My one-step proposal for Vatican reform (Part I)

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 11, 2026

For 30 years or more, in nearly everything I have written, I have sought to drive home a few key themes:

• The Catholic Church is in the midst of a serious crisis;
• That crisis is not merely a matter of sexual abuse, or declining Mass attendance, or doctrinal dissent, or financial collapse, or corrupt leadership, or marital breakdown. These are all symptoms of a deeper problem: a crisis of faith.
• A crisis of faith cannot be resolved by professional programs or administrative procedures. It will require a spiritual renewal at the level of dioceses, parishes, even households.

So why am I writing today to recommend an administrative change at the Vatican?

Because any administrative system rewards certain attitudes, certain instincts, certain modes of understanding situations, certain likely responses. And the current administrative structure of the Roman Curia favors a way of thought that gives priority to worldly rather than spiritual concerns.

Specifically, I am referring to the role of the Secretariat of State as a sort of super-dicastery, which supervises and coordinates—and therefore to a large extent determines—the work of all other offices in the Roman Curia. The Secretariat of State is a good, useful, necessary institution. The Holy See, and the universal Church, is composed of mortal men and women, who have ordinary material needs. Stato serves those needs—in most cases, quite ably. But if the leadership of the universal Church thinks first of material needs, trouble is on the way. The “great and first commandment” is not to provide for ourselves, nor even to provide for our neighbors—though those are good things to do—but to “love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

The split role of the Secretariat

American Catholics might naturally think of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State as a counterpart to our own State Department. That comparison is misleading, because Stato serves two very different functions.

The Secretariat is divided into three sections. Section Two is, like our State Department, devoted to foreign policy: to relations with the world’s governments. Closely related is Section Three, newly established by Pope Francis in 2017, which serves the pastoral needs of those preparing for, or engaged in, Vatican diplomacy. But Section One, the Section for General Affairs, plays a different role, only tangentially related to international affairs.

Section One, headed by an assistant Secretary of State commonly known as the Sostituto (“Substitute”), has the more general charge of “expediting matters involving the day-to-day service of the Roman Pontiff.” In practice Section One handles virtually all of the paperwork that flows through the offices of the Roman Curia. Although the sostituto hold the title of archbishop (as opposed to the heads of other dicasteries, who are usually cardinals), he exercises enormous influence, with unfettered direct access to the Pope.

Interestingly enough, Pope Paul VI—who himself had been sostituto for 17 years, and consequently had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Vatican bureaucracy—set Section One apart from the Secretariat of State in 1967, when he reformed the offices of the Curia, creating the Council for Public Affairs. But in 1988, Pope John Paul II reversed that move, putting that council back under the aegis of the Secretariat. The Stato web site now explains: “This guaranteed both unity of purpose and the specificity required in the service which the Secretariat of State is called to offer the Pope.” The organizational chart now confirms the hierarchical order: Section One serves the Secretariat; the Secretariat serves the Pope.

In the days before the conclave of 2013, which elected Pope Francis, many cardinals spoke of the need to reform the Roman Curia, and some proposed the creation of a new role: a moderator of the curia, who would be in effect the Pope’s chief of staff, responsible not far any particular office, but for coordinating the work of all the dicasteries. But in 2022, when Pope Francis finally issued the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, reorganizing the curial offices, the Secretariat of State remained by itself at the top of the chart, with Section One and the sostituto as one part of that super-dicastery. If anything the clout of Stato has grown in the past decade.

Resistance to reform

Back in 2013 the cardinals had ample reason to call for administrative reforms.

• The sex-abuse scandal, which had exploded in the US a decade earlier, had now proven to be a worldwide phenomenon, and accusing fingers were pointing toward Rome—and more specifically, the Secretariat of State. Cardinal Bernard Law, who had been forced into retirement because of the scandal, was given a prestigious ceremonial post, as archpriest of a Roman basilica, reportedly through the intercession of Stato. Then-Cardinal McCarrick, who would become the poster-boy for institutional corruption, was a favorite international emissary for the Secretariat, despite a papal directive that he should retire to private life.
• The “Vatileaks” scandal had exposed bitter infighting among the offices of the Roman Curia, with Vatican officials spying on each other and leaking sensitive documents to the press in order to further their private plans.
• International bankers had cut off ties with Vatican institutions, complaining of mismanagement in Vatican financial institutions and money-laundering at the Vatican bank.

The overall picture was chaotic. Pope Benedict XVI had commissioned a team of senior cardinals to investigate charges of corruption in Vatican offices. (Their report, which Pope Benedict left to his succesors, remains secret to this day.)

More than a decade later, the same problems remain. The abuse scandal still festers; a half-hearted investigation into McCarrick’s influence answered no important questions, while the ongoing Rupnik scandal displays the institutional resistance to accountability. The drive to regularize Vatican finances has made some headway, but also produced the “trial of the century,” a farcical show that again has raised more questions than it has answered, and now the Vatican’s judicial system, too, has come under international scrutiny. Contributions to the Vatican have slumped, understandably, as donors question how they contributions will be used.

Human weakness taints every institution on earth. When we say that an institution is corrupt, we do not mean that some people in that institution do bad things; that is true of every institution. We mean that the institution has ceased to correct the bad behavior—that it cannot or will not reform itself. I submit that the overweening power of the Secretariat of State thwarts efforts for Vatican reform.

Stato unquestionably opposed the financial reforms undertaken by Cardinal Pell, and the efforts by Cardinal O’Malley’s special commission to hold bishops accountable for their handling of abuse complaints. But beyond those very visible scandals, the Secretariat of State has shown an institutional resistance to reform.

Every bureaucratic institution works to protect its own interests, and the offices of the Roman Curia are no exception. Within the Secretariat of State, where the “Section for General Affairs” coexists with the “Section of Relations with States,” any initiative for reform inside the Vatican will soon run afoul of the diplomatic imperative to show a positive face to the outside world.

Diplomats do good and necessary work: fostering friendly relations, promoting the particular interests of their countries (or in this case, of the universal Church), negotiating agreements, settling disputes. And the Vatican diplomatic corps has an enviable reputation for this sort of work. But to work effectively, diplomats must form develop skills and form habits: the willingness to lease others, the readiness to compromise, the instinct for making deals. Those characteristics are not always compatible with the bold and unapologetic preaching of the Gospel.

To Be Continued