Pope's Reform Path: Francis Shakes Up Church Establishment

By Hans-Jürgen Schlamp in Rome, SPIEGEL

July 6, 2013

It appears Pope Francis truly wants to change the Catholic Church. He's reforming the Vatican Bank first, but he's also circumventing the old guard wherever he can. The establishment is up in arms.

A cardinal in Rome earns about ?3,000 ($3,888) a month, even less than a pastor in Germany. But a cardinal's life in Rome is a lot more expensive -- with visits to restaurants and shopping at boutiques for the upscale clothing men of the church are expected to wear, not to mention their jewelry and the antiques they display in their apartments. So it's good to have friends who can treat you or otherwise provide support now and then.
Friends are also happy to give a cardinal a hand -- and not just out of religious considerations. A cardinal can be helpful in both political and business terms. So it's not surprising that a symbiotic relationship between parts of the Curia and the upper class around the world has formed -- one that brings together the establishment, luxury and power. It's a nice little tradition that new Pope Francis would like to put an end to. For the Catholic establishment, though, it is nothing less than a catastrophe.

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Even before his enthronement as pope, when he was still a cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had spoken clearly about this. During his speech to the cardinal conclave, he warned that, "When the church does not emerge from itself to evangalize, it becomes self-referential and therefore becomes sick." He warned of "self-referentiality" and "theological narcissism." He also criticized a "mundane church that lives within itself, of itself and for itself." And it appears the Argentinian pope meant this criticism seriously. In fact, he demonstrates that every day.
Instead of wearing a gold cross, he has one of steel. And he lives in a sparsely furnished apartment in the Santa Marta guest house rather than in the Apostolic Palace. Instead of taking his seat in the Vatican concert hall to listen to classical music, he recently remained at his desk working on the final version of his decree for the church-state's own Institute for Religious Works (IOR) bank. With his signature, he created a powerful special papal commission to review the bank's activities. He also said the new commission must change everything at the Vatican Bank, as it is also known. He said the Vatican certainly needed a bank, but its areas of business should only reach a "certain point."
A Papal Bank with Mafia Contacts
For decades now, the IOR has been in the headlines for one scandal after the other. At the beginning of the 1980s, it was at the center of one of the darkest crime thrillers in postwar Italian history. The scandal surrounded billions in business with the mafia, and a Vatican banker was hanged from a London bridge by a killer commando.
But the chain of scandals never let up. When, in autumn 2010, fresh suspicions of money laundering to the tune of triple-digit millions emerged, then Pope Benedict XVI promised stricter rules for his financial managers. In fact, though, nothing changed. In the so-called Vatileaks scandal, secret documents that had been smuggled out of the Vatican shed light on bizarre intrigues inside the papal state. Often, the Vatican Bank played a role in those intrigues. Benedict XVI was appalled, but also overwhelmed. He failed to prevail over the powerful cardinals who backed the IOR. His resignation was the logical outcome.
German Baron Takes Helm of Bank
His successor is taking more decisive action. First, he fired Nunzio Scarano, the top accountant in the Vatican office that oversees Vatican property and investments, after he was accused of money laundering and corruption and arrested. Then, practically overnight, he forced out IOR Director Paulo Cipriani and his deputy. Now the bank will be led by Ernst von Freyberg, a German baron and former consultant, member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the president of the IOR supervisory board since mid-February.
Between now and October, Pope Francis wants to ensure clarity and also determine how the financial institute will handle its duties in harmony with the "church's mission" in the future. A that point, a new structure will be created for the bank and a new boss will be appointed.

"Did we actually vote for someone who really believes in what he preaches?" some within the Curia are now whispering. Once again, Francis has taken them fully by surprise. In an almost demonstrative manner, he has been excluding the Vatican apparatus in every way he can. Most recently, this happened with the trip the pope announced he would take on Monday to the island of Lampedusa in southern Italy. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, first learned of the planned trip through a papal press release. And instead of the kind of months of advance-team work used by heads of the Catholic Church for trips in the past, Francis has dispensed with that. Instead, the eccentric Argentinian pope ordered his staff to prepare a plane so that he could fly there in the morning and be back by midday.

Thousands of refugees have arrived at Lamedusa each year in desperation after making the journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa in small, dangerous boats. Francis wants to pray together with them and also throw a wreath into the sea to commemorate those who have lost their lives trying to make it to Europe. The pope has announced that he doesn't want to meet with the mayor or other authorities. He also also ordered church officials to stay away.

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Taken from: http://abcnews.go.com/International/popes-reform-path-francis-shakes-church-establishment/story?id=19573297

Pope Francis Is Good for the Jews

A repair process that began with John Paul II just might be completed by the new pope.

• By FRANCIS X. ROCCA

Vatican City

Nearly half a century ago, the Second Vatican Council corrected the Roman Catholic Church's historical attitude toward Jews with the document "Nostra Aetate," which exonerated the Jewish people of any collective guilt for the killing of Jesus and affirmed that God's covenant with them had never been abrogated.
The document remains a source of controversy among Catholics, particularly over the question of whether they should ever seek to convert Jews, or merely, as "Nostra Aetate" says, await "that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord with a single voice." Yet the 1965 document unquestionably opened a period of unprecedented dialogue and dramatic overtures by Catholic leaders—a movement that promises to continue, and even rise to another level, under Pope Francis.
While Jews have an obvious interest in communication and harmony with the world's largest church, the interest for Catholics is more complex. Dialogue allows the church to repudiate the anti-Semitism encouraged or tolerated by its leaders and members over the centuries, and to acknowledge what "Nostra Aetate" called its "sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles." A Catholicism that regards the people of its divine founder with anything other than love and honor is a religion profoundly at odds with itself.
Pope John Paul II, who grew up with friends from Poland's large prewar Jewish community, became in 1986 the first pope of modern times to visit a synagogue—in the very Roman Ghetto where his predecessors had kept Jews confined until the late 19th century. The pope visited Jerusalem in 2000 and prayed at the Western Wall, expressing sadness for past injuries to Jews. John Paul also opened full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See.
Pope Benedict XVI followed John Paul's lead, also visiting the Rome synagogue and Israel, and he reiterated and elaborated on Vatican II's denial that the Jewish people were culpable for Jesus' death. Benedict also modified John Paul's famous description of Jews as Christians' "elder brothers," in favor of what he deemed a more unambiguously reverent term, "fathers in the faith." When Benedict's decision in 2009 to readmit to the Catholic Church an excommunicated traditionalist bishop who turned out to be a public Holocaust denier stirred an international furor, the pope pointedly thanked "our Jewish friends" for their support.
Benedict's words and gestures, coming from a German who had served (unwillingly) in the Hitler Youth and then his country's military during World War II, had a special historical resonance. They also indicated that friendship with the Jews was a principle of church teaching rather than merely the inclination of a given pontiff.
Nevertheless, given the rising urgency of pursuing a dialogue with Islam, it was hardly obvious that Benedict's successor in Rome would promote the church's relationship with Judaism with the same focus and zeal, especially if the new pope came from outside Europe.
As it turned out, the College of Cardinals could not have elected a man with a clearer commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations than Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Hannukah in local synagogues, voiced solidarity with Jewish victims of terrorism, and co-written a book with a prominent rabbi. Touching on one of the most sensitive points in the relationship between Catholics and Jews, Bergoglio had called for the Vatican to open its archives from the pontificate of Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, to address lingering questions about whether the wartime pope had done or said enough to oppose the Nazi genocide.
It is relevant in this connection that the new pope comes from Buenos Aires, the city with the largest Jewish community in the Southern Hemisphere. No pope since the church's early centuries has come from a society as culturally diverse as modern Argentina, which Francis has celebrated for its blend of ethnicities and religions.
This background helps explain the strikingly matter-of-fact and unselfconscious character of his book-length conversation with Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Buenos Aires, published in Spanish three years ago and recently brought out in English under the title "On Heaven and Earth." Only a few pages of the discussion between the then-cardinal and the rabbi touch on the historical tensions between Catholics and Jews or how they might be resolved—questions that have traditionally loomed large in Catholic-Jewish exchanges.
Instead, the book presents two religious leaders reflecting together as friends on topics as varied as feminism, globalization and same-sex marriage. The two men compare notes on the approaches of their respective traditions, often agreeing yet not hesitating to note differences. In the (future) pope's own words: "With Skorka I never had to compromise my Catholic identity, just as he never did with his Jewish identity, and this was not only because of the respect we have for each other, but also because that is how we understand interreligious dialogue."
Half a century after Vatican II, following John Paul's pioneering opening to Judaism and its confirmation under Benedict, Pope Francis's pontificate now offers the prospect of an achievement no less historic for Catholic-Jewish relations: normalcy.

Mr. Rocca is the Rome bureau chief of Catholic News Service.

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Taken from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324063304578525432914777890.html