Challenges facing the conclave

Like it or not, the Church is a power structure—at least that she has a divinely given hierarchical power structure—and the cardinal electors are the ones who must choose the man to sit atop it, under God.

It is an immense responsibility, even when the Church is in relatively good order.

These days, the Church is not in good order. She has not been in good order for a long while. Truth be told, she has never been in really good order. There is no golden age to which we may return, nor is there any perfect future this side of celestial Jerusalem. The Church has been very nearly a shambles since Christ, Our Lord, ascended.

If you doubt this, read the Acts of the Apostles, and take heart.

That said, there are real, practical, nuts-and-bolts problems to face. There are urgent crises to address, which require both calculation and expedition. They are the sorts of problems human nature cannot help but have to one degree or another. Human nature is constant. Cultures and civilizations change, however, and the problems facing the Church in this day are very much those of the present cultural and civilizational moment.

If they are to do their job, the cardinals in Rome will need to keep this at the forefront of their minds.

A wish is not a plan

“Amateurs talk strategy,” runs an old truism, “professionals talk logistics.” Frequently attributed to Gen. Omar N. Bradley (who likely never said it) the quote nevertheless expresses the ethos of the great American general, a relentless planner as well as a careful student of human nature, both qualities essential in a commander and desirable in a leader.

It happens that a Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Robert H. Barrow, did say, “Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare.” Barrow apparently gave the quote to a California newspaper in 1979.

Whether one prefers the tighter version attributed to Bradley, or Barrow’s expansive line, the animating idea is the same: Those in charge do well to focus on facts, with a view to execution; on what is necessary and what is feasible based on a clear-eyed view of how things are, rather than on grand visions of how they’d like things to be.

The Vatican is not very likely to be at war with anyone anytime soon—quod Deus avertat—and it’s been a good long while since the pope had any divisions of his own.

Still, the cardinals gathered in Rome for the conclave would do well to keep the maxim in mind and focus their attention on the concrete circumstances of the institution, the head of which they are about to choose.

There is already a good deal of talk about liberal vs. conservative cardinals. There is speculation—some of it even well informed—about the blocs forming around things like doctrine or liturgical preference. Those and other similar and adjacent issues are important, even urgent, but they are also the sorts of things that tend to sort themselves.

Here are some things that tend to get worse if they’re left alone.

The Vatican is insolvent

Vatican watchers have been noting the deepening financial crisis and tightening financial straits for years. The problems did not begin under Francis. They were already advanced when Benedict XVI took the reins.

Hiring and salary freezes, downsizing and consolidation, the reduction or elimination of services once considered essential, have all been in place for years. Two independent consultations more than a decade ago—both under Benedict—recommended drastic measures, only some of which the Vatican implemented, and then only in part.

A series of major financial scandals rocked the Vatican on Francis’s watch, and—most damningly—revealed that the Holy See had been using monies collected on the understanding that they would be used primarily in direct support of the pope’s charitable initiatives, to plug holes in the Vatican budget.

“To support the Holy Father’s mission” is the purpose of the Peter’s Pence fund, a mission that “extends throughout the entire world.”

After “the proclamation of the Gospel” and “promotion of integral human development, education, peace, and brotherhood among peoples,” the Vatican description of Peter’s Pence says all this is, “thanks also to the many activities of service carried out by the dicasteries, bodies and organs of the Holy See who assist him every day.”

So, technically not a lie, but still it touts the collection’s use in support of papal charities serving the world’s poorest and neediest, while the Vatican has actually been using most of the money to run the Church’s central governing apparatus.

Even if donations to Peter’s Pence pick up—and they did in 2023, after a disastrous 2022—the money coming in is about half the money going out, and the Roman curia is swallowing the lion’s share of that.

The next pope has a fiscal disaster to avert and a persistent financial sustainability crisis to address, both of which are exacerbated by a widening credibility gap created in part by the less-than-perfectly forthright billing given to the Vatican’s flagship fundraising campaign.

Justice, delayed

The administration of justice in the Church is another critical area in need of reform. The case of Fr. Marko Rupnik epitomizes the problem, but is ultimately only the most egregious symptom of the Church’s failure to deliver justice or even appear concerned with delivering it.

The next pope will have to repair the broken justice system at the center of the Church. He will have to figure out how to make ecclesiastical justice meaningfully public.

“Justice,” runs Lord Hewart’s famous phrase, “must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done.” The statement came in a decision Hewart delivered when he was Lord Chief Justice of England, in a case involving the mere appearance of bias—no actual malfeasance was ever suspected or alleged—which was enough to get the case tossed.

It has since become a maxim.

The Vatican cannot hope to fix all the problems in every ecclesiastical tribunal around the world, but the Vatican ought to lead by example. The Vatican’s organs of justice, in other words, ought to set the standard and abide by it.

The scandalous inadequacies of Vatican justice go back a very long way, indeed.

“[T]hese servants of a most merciful but sometimes severe God,” wrote Edmond About in his 19th-century polemical masterpiece On the Roman Question, “simultaneously abuse both mercy and justice.”

“[F]ull of indulgence for the indifferent, for their friends, and for themselves,” About wrote, “they treat with extreme rigor whoever has had the misfortune to become obnoxious to power,” and “more readily pardon the wretch who cuts a man’s throat, than the imprudent citizen who blames an abuse.”

It is fair to note—I have before—that the popes were civil rulers in About’s day as well as ecclesiastical, but his observations applied equally to both the temporal and the spiritual spheres. They are still pertinent.

“If occasionally officials of a certain rank are punished,” About wrote (introducing a discussion of the Campana Affair, a financial scandal and cause célèbre in its day that is still instructive), “if even the law is put in force against them with unusual vigor, rest assured the public interest has no part in the business: The real springs of action are to be sought elsewhere.”

The impression, shared by people across the whole spectrum of opinion in the Church, that motives other than the furtherance of justice—a public good—are at work in the Rupnik affair and many others, is not unique to the late Francis pontificate but a longstanding feature of pontifical and ecclesiastical rule.

Until the clerical and hierarchical leadership of the Church recovers a sensibility of justice as a public good and begins to conduct the machinery of justice accordingly, no member of the faithful in any state of life will be able to trust ecclesiastical processes or judgments.

Rome must become exemplary, not only by comparison with the rest of the Church, but before a candid world.

Irreducible complexity

These two problems—the financial crisis and the crisis of justice—are functions of one another. Fixing one of them will take time and be expensive. Fixing both will be more so. Fixing the broken justice system, especially, will be expensive. Time and money are the two things in short supply, even if the will may be found not only to make a start but to see it through.

Here, a lesson from US history may be instructive.

In 1797, a diplomatic mission sent by US President John Adams made its way to France, in the hope of negotiating an end to rapacious French practices at sea against US-flagged merchant vessels.

The American mission dealt with go-betweens, code-named in dispatches X, Y, and Z, who demanded bribes from the American envoys before negotiations could begin. When word of the French agents’ demands became public, it raised an outcry and war fever.

“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” became the American rallying cry.

The new pope must trust in the Holy Spirit, and also trust that He works through the spirit of the worldwide body of the faithful, for whom the rallying cry may be: “Millions for reform, but not one cent for business as usual!”

At bottom, none of this is solely or even primarily a matter of internal discipline.

If faithful Catholics in every state of life cannot trust Church leaders with their money or with the administration of justice, how can the world trust them when they proclaim Christ crucified and risen?