Sunday Times 2
Pope Francis denounces resistance to Vatican reform in Christmas speech to Curia
ROME – Pope Francis on Thursday lashed out against high-level Catholic prelates who have been opposing his efforts to reform the Vatican’s central bureaucracy, using an annual pre-Christmas meeting to say that while some cardinals and archbishops offer questions in a spirit of goodwill others practise a “malevolent resistance.”
Such sinister opposition, the pontiff said, “sprouts from twisted minds and presents itself when the devil inspires bad intentions.”
The pope also said it “finds refuge in tradition, in appearances, in formality, in the known, or in the desire to make everything personal without distinguishing between act, actor, and action.”
The pope was speaking Thursday in an annual meeting that under previous pontiffs had simply been a polite encounter to exchange greetings before the holidays.
But in 2014 he shocked the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Roman curia, by using the occasion to list off 15 “spiritual sicknesses” he said he had witnessed among them. In 2015, he offered what he called a “catalog of virtues” to help them overcome the sicknesses.
This year, the pope outlined 12 guidelines he is using in pursuing his reform of the curia. But he first again took the prelates to task, hitting back against those who have resisted his changes.
Besides those opposing malevolently, the pontiff identified cases of what he called “open” and “hidden” resistance.
The pope said open resistance is often “born of goodwill and sincere dialogue,” but that hidden resistance is “born of fearful or hardened hearts content with the empty rhetoric of a complacent spiritual reform, on the part of those who say they are ready for change, but want everything to remain as it is.” The pope said that in undertaking reforms of the Vatican, people should see that the central command of the church “is not an immobile bureaucratic apparatus.”
“It is necessary to reiterate with force that the reform is not an end in itself but is a process of growth and most of all, conversion,” said the pope.
“The reform, then, does not have an aesthetic end so as to make the curia more beautiful,” he continued, saying it was not like applying make-up as a “trick to beautify the old curial body” or like undergoing plastic surgery to remove wrinkles.
“Dear brothers, it is not wrinkles that the church must fear, but moles!” the pontiff exhorted the cardinals and bishops.
“The reform will be effective only if it is carried out by ‘renewed’ men and not simply with ‘new’ men,” said the pope. “It is not enough to content ourselves with changing the personnel, but we must bring members of the curia to renew themselves spiritually, humanly, and professionally.”
The pope then gave the prelates his 12 guidelines to reform: Individualism, pastoral concern, missionary zeal, clear organisation, functionality, modernisation, sobriety, subsidiarity, synodality, Catholicity, professionalism, and gradualism.
The pope said he foresees “a greater number of laypeople, especially in those dicasteries where they can be more competent than clerics or consecrated people,” and said “giving value to the role of women is also of great importance.”
- National Catholic Reporter