governing the Jesuit order in his native Argentina and then the archdiocese of Buenos Aires has given reformers hope: Several cardinals have cited Francis' record as evidence that he has what it takes to make tough, unpopular decisions when necessary.

 

Bergoglio was named provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina in 1973 at the very young age of 36, and by all indications clashed with more left-leaning members of the order who were increasingly taking up the call of liberation theology, the belief that Christ's teachings justify fights against social injustices. His six-year term also spanned the initial years of the 1976-1983 military junta, which kidnapped and killed thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents. Two of Bergoglio's own priests were kidnapped, but later freed after his intervention.

 

"He knows how to govern," George said. "He's done all those in very difficult circumstances."

 

In the 2010 book "The Jesuit," written by his authorized biographer, Bergoglio explained his decision-making process, saying he always discounts his first ideas because they're "always wrong."