Pope Encounters Resistance On Some Reforms

At the Vatican this week, the pope's G9 -- a committee of nine cardinals -- is working on how to
overhaul Vatican governance.
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When Pope Francis was elected two years ago, he had a mandate from the College of Cardinals:
restore credibility to an institution rife with cronyism, corruption and waste. This week, he spent two
days with cardinals to discuss reforming the Vatican's central administration. As NPR's Sylvia
Poggioli reports from Rome, the Pope is encountering resistance.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: Pope Francis urged the cardinals to reform a dysfunctional
administration known as the Roman Curia. Last December, in his Christmas address to the
bureaucrats, Francis was scathing. He spoke of the pathology of power and the temptation of
narcissism in what he called the list of illnesses afflicting the Curia.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTMAS ADDRESS)
POPE FRANCIS: (Through interpreter). There's a spiritual Alzheimer's, a gradual decline in spiritual
faculties that leads people to build walls around and make idols of themselves.
POGGIOLI: Francis denounced existential schizophrenia that leads to hypocrisy and a double life.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTMAS ADDRESS)
FRANCIS: (Through interpreter). There's the illness of gossip and rumors. There are those who kill
their colleagues' reputation in cold blood, cowards who speak behind the others' backs. My brothers,
beware the terrorism of gossip.
POGGIOLI: Many in the audience were stunned by the Pope's diagnosis.
JOHN THAVIS: The Pope's critique of the Roman Curia last Christmas just caused jaws to drop. No
one had ever told them those kind of things before.
POGGIOLI: John Thavis is a veteran Vatican analyst. In wanting to overhaul the Vatican
bureaucracy, Thavis says, Francis is not just trying to change administrators.
THAVIS: He is trying to change a culture here. He was elected with a mandate to do this. That
means not only changing the nameplates on the Vatican office doors but getting to these chronic
problems of careerism, power struggles, financial transparency and streamlining the bureaucracy.
POGGIOLI: The cardinals came to Rome to discuss proposals for the Pope's nine-member Advisory
Council. Those include placing 20-odd current departments under two new, large umbrella

groupings: one for laity, family and life and another for charity, justice and peace. The latter would
include a new section for the environment, a priority issue for Francis, who will issue a major
document on the topic this summer and who believes climate change is manmade. But changing the
cultural climate inside the Vatican is proving difficult. Pope Francis, says Thavis, was cheered when
he was elected and announced he was going to clean house.
THAVIS: But now the cheering has subsided, at least inside the Vatican. And I think it's because a lot
of Vatican officials realize it's getting a little too close to home.
POGGIOLI: South African Cardinal Wilfred Napier, a member of the new council advising the Pope
on economic reforms, said in an interview that the group has run into resistance from some
departments that had earlier enjoyed financial autonomy. And in a sign that the establishment may
be trying to downsize expectations of sweeping and speedy reforms, Vatican spokesman Father
Federico Lombardi said changes will take some time. And at a briefing, Lombardi was asked
whether a layperson could become head of one of the new departments.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRIEFING)
FEDERICO LOMBARDI: (Through interpreter). It seems to me unthinkable that a layperson could
chair a department. They've always been headed by cardinals.
POGGIOLI: Father Thomas Reese, senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, says no
cardinals or bishops should serve in the Curia.
THOMAS REESE: I think we have to destroy this idea that they are like a 17th-century royal court
and turn them into a civil service. And that should be their image of who they are.
POGGIOLI: Francis has repeatedly said that image should be of men who see themselves as servants
of God, not princes, not the rulers in charge of a 1.2 billion-member church. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR
News, Rome.
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