Pride, ambivalence about Americans in Benedict's Vatican

Good article as usual. Having so many prominent Americans in the Vatican also explains why there seem to be some bishops who fall over themselves to get to Rome at the detriment of their local diocese. They loose touch with the good people they are to shepard in a personal push for a promotion. Often dioceses are torn apart of it in an unrealistic attempt to remake the local diocese (or even parish for some priests who do it) in a mirror image of Rome.

The best bishops right now are those not looking for advancement no matter how modern or traditional they manage their own spirituality or those of their flock. On a local note, both former Bishop Lucker and current Bishop LeVoir fit this mold even though LeVoir is more traditional. The now Archishop Nienstedt who was in between the previous two was looking and writing for advancement during his entire time at the detriment of the local diocese.

Having Archbishop Raymond Burke in the curia doesn't count. He's so conservative that he's more Italian than American.

Unlike in the time of Leo XIII, the thing to fear today from the American hierarchy is not the heresy of "Americanism", but the heresy of "Republican Party hackism".

Two recent happenings, Archbishop Raymond Burke's comments on Politicians and Communion and funerals for politicians and Cardinal William Levada's investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious make one wonder whether they are instruments of Benedict XVI into the U.S. Catholic Church or are their own initiators.

The meaning of "impressionante" can vary according to the tone.An old friend of mine who has been dealing with Vatican affairs for more than 30 years was kind enough to give me some details about the 'impressionante' influence of the Americans over the Vatican authorities. "It is more than what the English call 'impressive; it is 'tremendous', 'frightening', 'awful', 'upsetting', depending, of course, on one's point of view.The American High Clergy", he added,"are highly 'romanized'. The Roman Curia is being taken over by the Americans. Furthermore,there are now 13 American Cardinals under the age of 80...I would not be surprised if the next Pope were to be an American". John Allen's interesting piece might stir up an "impressionante" hornet's nest.

I think Abp. Burke is the Glen Beck of the vatican and stirs more enmity among many than ambivalence.
Beyond that, given the skepticism many have toward the hierarchy, the curial regimen represents nothing more than an out of date beauracracy that is not only out of touch with the surrounding world and but too much concerned with the games beaurocrats play within an organization.

Could this be directed at Archbishop Burke's recent comments on the Kennedy funeral?

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2009/09/quote-of-day_27.html

Why no mention of the most notorious US ecclesiastic in Rome - Bernard Cardinal Law? No one could be better placed than John Allen to update us all on just how many Vatican bodies Law still graces. And on why that is, given the questions Law's presence in Rome poses re the papacy's commitment to child protection.

How about it, John?

Sean

I don't think the names of the American bishops/cardinals working in the Vatican would actually represent the majority of American Catholics...so if the pope is "impresed" he's getting false impressions...how do we let the pope really know who we are, how we live out our faith, how we support all our variety of ministries and ministers, how we educate our children in our faith...

We must read with great admiration for the unusual subtley of our NCR journalist in so diplomatically reporting thusly: "Nonetheless, the Americans in Rome, even though they now carry responsibility for the universal church, can’t help keeping a special eye on things back home. Every now and then, there’s probably a tug to cross the line from observation to interference.
Many Italians, on the basis of their long historical experience, are quietly issuing this bit of advice to their American friends: The more Americans there are in senior Vatican positions, the greater the need for clarity about roles and lines of authority back home. Whatever one makes of that, it’s probably a caution worth considering."

Whatever one makes of that, we cannot help but notice his wise and judicious restraint from writing here thename of Archbishop Burke, particularly in light of his recent public scolding of Cardinal Sean O'Malley, certainly acting in this far outside the obligations of his Vatican office and in direct contradiction of the serious yet subtle suggestions whic conclude this article.

Such discretion as Mr. Allen's here is so seldom seen and rarely prized in commercial US journalism, and we must sincerely admire his remarkable (in fact, impressionante) abilities, grateful for the otherwise inaccessible insight they bring to these glorious ncronline.org pages. Not since living in silent, subtle France have I found such demand for bringing out and putting on those eyeglasses which grant the ability to read between the lines, at what is left unsaid and barely indicated. Unfortunately I find I need a new prescription, as mine were never, ever powerful enough.

Thank God for John, and I hope his family is well, and that his children may play with those of our US Ambassador, if ages conincide!
frère charles du désert OSB OBLAT (Congrégation de Subiaco)

We wouldn't, perchance, be talking about anyone in particular, would we? Nah...of course not...:-)

I.m sure you are right, but I am not sure I understand you. If you are saying that high Vatcan officials should not interfer with the affairs of their local dioceses, please explain why not. In any case what has it to do with Jesus and the command love God, and love one another? You are way over my head - and I thought I could understand even quite subtle distinctions eg the difference between speech and communication. You are not communicating with this blockhead. And what significance is it that his Holiness has a lot of Americans advising him ? Probably Judas was "gracious astute and hard working". We do know that he kept the purse, he was certainly concerned about Jesus' public relations and clever enough to keep his own counsel - no blabberer. Almost certainly he was more "educated" than the other apostles. It seems he was able to communicate with Jesus, in their presence, in a way that they did not apprehend until much later. You give us nothing about Wells that shows his real qualities. Has he spent much time trying to defend the faith from the daily assaults of militant atheists? Does he know of the subdued rebellion of the masses of Catholics, who like me are convinced that the church's pronouncements about birth control are in practice impossible to follow, and rest on a foundation of Natural Law that is shaky to put it mildly.
The Moral Law is one thing, but Natural Law strictly applied runs close to the nonsense that is Christian Scientism. Tell me that he has thought long and hard about these problems and I shall rejoice - if I really believe you. The Vatican shows no awareness of these challenges that are coming from thinking Catholics, or else - which is more dangerous - is simply refusing to discuss them . Hopefully the laity are praying about these things, but is the Vatican open to prayer? If indeed it is not it will be like the salt that has lost its taste, ready to be thrown away as rubbish; That is the fate of those who oppose the will of God. What else can one call it if not even argument in a calm and peaceful environment is permitted.? The Vatican has expelled a nun just recently for stating that her conscience would not allow her to keep silent about women priests. Luther was excommunicated because he insisted that the sale of indulgences was wrong ie sinful and he was right - it is the sin of simony. Luther was right - maybe he will be acknowledged that he was right about the primacy of the conscience. It is surely a wake'up call if a nun who swears allegiance to the local bishop, finds in her heart it necessary to say, my allegiance is to God, not man. The prejudice against women is a human tradition of ancient vintage. Have we not honoured as saints the rare women who have determined to obey God, and not their husbands? There is nothing in the Gospels about women being inferior to men. So Jesus selected men only to be Apostles. Did he ever say that they should not follow Him? and in fact commended Mary for choosing the better part? Was he not a human being in everything but sin? Did he not act like a typical male of his time, and the idea of a woman priest never entered his head.If it had he might have had an insight, but nobody even dreamt to ask him. Basically they all thought women to be the possession of the male. Whose wife wll she be asked the Jewish leaders, trying to catch Him out with a trick question which was designed to show ythe belief in eternal life after death to be ridiculous. H answered by saying that marriage was irrelevant after death, implying that all are equal in God's sight - which is good catholic doctrine - which the Pope in the Vatican ignores in practice.

I hope someone tells Archbishop Raymond Burke that he did enough damage here as Archbishop of St. Louis. It would help if he would stop now.

I submitted the following comment under the September 29, 2009 article/blog by Tom Cox on Sister Kane. However, my comment draws on some points in the article above by Mr. Allen, and so I also submit it here.

Sister Kane’s words, as reported by Tom Cox (in a blog now hard to find in the NCR site, although only two days ago), are both brave and charitable, and never mind any anger that Mr. Cox may have discerned in them at the nuns’ conference in St. Louis. The real anger in the overall story is in the motivation and planning behind the investigations of the nuns, which must be a story focused upon the Vatican bureaucracy (“Vatican”), and not on a city in America’s heartland. And it eventually will be the story of a mistake at the Vatican, a mistake that has yet to unfold itself and hurt all the real people whom it will hurt.

Ordinarily, mistakes within the Vatican are the result of past practices colliding with unread needs, failures by one office within the Vatican to communicate with another, and other such causes which beset many other large bureaucracies. In the case of mistakes made by the Vatican, however, the correcting of any mistake is often more elaborate and time-consuming than the making of the mistake in the first place. For the correction “process” is elaborated and protracted by traditions of secrecy, by “chains” of command that are ever-morphing labyrinths, and by unuttered personal ambitions and alliances.

Ordinarily, the Vatican does not perceive the issues that entertain various factions within the American Church as being peculiarly American problems. American Catholics who are more than marginally interested in seeing changes in the Church in such matters as female and married clergy, gay and lesbian rights, birth control, abortion, and so on have their equivalents in other geographic areas of the globe, and, therefore, are broadly lumped by the Vatican as the products of the broad issues of the materialism, modernism, and consumerism that have been affecting the entire world. These broad issues are not uniquely American issues, and Vatican actions are responses to these broad issues – issues already out there awaiting remediation -- are not motivated by any animosity against anyone, anywhere, and particularly not against any segment of American Catholics. That is, until now.

The many offices at the Vatican are the latest descendants of perhaps the world’s oldest bureaucracy. The Vatican cannot be simply regarded as an ecclesiastical monarchy, since the bureaucratic officials within the Vatican have a great deal of power. Studies of the power wielded by many of these offices have offered occasional insight. John L. Allen, Jr. in his October 1, 2009 article for NCR, “Pride, ambivalence about Americans in Benedict's Vatican” remarks on the increase in the numbers of American clergy within many high offices of the Vatican. Allen is, among other things, one of the best of the vaticanista – Rome-based reporters attuned to the Vatican. And vaticanista who want to remain such, must be careful not to spoil their Vatican sources.

The Vatican action now, to institute two investigations of American women religious, is unusual because its origins are apparently within the Vatican (rather than being a response to an issue external to the Vatican) and it is directed solely at a segment of the American Church. Ordinarily, when the Vatican rubs some within the American Church the wrong way, it is because a Vatican action (whether it is an encyclical, a press release, an appointment within the Vatican, a prominent sermon or paper, and whether it is by the pope himself or by any leading Vatican official) that is actually directed broadly to the Church around the world seems out of touch with positions favored by some parts of the American Church. Rarely might any such Vatican action be directed solely at an issue that is uniquely American – although censorings of American clergy (an editor and a theologian come to mind) would be exceptions to such a pattern. Ordinarily, when one wants to read the tea leaves as to how the Vatican is viewing specific problems unique to the American Church, one is left to interpreting, for example, Vatican appointments to fill American bishoprics, pieces in L’Osservatore Romano, and statements by the pope to ranking American visitors. This is not inconsistent with other large bureaucracies. Thus the Vatican action beginning the investigation of the American nuns is extraordinary: it is a case of an oxymoronic bureaucratic initiative; it is an issue created in the initiative itself, and so, not a response to an external issue; and it is directed solely toward a segment of (only) the American Church.

That this segment of the American Church happens to be the various orders and groups of nuns who daily labor in various missions among the poor and marginalized is as shocking as it is revealing. It shocks for reasons now already expressed in others’ articles and comments (coming on the heels of the clergy sex abuse, of the hierarchy’s cover-ups of the clergy’s sex abuse, and of pharisaic prohibitions barring specific Catholics from communion). It is revealing, for it comes only months after then-Archbishop Raymond Burke’s abrupt removal from the St. Louis archdiocese and his appointment to one of the supreme court-like agencies within the Vatican. Bishop Burke is not the only American at work within the Vatican, as John Allen describes. But most of the others hold responsible posts where they are very busy with the matters at hand. Bishop Burke, however, is now essentially a judge, and judges must wait for cases to wind their way to their tribunals. Judges’ duties focus them (only) on the cases that come to them. Clearly such judicial work is too slow for his energies. The old problems back in the U.S.A. have compelled Bishop Burke’s continuing attention and help him fill his voids.

Let us recall that Bishop Burke is the recent St. Louis bishop who threatened to issue an interdict (excommunication) against all obstinate parishioners in a Polish-national parish who were refusing to turn over the monies of their parish to their bishop’s control. (After he researched the use of medieval interdicts, will Bishop Burke want to extend their use to certain women?) This is the St. Louis bishop who tried to break the career of a nun who dared support the idea of female ordinations by taking vindictive episcopal action the day before the public announcement of his Vatican appointment. This is the St. Louis bishop who threatened prohibitions against certain Catholic politicians receiving the sacraments. He has developed religious expertise in the field of punitive actions.

And now, despite his post being at the Vatican, this is the bishop who spends his time composing a lengthy article characterized as his “fundamental reflections on how to advance the culture of life in our nation” (published September 26, 2009 in Inside Catholic.com), directed against his once-fellow bishop, Cardinal O’Malley, for his [See: http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6937&Itemid=121&ed=1], decision to provide the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy a Catholic funeral after long service in support of many pro-life issues (though unfortunately not against abortion). And this is the bishop who has issued other recent letters encouraging Eucharistic ministers and others to deny communion to other, still-living American politicians. Bishop Burke is still very much here in America. Isn’t it strange that he hasn’t used his Vatican bully pulpit to guide and correct any other parts of the world? Again, his actual duties in the Vatican are obviously insufficiently challenging.

John Allen’s October 1 piece, referenced above, mentions a Vatican norm of Vatican personnel avoiding personal involvement in Italian affairs, which has long been important for the many Italian clergy who have held positions in the Vatican. He alludes to this norm as being important now for the growing numbers of American clergy at the Vatican, who must learn the importance of avoiding personal involvement in American Catholic affairs. Allen goes no further, and leaves his readers to imagine what prompts his remarks.

Let me guess. I believe that it was Bishop Burke who, primarily, encouraged Cardinal Franc Rodé, a Slovenian, the head of the Vatican’s “Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life,” to initiate last December (2008) the investigations of nuns in the American Church. Although only within the last week (late September, 2009) have we heard of the Vatican’s call upon the American Church to financially support these investigations, it is clear that the timing of this most recent news is misleading. An essential issue, from the very beginning of the concept of such investigations, had to have been the financial issue. Here, someone at the Vatican is likely to have simply pointed to the one thing that has always distinguished the American Church at the Vatican: the generous collection-basket contributions of American Catholics. Moreover, the million-dollar (plus) price tag for the investigations is actually paltry. Someone more familiar than Cardinal Rode with how American bishops handle their episcopal finances, would know how to handle the details surrounding this money. For example, if each bishop in charge of (only) the larger American dioceses skimmed just $50,000 from various existing funds and sources and reallocated the $50,000 to a new budget line item designated, for example, Special Vatican Investigations -- and sent a check, the investigations would be fully funded in no time. And, this way, no special collection need be conducted, particularly where bishops and pastors sense that their laity support their local nuns.

Whether or not one agrees that the hand of Bishop Burke is likely to be behind the investigation of the American nuns (possibly for purposes of deploying his new-found tool, a medieval-style interdict), if the investigation’s funding is left unsecured or incomplete, the bean counters within the Vatican’s financial units will be alienated, and those in the Vatican who support the investigations will lose some allies (although this is unlikely to ever be known). But if the story of the investigation’s insufficient funding is publicized, who knows how the tea leaves will spill out? Perhaps the American clergy at the Vatican will be (silently) admonished to follow the rule against personal involvement in American affairs. How would we ever know how Bishop Burke would respond? Might he become someone else’s ghost writer? Might he develop his own loyal vaticanista, so as to feed conservative American Catholic media? What would become of interdicts? Will they surface in the results of his tribunal’s decisions?

Now, however, the bottom line for us is that we should insist on learning from local bishops how they intend to respond to the Vatican’s call for funding of the investigations. Where no collections are taken up, the call for information about the local bishop’s response to the Vatican should be louder and more persistent. And we can pray, pray that the Vatican’s mistake is indeed corrected before people are hurt. Nuns, you know, are hardy souls, made of the stuff of martyrs. We should worry for the poor and marginalized who rely on the continuing labors of the nuns.

And for now, the bottom line for Sister Kane is that her reported remarks – ironically, in St. Louis – may have been enlivened with some anger, but a degree of anger helps one to marshal his or her resources and avoid the collapse that is known as depression. The Vatican couldn’t care any less than it does about any “anger” in Sister Kane’s remarks. The Vatican will turn and look only when its receipts from the American Church are thrown into public question. Remember how the papacy began to take the words of Luther seriously only after revenues from the sale of special papal indulgences in Germany were threatened.

Vincent of Valley Forge October 1, 2009

I have a feeling that Pope Benedict will rollback Vatican II to the medieval ages.

I write from Scotland where, believe it or not, Archbishop Raymond Leo Burke is not unknown. He is a friend of our Bishop Philip Tartaglia (Diocese of Paisley) and came here to deliver a paper at the Annual Conference of the Catholic Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland in, I believe, 1999. He most likely was here other times as well, but I have no way of knowing.

So I hope you do not mind if I intrude in what seems to be being regarded as a purely American Catholic argument. But I would contend that if you try to re-write what it means to be American and Catholic I would have to reconsider whether I could continue to be Scottish and Catholic in the light of what others would consider to be Catholic in light of what they believe your Catholicism to be.

And that is what is the nub of all of which you argue: the Universaity of the Catholic Church.

Vincent of Forge Valley forgets one simple fact: in all the actions which he lists that Archbishop Raymond Burke did, in his view reprehensibly, the Most Reverend gentleman acted absolutely one hundred percent according to canon law; and he didn't require to research "the use of medieval interdicts".

If Vincent cares to refer to "The Cardinal" by Henry Morton Robinson -- published in 1950 when Raymond Leo Burke was just about two years old and knew nothing of medieval interdicts -- he will find all the good Archbishop needed in dealing with "all obstinate parishioners in a Polish-national parish who were refusing to turn over the monies of their parish to their bishop’s control". In "The Cardinal" the obstinates were called The Sons of Assissi and their routing by Father Fermoyle was one of the highlights of the book.

And if certain women religious and their leadership wish to remove themselves form the Catholic Faith and Church -- and that Faith and Church inevitably involves acceptance of and obedient acquiescence in a Canon Law and Church practice which precludes female ordination -- no such thing as a "new-found tool, a medieval-style interdict", even though it be neither "new found" nor "medieval", is necessary: the women concerned only have to be honest with themselves and others and publicly say that they no longer wish to be considered as women Catholic religious!

Orrabestorratime, Hughie.

Burke and Levada are embarrassments, nothing more! May their tenures be short!

Talking of Americans, you fail to mention the current whereabouts of Monsignor William V Millea, who up until September was one of the Papal Masters of Ceremonies but has since been taken off that position and is seemingly nowhere to be seen.