The Vatican vs. "Americanism"
John Allen has written an exceedingly valuable book. It is titled All the Pope’s Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks (Doubleday, 392 pp., $24.95). Never mind that he speaks dismissively of those who write “instabooks” on matters Catholic, while admitting that he pulled this one together in less than a month. John Allen has a lot that is worth pulling together. Never mind that book-size length is achieved by a lot of padding from his earlier reporting from Rome, such as more than a hundred and fifty pages of chronological accounts of the sex abuse crisis and the Vatican’s response to the war in Iraq. It is very useful material to have all in one place. The book also provides a thoughtful summary of what Allen has learned about the Holy See over his years of trying to be assiduously fair while reporting for the decidedly leftist National Catholic Reporter. Had the title not been taken by a recent and less interesting volume, Allen might well have called his book Inside the Vatican.
There are analytically descriptive sections on the structure, psychology, and sociology of the Vatican, along with a treatment of “myths” about the Vatican. The Holy See is of course the see of Peter, and the Vatican is the city-state where Peter presides surrounded by his administrative apparatus, the Curia. Allen offers a brief account of the development of papal governance, as well as an intelligent consideration of the arguments, pro and con, for the “centralization” of Petrine authority. He describes the division of labor, and sometime conflicts, between the curial dicasteries—congregations, pontifical councils, and assorted subordinate offices—and is generally sympathetic toward the people who work in them. The skeptical reader may wonder how much Allen is pulling his punches, since these are the people he needs as sources in order to do his work, but I am inclined to think his expressed respect is genuine. In part because, in my much more limited experience of the Vatican, his evaluations tend to ring true.
The chief “myths” include the notion that the Vatican has a monolithic view on everything. Without slipping into gossip, Allen does a fine job of indicating the ways in which personalities, dispositions, alliances, and turf wars keep many viewpoints in play, all within the bounds of a shared understanding that every person and every office is in the service of the pope. Similarly, the myth of Vatican secrecy is, he suggests, much exaggerated, as his own reporting demonstrates. As with any organization, some things are confidential, and there is of course the sacramental seal, but over lunches and dinners, at diplomatic receptions and in formal interviews, the Curia sometimes seems like a perpetual talk shop. Curial officers are often depicted as grasping careerists, and no doubt some are, but Allen suggests that the norm is that of people making considerable sacrifices, financial and otherwise, to serve the Church. As for the myth of the Vatican’s wealth, he notes that it operates with a regular deficit and, while it owns artistic and other properties that are of inestimable value, none of them can be sold or used as security. In fact, being steward of these properties is a huge financial liability.
The Curial Mind
Under “the psychology of the Vatican,” he proposes words indicative of the operative values: Authority, bella figura, Cosmopolitanism, Loyalty, Objectivity, Populism, Realism, Rule of Law, Time, and Tradition. Most of those may seem self-evident. Objectivity, Time, and Tradition are summed up in the maxim that Rome thinks in terms of centuries. By bella figura is meant that direct confrontations are, whenever possible, avoided; losers are given a chance to save face, and the hope is that everybody comes away from a difficult decision “looking good.” Surprising to many readers will be Allen’s treatment of “populism.” Rome is the final court of appeal for people in the Church who have been treated shabbily, and is generally on the side of the underdogs, notably when they, whether clerical or lay, have suffered at the hands of arbitrary or tyrannical prelates. Moreover, the Curia is populist in the sense that Rome is serious about the faithful having a right to the faith taught and practiced faithfully. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is often called the Church’s doctrinal “enforcer” and depicted as the oppressor of theologians, but Allen helps the reader to understand that he may more accurately be seen as the protector of the Catholic people from the malfeasance of academic elites.
With respect to the “sociology” of the Vatican, Allen says that curial officials, from top to bottom, are shaped by what might be called the constructions of reality within several everyday circles of experience: the Vatican itself, the city of Rome (ecclesiastical and secular), Italy (ecclesiastical and secular), and Europe. Whether an official is from the U.S., Ukraine, Brazil, or Nigeria, he becomes, in due course, curial, Roman, Italian, and European. That formation of thought, priorities, disposition, and personality is, one gathers, pretty much inevitable; and Allen is appropriately skeptical about the success of “reforms,” such as those proposed by retired Archbishop John Quinn, for making the governance of the Church more “representative,” perhaps by having a more or less permanent synod of bishops act as a kind of parliamentary check on executive authority. The Vatican-Roman-Italian-European formation has everything to do with Rome’s response to the American sexual abuse crisis and the Iraq war, to which Allen devotes half of his book.
His chronology of the sex abuse crisis, unfortunately, stops well short of the release of the report of the National Review Board in February 2004. He does provide page upon page of what was actually said by curial officials, sundry cardinals, and other leaders. Only snippets of these texts appeared in news stories, and it is good to have them in context. The fuller documentation is frequently embarrassing, as when it is alleged that sex abuse is a distinctly American problem, or that the firestorm of publicity was motivated simply by anti-Catholicism or was orchestrated by a conspiracy of Masons working together with Jews who control the media and are repaying the Church for its pro-Palestinian sympathies. In Rome, and in Europe more generally, the frequent allusion to the Masons often puzzles Americans, for whom the Masonic Lodge is as sinister as the Rotary Club, although a good deal less influential.
It is not only the French but Europeans more generally who are inclined to think that an inveterately puritanical American culture has a hard time being sensible about sex. That more “sophisticated” European stance was reflected in European bemusement at the brouhaha attending President Clinton’s dalliances, and was not absent from the reaction to the media outrage in the sex abuse crisis. When will these Americans grow up? Things happen.
Understanding Frailty
Roman officials were much and rightly concerned about the norms adopted by the U.S. bishops in their panicked meeting of Dallas 2002, including “zero tolerance” for any cleric who was at any time in his entire life accused of sex abuse—with “sex abuse” being defined so loosely as to make possible the conviction of almost any normal adult. The abovementioned populist dimension of curial culture came into play as Rome modified those norms to ensure that the accused got at least a measure of due process. Allen understands that it is not only the so-called Puritan factor that makes America different. Ours is a more legalistic culture. Some attribute that, too, to Puritanism or, as Francis Cardinal George of Chicago prefers, Calvinism. For most Europeans, and notably for Italians, the law is an ideal, it being understood that all mortals fall short of the ideal. For Americans, the law is there to be enforced. In addition, other countries do not have our system of tort law by which huge financial damages can be exacted from institutions. Finally, in many countries the age of sexual consent is lower—often sixteen or fourteen, and in a few places as low as twelve. In such societies, it is thought that young people bear a greater measure of responsibility for what they do, also sexually. This obviously reflects very different cultural attitudes toward children and childhood.
Early on in the crisis, curial officials learned to express the mandatory outrage at the damage done to victims of sexual abuse but, although Allen does not come out and say so, sometimes it seemed their hearts were not in it. The general attitude seemed to be this: Yes, of course the Pope was right when he said that there is no place in the Church’s ministry for anyone who might harm children. But then, in the Church as elsewhere, we are all sinners, and sometimes even priests do evil things. Surely they should be punished, and strictly so. The Church has centuries of canon law—canon law which the American bishops did not use—specifically designed to deal with such offenses. And surely those who are hurt should be helped as much as possible. But please, perspective is required, and patience, and a sympathetic appreciation of human frailty. Let there be no rush to judgment and, above all, let us not play into the hands of those who wish the Church nothing but ill. Such was and is the widespread, if not dominant, view within the Curia.
Then we come to the Vatican and the Iraq war. Allen offers his considered judgment: “The only possible reading of the record is that John Paul II was strongly opposed to the Iraq war.” I suggest that this is not the only possible reading, but it is the most plausible reading. John Paul never explicitly condemned the war as immoral, but many curial officials did, and John Paul did not publicly distance himself from their remarks. John Paul did say that all war, including this war, represents a failure for humanity, and supporters of the war could readily agree with that, acknowledging that only when other means of resolving conflict have failed is war necessary. Allen supplies page upon page of curial criticisms of U.S. policy from August 2002 through June 2003, some of them quite strident. Curiously, he does not include Renato Cardinal Martino’s assertion that there can be no just war today, an assertion that, so far as I know, has not been retracted. Most of the criticisms focused on predictions of massive civilian casualties (which did not happen); the incompatibility of preemptive and unilateral military action with traditional just war doctrine; the expectation that the action would precipitate religious warfare between Islam and Christianity; and the moral illegitimacy of such actions undertaken without United Nations approval. At least a couple of statements came close to suggesting that Catholics could not in good conscience support or participate in the intervention by the American-led coalition. Surprisingly—some thought scandalously—the Vatican was silent about Saddam Hussein’s mass killings and violation of human rights, perhaps because that might lend some legitimacy to the coalition action. The Vatican had previously approved of humanitarian intervention in, for instance, the case of Kosovo.
Papal Leadership
Relative to the “most plausible reading” of John Paul’s position, it is not known how many of these curial statements were brought to the Pope’s attention or had his approval. This touches on the very delicate question of the Holy Father’s physical debility and reduced energies. It is known that he did not publicly distance himself from the criticisms nor did he rein in the critics. Some curial officials exulted in the supposed demonstration of papal moral leadership when millions of antiwar demonstrators in Europe and elsewhere cheered John Paul as their champion. When assorted leftists, including pro-abortionists and declared enemies of the Church, take to the streets to cheer the pope, that is an instance not of papal leadership but of papal co-optation. But again, John Paul did not distance himself from, but appeared to welcome, these implausible supporters of papal moral leadership.
A great and necessary concern of the Vatican is Islamic-Christian conflict, and especially the treatment of Catholics and other Christians in predominantly Muslim countries. Vatican officials noted with satisfaction that there was no outbreak of anti-Christian hostility following regime change in Iraq, and they attributed that to the fact that the Pope, the preeminent representative of the Christian world, was perceived as being opposed to the coalition action. There is no doubt much truth to that. Beyond Islamic-Christian relations, which will be a preeminent concern for decades, very basic questions have been raised about the way the Vatican views the U.S. In a world of unipolar hegemony—or, if one prefers, empire—the Holy See may increasingly see itself as a necessary balance, if not antithesis, to the dangers of overweening American power—political, military, economic, and, above all, cultural. This is different from, say, Chirac’s France nominating itself as the center of a new “multipolar” world. The Vatican city-state with its 108 acres and 1,500 residents has no illusions about being a big, little, or even very tiny power among the powers of the world. Yet it must be admitted that “how the Vatican really thinks” is not always that different from how France and other promoters of an anti-American line think. Although curial pronouncements on the Iraq war were usually prefaced by the claim that cardinals and archbishops were speaking as moral leaders and not as politicians, most of what they had to say was little more than an echo of the dominant views in the press and political chambers of what is now called “old Europe.” At the same time, John Allen is right in saying that the controversy over the Iraq war brought to the fore important issues that will have a long shelf life. Allen thinks one of those issues is the development of just war doctrine. Perhaps so, but the interventions of curial officials on just war in the run-up to the Iraq intervention were generally ad hoc, political, and matters of prudential judgment; they did not have the mark of theological and moral deliberation that one associates with a development of doctrine. At most, there is a development similar to that of John Paul’s well-known opposition to capital punishment. In both cases, the Church’s doctrine is deeply entrenched in the tradition, and the moral and theological questions entailed have not been addressed in a way that rises to the level of magisterial teaching. A preferred position of the Vatican is not the same thing as a doctrine of the Church. This applies as well to Vatican attitudes toward the United Nations, the Kyoto environmental treaty, the International Criminal Court, and international law more generally. The differences between the U.S. and most of Europe on these issues is well known, and the Curia reflects the European position. That may be regrettable, but it is not surprising. The disagreements are political and not doctrinal. In fact, if one wished to press the matter of social doctrine, it would be highly interesting to explore how the curial position on, for instance, the International Criminal Court can be squared with the teaching of the 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus on the accountability of governments to their societies.
As for America . . .
Allen raises a more provocative question with respect to the general disposition of Rome to the United States. He writes:
Both the Iraq war and the sex abuse crisis suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture. These reservations are well documented, from Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the supposed heresy of “Americanism,” to Pius XII’s opposition to Italy’s entrance into NATO based on fears that the alliance was a Trojan horse for Protestant domination of Catholic Europe. Key Vatican officials, especially Europeans from traditional Catholic cultures, have long worried about aspects of American society—its exaggerated individualism, its hyperconsumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.
These are interesting questions indeed, and John Allen believes they are receiving very definite answers:
At the deepest level of analysis, there is serious doubt in many quarters of the Vatican that American culture is an apt carrier for a Christian vision of the human person and therefore of the just society. . . . Though no pope and no Vatican diplomat will ever come out and say so, the bottom line is that despite great respect for the American people and their democratic traditions, the Holy See simply does not think the United States is fit to run the world. . . . Thus the Holy See’s diplomatic energy in coming years will have as a central aim the construction of a multilateral, multipolar world, which will necessarily imply a limitation on the power and influence of the United States.
On all these scores, Allen may well be right. The result would be that on the world stage the Vatican will be increasingly perceived by Americans and others as anti-American, and it will be precisely that. As documented in George Weigel’s authoritative biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, this has been the most pro-American pontificate in history. This Pope has made numerous and unprecedented statements on the genius of the American political and social order, and that appreciation is clearly reflected in the aforementioned Centesimus Annus on the just and free society. But Allen and others counter that this positive disposition toward America was but a phase, a momentary aberration created chiefly by the cooperation of Rome and the U.S. in bringing an end to “the evil empire.” After the fall of Soviet communism, in this view, the Vatican has reverted to what might be called its default position, that of Leo XIII’s robust suspicion of America and “Americanism.”
Certainly, there are those who agree with and welcome Allen’s prognosis. He cites David Schindler, editor of the English-language edition of Communio, who has written extensively on why—anthropologically, sociologically, and in its tacit theology—the American order is incompatible with Catholic Christianity. Moreover, there are American bishops with influence in Rome and Americans highly placed in the Curia who have been quite thoroughly Europeanized in their critique of their own country. Europeanized, that is, in the image of “old Europe.” In Poland and other countries still newly liberated from Soviet communism, the view of America is quite different. Of course these countries may over time be subsumed into the worldview of the European Union, to which the Vatican may provide a kind of moral chaplaincy, even if the EU will not so much as acknowledge Christianity as part of its cultural heritage.
Murray the Minority
One readily admits that the United States is not a fit bearer of Christian culture in the world. No country or concert of countries is that. But then one must always ask: Compared to what? The European Union? Russia? Latin America? Africa? Or to stretch the point to absurdity, China? Strategic and tactical aspects of the war on terror aside, the argument can be made that American influence is generally on the side of the Church on the big questions: human freedom, democracy, the dignity of the human being at all points on life’s continuum, the indispensable centrality of family and marriage, the economic development of poor nations, and the practice of subsidiarity in civil society. A change in U.S. administrations would likely have a negative impact on all these, but they would nonetheless remain vibrant components of the continuing American experiment.
In contrast to Leo XIII’s judgment in 1899, John Courtney Murray published in 1960 We Hold These Truths. He made, and those who claim his legacy make, the argument that not only is Catholic faith and life compatible with the American experiment but Catholicism may be essential to preserving the experiment, even as it counters those elements of “Americanism” that are corrosive of the Church’s vision. Murray’s was a minority position then and, if Allen and others are right, it may become more of a minority position in the future. John Paul warmly embraced crucial aspects of the Murray argument, but on the not-so-distant horizon is another pope who will likely be shaped by, in Allen’s phrase, “how the Vatican really thinks.” More than in 1899 and more than in 1960, the world is being reconfigured by divergent attitudes toward America and its global hegemony, which, for better and worse, is likely to continue for a long time. It will be a very great pity if the Vatican becomes the spiritual cheerleader for those Europeans who view America with a measure of respect and even admiration mixed with a much larger measure of envy, resentment, and pitiable pretensions to moral and intellectual superiority.
In the background of that European attitude, and not very far in the background, hovers the fear of huge and restive Muslim populations in countries such as France and Germany. In a global conflict with an enemy motivated by Islamic fanaticism, these Europeans, and perhaps some in the Vatican as well, do not want to be perceived as being on the Christian side. To be sure, the Vatican has a singular responsibility to cultivate dialogue with Islam, but that dialogue will be neither credible nor fruitful if the Vatican is not clearly on the Christian side. That does not mean that in every instance the Vatican should be on the American side. A great deal of delicate diplomacy and careful thought is required. But this much is certain: in the new configuration of world power and influence, the United States is, on balance and considering the alternatives, on the Christian side.
We should all understand why President Bush refuses to speak about a clash of civilizations or to describe our circumstance as one of religio-cultural warfare. But we should all know that that is what, in fact, it is. Or, as the report of the 9/11 Commission prefers, it is an ideological conflict inescapably tied to religion. It would be an exquisite irony of history if, when war is declared on the Christian West by those inspired by a possibly perverse but undeniably Islamic ideology, the Vatican refused to take sides; thus, willy-nilly, taking the other side. The Curia’s cosmopolitanism, sophistication, devotion to dialogue, and long-term perspective shaped by centuries of diplomacy can all be assets. They can also induce a blindness to the fact that an enemy has declared war and sides must be taken. The Europeans who run the Vatican are right in believing that the Vatican must not be a chaplain to American hegemony; a critical distance is required. When that distance becomes disdain, however, the credibility of the Church’s political guidance and the defense of our common civilization are gravely weakened.
As I say, John Allen may well be right in his description of a Vatican reverting to Leo XIII’s animus toward “Americanism.” I am not persuaded that he is right, but it is one of the important arguments we are invited to engage by his valuable book, All the Pope’s Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks.
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