How the Vatican works: an interview with Thomas J. Reese.

Inside the Vatican (Harvard University Press) by Thomas J. Reese, S.J., was published December 1. Reese, a political scientist and a fellow at the Woodstock Center, Georgetown University, has previously written about the American hierarchy (Archbishop, Harper & Row) and the U.S. bishops' conference (A Flock of Shepherds, Sheed & Ward). Inside the Vatican is, in part, an organizational study of how the Vatican works and, in part, a look at the culture that supports the system [see review, page 14]. This interview with Reese was conducted in his office at the Woodstock Center.

* MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS: What was the most surprising thing you found in doing Inside the Vatican?

* THOMAS REESE: I was surprised how many Vatican people talked to me. I was afraid I would get there and no one would. I interviewed over a hundred people. I couldn't have done the book without them. For the most part, they let me tape the interviews. Most didn't want to be quoted. The higher you went, the more willing people were to be quoted. The people from below knew their careers could not be advanced by being quoted, and that they could be ruined.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had no problem being quoted, nor did Cardinal Edward Cassidy. I had asked for five or ten minutes, yet Cardinal Ratzinger talked to me for forty-five minutes to an hour. He was very pleasant, very gracious. The interview was in English, which he speaks very well. I try to let the players speak for themselves. Ratzinger should be able to make his case, to explain what he's doing and how his congregation works.

* STEINFELS: Inside the Vatican gives a real sense of how the Vatican works. That will be part of its value to people. I assume most of this is a mystery to most of the world.

* REESE: Oh, it is. It's a mystery to most bishops.

* STEINFELS: The book raises questions about decision making, staffing, access to information, and other "style" questions.

* REESE: One of the fascinating things, and one I found difficult to do, was not only to describe the structure of the organization, but also its internal culture. That's why I talk about the impact of Italian culture and the European educational system on how Vatican officials think about bureaucracy; how they think about the role of teachers and how teachers teach.

It's not only a change of structures that's needed, but a change of mentality. What is the role of the papacy? What are the goals of the church? What should the church look like? To answer those questions, you have to go beyond social science to a theological vision of the church. I tried to save most of that to the last chapter because I wanted to be as purely descriptive as I could be. Once I did that, I knew people would want to know: "Well, what do we do now to make this institution work better?"

* STEINFELS: As a political scientist, you make a good case that the curia is the most efficient bureaucracy in the world.

* REESE: Efficiency is a measure of input vs. output. It's a question of what you think its output is. Or what you think they should be doing.

The Catholic church, for all of its hierarchical structure, has one of the flattest hierarchies in the world: the pope, bishops, priests, and laity. For a billion-member organization to have only four levels is extraordinary. If you take a look at the U.S. government or any kind of corporation, you will find twenty, thirty, forty levels of bureaucracy between the persons at the highest and the lowest levels.

* STEINFELS: You have a nice line in the book: "The curia is a product of history and not of management theory."A blessed condition?

* REESE: Absolutely. What makes this flat structure work are: First, the role of the pope in appointing bishops. He appoints people who basically agree with him. That means you don't have to do a lot of supervision. You don't have to tell them what to do. They're already trained and on board to do what you want them to do.

Second, there is the whole socialization process of seminaries and priestly culture and education that goes into the training of bishops. It's not like you hire someone off the street. Those are the kinds of things that make it work, that the major participants bring to the organizational structure.

* STEINFELS: The curia's preferred style of decision making is consensus. If something doesn't get substantial agreement, it goes back for more work, or for a decent burial. Does this work?

* REESE: It works in many cases. For example, if the Vatican is working on a document and they can't get consensus, it gets delayed, delayed, delayed. It can take a decade for a document to get out of the curia. That's not a bad situation.

On the other hand, decisions sometimes have to be made. A new bishop has to be appointed; you can't wait ten years. Or you have a situation where someone is seeking redress of an injustice. Then, the delay can be harmful.

Sometimes the delay and desire for consensus are helpful, sometimes hurtful. For example, the reform of Vatican finances took much longer than was necessary because of the desire to have consensus. Until they brought in Cardinal Edmund Szoka [former archbishop of Detroit], who knows how to make decisions, little happened. Without consensus but with the support of the pope, he reformed the Vatican's finances. He made enemies by doing what needed to be done.

* STEINFELS: A favorite American proposal for decision making in the Catholic church is more democracy: clear-cut, someone wins, someone loses.

* REESE: The American bishops don't operate on that principle. Their preferred style of operation is consensus and compromise. Most things need a two-thirds vote.

But using the word consensus about crucial decision making can be a little bit misleading. It's like Animal Farm; some animals are more equal than others. Cardinal Ratzinger is more equal than other officials in the curia when it comes to issues of doctrine. He has the ability to simply say this will not be published until it's revised.

* STEINFELS: People defer to him? We're not talking consensus here.

* REESE: Oh, absolutely. But there will be long, long discussions, and sometimes he can be persuaded.

* STEINFELS: Look at it the other way. Could he ever publish something himself about which there is wide disagreement among his colleagues?

* REESE: Yes, he's able to publish things without much consultation with the rest of the curia. This has gotten him into trouble: for example, his first document on liberation theology. Even the pope ended up saying that this was not a defensible statement and that he himself was going to come out with something more nuanced, and he did.

On the other hand, Cardinal Ratzinger operates within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. You have to remember that many cardinals from other curial offices, and cardinals from around the world, are on his congregation. He would take documents to them and also to his consultors. Normally, the documents that come out of his congregation are fairly well studied and discussed before he approves them. He meets on a weekly basis with the pope. If he and the pope decide to do something, it's going to happen no matter what any other cardinal in the curia or on his congregation thinks.

* STEINFELS: The curia has an interconnecting set of officials; cardinals head their own congregations and serve on others. Yet, you give the impression that people don't know what goes on in other offices. Don't overlapping personnel produce an overlapping understanding?

* REESE: The overlapping occurs only at the very highest levels. Below that, people are out of the loop. And then, some of the congregations meet rarely. You have a lot of isolation. It would be very rare for someone in an office to pick up a phone and call somebody in another office to find out what they're doing. If you don't have a friend in another congregation, you're not going to get much information.

* STEINFELS: But surely there is social interaction among people who are friends or were together in the seminary.

* REESE: Yes, there is. But that's it, you just don't call someone in an office. You meet someone over lunch who's an old friend, or you have someone introduce you to someone. There's communication among nationality groups. There's communication especially among the Italians who have gone to the same seminaries, the Collegio Romano or the Lateran. Probably the best communication goes on among the career Vatican officials, the ones that went through the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, who were trained to become diplomats, and who work in the curia.

* STEINFELS: The internationalization of the curia has been much spoken of, but your book gives the impression that that trend is modified by people being "Vaticanized" and "Italianized," living in Italy and speaking Italian.

* REESE: They are trained into the system and buy into the culture of the system. If they don't like the culture, they don't stay. They go home as fast as they can.

* STEINFELS: So there is less than meets the eye when it comes to internationalization?

* REESE: Yes. Even among the staunchest Vatican supporters, there's concern about good people. A lot of local bishops don't want to lose their best people to Rome.

* STEINFELS: You propose rotation of the curial staff, particularly clergy, out of the Vatican. You propose term limits. You also propose that one way to change the curia is not to reward Vatican service by making people bishops. I would assume that some proportion of the people who work in the Vatican do so because that is exactly what they hope for.

* REESE: Those are the ones you want to get rid of!

* STEINFELS: Yes and no.

* REESE: Yes and no?

* STEINFELS: It's a bit like the term-limits debates in this country. You can change the state legislature every eight years but the learning curve becomes a serious issue: many of the people working in the institution don't really know how it works. Apply that to the Vatican.

* REESE: Every reform has positive and negative consequences. A negative consequence of cycling people in and out of the curia is that you would lose some very good people who have learned on the job.

On the other hand, there is a great value in having people with pastoral experience working in the Vatican. Maybe it's just a question of a sabbatical year, of going back, being in a parish, celebrating liturgies, hearing confessions - being a priest! After doing that for a year in your own culture, then come back to Rome. Some of these people would come back a different person. Suddenly, they would realize that there's an awful lot going on in the local Christian communities that is much more important than the papers that they are moving in their Vatican jobs. That's the kind of change I would like to see. Nobody is so irreplaceable that they couldn't go off for a year's sabbatical back to their own diocese.

* STEINFELS: The appointment of papal nuncios [diplomats who represent the Holy See in capitals around the world] is critically important in the appointment of bishops. They send the names of priests to be nominated bishop to Rome. You don't say much about how nuncios wind up where they do. What kind of process is involved?

* REESE: I didn't get enough information on this. People say that a man becomes a nuncio as long as he sticks around and doesn't make any mistakes. He might serve on the staff in a small country in Africa or Asia, but would eventually become an archbishop and a nuncio. On the other hand, those people who rise to the very top, who get Paris, London, Washington, tend to be people who have made friends. They have had patrons who are cardinals or the secretary of state.

* STEINFELS: You write that Paul VI in appointing Archbishop Jean Jadot to the United States was particularly concerned about the reputation of the American hierarchy being better businessmen than pastors. Archbishop Jadot recommended clergy for the episcopate who seemed to be more pastoral and had more experience in parishes. Yet Jadot was apparently punished for doing what Paul VI wanted.

* REESE: Jadot is a fascinating example. He was not a member of the diplomatic service, did not go to the Ecclesiastical Academy. Paul VI went outside to appoint him because of this desire to find bishops who were pastoral.

I have my own spin on what Paul VI really meant in asking for more pastoral bishops in the United States. It had a lot to do with the style of being a bishop. Remember what was going on at the time. There was conflict between the U.S. clergy and bishops. I think Paul VI was concerned about this. What he and Jadot looked for were priests who were respected by their peers. I think that's what he meant by pastoral bishops. He wanted peace between the bishops and their clergy, because if they're fighting, you have a very bad situation in the church. As a side effect of those choices, you also got bishops who were good in dealing with the laity. Today there is not this fighting in the streets, demonstrating, picketing of bishops by their clergy. So finding priests who are respected by their peers is no longer a priority in Rome. Instead, they look for people who will follow the Vatican on doctrine and discipline.

* STEINFELS: Although bishops from around the world are appointed to Vatican congregations, many of them never participate because they must go to Rome for meetings but can't. Yet, you quote Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, who serves on the Congregation for Bishops, as saying that he calls in his vote for the selection of bishops. This seems like a perfectly fine idea. Why doesn't everybody call in his votes? Or consult through conference calls?

* REESE: Only O'Connor has the chutzpah to go tell the pope that he wants to call in his votes and the pope says sure. That's my guess. O'Connor is not afraid of anybody. That's one of his great virtues. He is not afraid of the media. He is not afraid of the president. He is not afraid of the curia. He says what he thinks. I think he knew he couldn't fly to Rome for every one of the congregation's meetings, but he wanted to be involved. He took steps to make sure he was. I'm impressed.

* STEINFELS: Why don't bishops on all of the congregations do the same thing?

* REESE: They are too easily put off by curial officials saying "we've never done it that way." O'Connor dealt with the bureaucracy of the United States Navy, so he's not going to be intimidated by the Vatican bureaucracy.

* STEINFELS: But this is a small measure that might make some difference in the way the curia functions.

* REESE: Sure, sure. The ability of the pope and the Vatican to consult electronically with bishops around the world is here. There's no reason why a congregation couldn't meet on the internet and transmit documents and allow discussions and votes to go on.

* STEINFELS: Outsiders are particularly fascinated by the idea of a centralized church and vesting a powerful form of moral authority in one individual and one institution.

* REESE: I agree with them. I like having a pope. I like having a central authority. You see the kind of media attention that the pope gets because he is this central authority. It's nice to have someone like that who can talk about Bosnia, about Rwanda, about refugees, about justice, about a culture in disintegration. These are valuable and important things.

At the same time, there's a need to empower people on the local level to deal with their own problems and to build the church in their own culture, not simply sit back and wait for the pope to solve their problems.

The difficulty is that it is always presented as an either/or situation. We either have to have a centralized church or we're going to have pure democracy or pure decentralization. The real challenge is to find what are the proper roles for the Vatican and what are the proper roles for local bishops and for local Christian communities. Empower both to do what they should do.

* STEINFELS: Style questions - of leadership, of consulting, even of conversation - are very important in such a large church.

* REESE: Style questions are important. We Americans need to understand that. We often come across to Europeans, Italians, as brash and undiplomatic, almost impolite in our bluntness.

On the other hand, when the Vatican does become blunt and clear, we consider them authoritarian. One Italian-American I interviewed had begun to recognize the advantages of ambiguity. It left more freedom for people to do what they wanted to do. You clear it up and you may get a very distinct and definitive answer, a no.

The documents of Vatican II have a lot of ambiguous, contradictory language, which allowed the bishops to vote for those documents with overwhelming majorities. Today we're fighting over how to interpret those documents. Everybody from right to left can find something to support his or her position. If you go to higher authority and say we want a definitive answer and explanation, they might give it to you. It might not be what you want to hear. And it might not be what's good. It might be too early.

STEINFELS: I'd like to turn to papal leadership and papal elections. Your book gives the impression that this pope is not a big fan of hands-on government. In this, he differs from his predecessors, Pius XII and Paul VI.

* REESE: The image I had of the pope when I went to Rome was that he was not a good manager. I changed my mind. A good manager sets his own priorities and then does what he wants to do. That's what John Paul has done. If he had followed the style of Pius XII and Paul VI, he would have been captured by the curia. In fact, he's been his own man and put his own priority on the things he's wanted to do. At the same time, that means that he doesn't pay attention to a lot of major things that are going on in the curia.

* STEINFELS: Does this make the pope a good manager?

* REESE: He manages his time well. He pays attention to the things he considers important. He spends about a third of his time outside of Rome on trips. Still, he manages to run the Vatican curia. That's extraordinary. He's constantly working with people, even at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

* STEINFELS: As a political scientist, your assessment of papal leadership is pretty positive. You find that curial structures work surprisingly well considering their limited size and the range of expertise available to them.

* REESE: If you like the pope, and the direction the pope is leading the church, the curia serves him well in supporting that vision. When John XXIII was pope, there was a period of time when there were serious questions about whether the curia was supporting the pope. That's not true today.

* STEINFELS: If a pope reigns long enough, he presumably finally has a curia that is more or less serving his purposes. If so, the reforms you've been talking about need to be reforms that move outside the Vatican and relocate certain forms of power and authority.

* REESE: That's why, when I started writing my book, I decided it couldn't be simply on the curia. That's why I have an early chapter looking at the college of bishops, at the ecumenical council, at the synod of bishops. The curia has to be put in the context of the college of bishops and the communion of churches. If you ask, how is the curia serving the pope in his ministry to the communion of churches, then there are a lot of consequences for reform.

Remember that the curia is not just a bureaucracy. It's also a court. It has the culture of a court. It has the dress of a court. It has the style of a court. That has an impact on a new pope when he comes in. You think the pope is this absolute power who can fire anybody in the curia and send the person off. You can't fire a noble. You can't fire an archbishop.

This is one reason that the people who work in the curia should not be bishops. They should be staff to the pope. They should not be part of the magisterium. They should not be in the college of bishops. The court character of the curia would be reduced if they were no longer bishops.

* STEINFELS: At the end of the book, you say that there has to be an alternative vision of the church and the role of the pope if there is to be significant change. You talk about the communion of churches as an alternative view. In many ways that structure characterizes the Orthodox churches. But they, too, have certain kinds of problems that flow from the weakness of a system that is dispersed almost altogether.

* REESE: The most serious problem the Orthodox have had through the centuries is their lack of independence from local government control. One of the great reforms accomplished by the papacy over the centuries was to take the appointment of bishops away from kings and nobles and centralize it in Rome. That was a reform. Now the question is: Do we need a further reform that decentralizes that power back into the Christian community?

Perhaps it is my background in American politics, but I believe in systems that have checks and balances. For example, it would be very important for the pope to have a role in the appointment of bishops by approving the choice made by the local community. In the ancient church, the bishop had to be elected by the clergy, approved by the people, and consecrated by the bishops of the region. That meant all three had to agree. If the clergy elected someone the people didn't like, they had to go back and try again.

* STEINFELS: Are you proposing a return to this system?

* REESE: Something that moved toward that would be an improvement.

* STEINFELS: Not even Protestant churches have direct election of bishops.

* REESE: I would not want direct election of bishops. Most people don't pay enough attention or care that much. Democracy is certainly not a divinely inspired system. All we have to do is look at our country and we know that. So I favor a system that has checks and balances; for example, the priests' council proposes three names, and one name has to be from outside the diocese. Or, the bishops' conference can propose an additional name. Then the pope picks one of the names that come to him. There's a great variety existing in how bishops are selected for the Eastern churches in union with Rome. There is a role for the clergy, for the local synods.

There are ways to give more power to the local communities without giving them total power over the selection of their bishop. I don't think they should have total power. We're part of the communion of churches, we're not simply the church of Washington, D.C., or the church of Los Angeles.

Whoever is chosen as leader should be someone who maintains unity with the rest of the communion of churches. How's that done? Different ways need to be tried and experimented with. No way is perfect. But the way we're doing it now, we're getting bishops who tend to be out of touch with their local communities, and this is not beneficial.

STEINFELS: Your book spends a good deal of time on the synods of bishops. You suggest that the bishops at Vatican II intended the synods to play a more important role than they have.

* REESE: The synods were something new, an attempt to continue what Vatican II had started, but without having to call together all of the bishops of the world. The purpose of the synods is to advise the pope. The difficulty with that is you can't advise someone unless you can tell him what he's doing wrong. Yet the whole culture of the church is that you never criticize the pope or say anything negative. For the synods to really work we need a change in mentality that makes it acceptable and proper for bishops to say, "Your Holiness, I think you're wrong here, and this is what you need to do." Or, "I think Vatican policy here is wrong. I think these changes need to be made." That's what it means to advise someone. Instead, the synod is a celebration of church unity, where everyone comes and says how wonderful things are, and how we all agree with our Holy Father. You see this in the way the Holy Father's speeches are extensively quoted by the members of the synod.

Structurally, I would suggest some changes: I don't see why the members of the Vatican curia need to be part of the synod of bishops, which should simply represent the churches around the world. This would reduce the size of the synod and would allow more people from outside Rome to attend. Many curial officials should be at the meeting, but they should be there only as staff.

* STEINFELS: What other kinds of structural things would you recommend?

* REESE: Getting the documents out on time. Allowing episcopal conferences to publish the results of their recommendations. We have all of this consultation, and never know what the conferences around the world have actually proposed to Rome.

* STEINFELS: You quote defenders of the current system of synods as seeing the need for confidentiality as well as for reasons of protocol and diplomacy. They think that openness is not appropriate. For example, you cite an official who says that the bishops would come to Rome and have to say things for consumption at home, instead of speaking their mind.

* REESE: There's some truth in that. Openness does have its limitations. That's why, for example, with the U.S. bishops' conference, I think they are right to have at least some of their meetings behind closed doors. Once a year they spend an afternoon talking about things they would rather not talk about in public. They talked about pedophilia for years behind closed doors. They talked about the problems of salaries for religious women behind closed doors.

I like the idea of more openness, but I don't think openness is the solution to every problem. Some things do need to be confidential. Certainly the bishops from Vietnam and China attending the synods have to be very cautious about what they say publicly because there can be very negative consequences for themselves and their flocks.

Still, more openness, more free discussion would be helpful. Bishops' conferences would know the results of discussions in other local areas before going to Rome. The members of each national bishops' conference would know how honestly their representatives spoke at the synod.

* STEINFELS: You seemed to have thoroughly covered the hierarchy with Inside the Vatican and your earlier books. What's your next project?

* REESE: I want to look at what might be the impact of the computer revolution on the church. I want to hold a conference that brings together computer experts, social scientists who study the impact of technology on culture and organizations, and ecclesiologists and church leaders, and then edit a volume of their ideas and suggestions. Historians say that without the printing press there would have been no Protestant Reformation. Now with the computer, wouldn't it be nice if we planned ahead a little better?

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal.