The Vatican (still) isn’t listening

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 21, 2025

Another week, another demonstration—no, a series of demonstrations—that the Vatican still resists reform.

Begin with the announcement that the Synod of Synodality will be stretched out for another three years. As I remarked in my initial reaction to that news, “Even among those Catholics who have heard something about this Synod, the lack of enthusiasm is overwhelming.” This Synod has been advertised as an opportunity to listen to the voices of the faithful, and there certainly has been no outcry from the faithful for more of the consultation that has already lasted so many months. The disinterest of the average Catholic is palpable everywhere, it seems—except in Rome.

Were the world’s bishops clamoring for more discussion of synodality? If so, they were clamoring very quietly. The Synod of Bishops was seen by Vatican II as means of worldwide consultation with the successors to the apostles. But the bishops were not consulted before the Vatican announced that in 2028, the next expected full meeting of the Synod would be replaced by a “Synodal Assembly.” In this entirely new sort of gathering, bishops will only be included among the participants. So this will not be a consultation among the prelates who, by the grace of their episcopal ordination, have the charism for Church leadership.

So the Synod of Bishops, an ecclesial body that has the support of tradition and the warrant of the Gospel, will be elbowed aside to make room for a Synodal Assembly that has neither. This latest manifestation of “synodality” highlights what Jeff Mirus described as “an ecclesial atmosphere in which the Gospel of Christ appears to be in flux, and the mission of the Christ’s Church appears to be in doubt.”

And that was only the beginning of a bad week.

Wednesday brought the feast of St. Joseph, the patron of the universal Church. In announcing the feast, Vatican News used an illustration by Father Marko Rupnik, the ex-Jesuit artist/theologian who faces charges of rape, spiritual and sexual abuse, blasphemy, and desecration. Rupnik has been dismissed from the Jesuit order but somehow remains a priest in good standing; he has been excommunicated and then, quickly and mysteriously, reinstated. His continued prominence is a glaring, blatant contradiction of the repeated Vatican pledges to wipe out sexual abuse and hold the perpetrators accountable.

Vatican officials assure us that Rupnik will face a canonical trial—eventually. But even before a judgment is passed, in light of his notoriety, wouldn’t it seem obvious that the Vatican should not be featuring his work? Yet Vatican News—a part of the Dicastery for Communications, which in theory should present the Church to the world in the best possible light—continues to give Rupnik special prominence. The use of his work can no longer be dismissed as oversight of happenstance; it is deliberate. The cries of outrage, and the continued suffering of Rupnik’s victims, have no impact. The Vatican is not listening.

Later that same day, The Pillar reported a Vatican tribunal’s ruling that Libero Milone, the Vatican’s former auditor general, could not introduce evidence of financial corruption in his lawsuit charging that he had been wrongfully dismissed. Milone says that the tribunal ordered his lawyers to remove more than half of his appeal.

The notion that a court would effectively censor a plaintiff’s claim is remarkable in itself. In this case, though, the ruling is particularly shocking, because Milone’s suit is predicated on the claim that he was forced to resign precisely because he had exposed corrupt practices. So the court is denying him the opportunity to present the substance of his claim.

On what basis did the Vatican court refuse to hear Milone’s key evidence? The tribunal ruled that the allegations of corrupt conduct might harm the “good name” of the officials involved. Now that is a curious concern, because some of those officials—most notably Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who demanded Milone’s resignation—has had his “good name” impugned by the Vatican’s own judicial system, which convicted him on criminal charges of financial misconduct.

During the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” in which Cardinal Becciu and others were found guilty, the defendants’ lawyers repeatedly complained that the judicial system had been tilted to protect top officials, depriving their clients of their rights to due process. (The defendants’ appeals are still pending.) The Milone case, entwined around some of the same suspicious transactions, raises those complaints anew. Libero Milone and Cardinal Becciu were on opposite sides of a bitter inter-office conflict. But in the end they were both dismissed from their posts, and now both claim that the Vatican judiciary suppressed evidence at their trials.

For well over a decade the Vatican has boasted of its new efforts to provide transparency and accountability in financial affairs. The reforms have driven many officials out of office, including some of the erstwhile reformers themselves. As Vatican-watcher John Allen commented back in November 2022, even before the high drama of the landmark Becciu trial: “By now, you could actually field an entire football team with all the personalities brought into the Vatican to promote financial reform but who, in one way or another, ended up as casualties of the process.”

Allen listed: two presidents of the Vatican bank, the Institute for Religious Works, along with one vice-director; the president of the newly created Financial Information Authority, and his top deputy; the Secretary for the Economy (Cardinal Pell) and his deputy; and two members of the Council for the Economy; along with Milone and his former deputy in the auditor’s office. The “reform” process has been a series of almost comical fits and starts, each time generating charges and counter-charges, never reaching the source of the problem. If the Vatican judiciary really hoped to preserve the Vatican’s financial institutions from suspicions of misconduct, that concern comes far too late.

Who profited by forcing Milone’s resignation, and who profits now by scuttling his appeal? Who was responsible for quickly lifting Rupnik’s excommunication, and who profits now by promoting his work? We do not have the answers to these questions, but it is obvious that someone(s) in Vatican leadership has enough clout to drown out the cries for reform.