When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City

National Catholic Reporter, August 14, 1998 by Michael Farrell

By Robert J. Hutchinson Doubleday, 289 pages, $11.95 paper

When one reads, early on page 2 of When in Rome, that "Everywhere you go in the Vatican, you see nudity," one suspects there's less here than meets the eye. But don't close the book yet. This cranky personal account of one journalist's attempt to break down Vatican doors offers tantalizing evidence that, like the emperor's problem clothes, many Holy See suits may be threadbare.

The author is a shameless fellow who reminds us his previous book was The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Gambling. But he's a practicing Roman Catholic -- he actually goes to Mass on Sundays and reads all the papal encyclicals, he says, not to follow their teachings but because, candid to a fault, "I don't feel like living that virtuous a life."

Girt with a Jesuit education -- "A steady diet of Karl Rahner and Gabriel Marcel, charismatic renewal and liberation theology, the St. Louis Jesuits and the United Farm Workers" -- Hutchinson fell to pondering the mystery of Christianity: how some Jewish peasants, "following a grubby carpenter," could transform human history and civilization. He decided Rome was a big part of the answer. Rome was the center of the world, and the first Christians went for it -- into the eye of the storm, or, more precisely, the lion's den. "Willing to be tasty hors d'oeuvres for the emperor's household pets," they took on the empire. They couldn't lose, having nothing to lose.

Once they conquered Rome, Roman popes became the center of gravity for dispersed and disparate Christians everywhere. Hutchinson thus ascribes the survival of the Catholic church to the papal "ministry of unity."

The author, his wife and three kids moved -- think of it -- from Las Vegas to Rome, where, "an innocent lay lamb among the curial wolves," he planned to ask a lot of dumb questions, and he did,

Any tourist or pilgrim who has visited Rome will identify with much of Hutchinson's account -- there is a large element of travelogue here. But any digression from the tourist track becomes a challenge: "Once you move beyond Bernini's columns into the inner offices of the curia, the smiling face turns all too often into a snarl."

This is a devastating account of Vatican public relations. "The first person to snarl at me was an old lady named Marjorie,' who seemingly snarled a lot and pays for it in this book. Although doyenne of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, she was -- and perhaps still is -- a famous obstructionist. No one, according to Hutchinson, wielded the Vatican's famous omerta more stridently than Marjorie. Grown men, including bishops, would go catatonic if asked a question by a journalist who had not been cleared by Marjorie.

It wasn't just Majorie: It was an institutional policy to tell nothing except to a select 5 percent of reporters. The result, as Hutchinson points out, "is to alienate and make implacable enemies out of the 95 percent who don't pass the Holy See's litmus tests." A Hutchinson friend nicknamed Friar Tuck explained: "The Vatican is like an aging woman who is long past her prime and knows it. She's desperately attempting to maintain her dignity and what little allure she has left.... When some pushy journalist starts asking all these seemingly trivial but sometimes very personal questions, the Vatican can be very testy."

One of Hutchinson's biggest surprises was the Vatican's smallness. Not the buildings but the organization. Of the approximately 1,300 who work there, 150 or less make any significant decisions, he learned. One bishop, who works in the Apostolic Palace, said that about 20 people run the Catholic church. The rest do clerical work and such.

Add to this the Hutchinson conclusion that, "from the point of view of contemporary business standards, at least, the Vatican still operates quite literally in the Dark Ages." So how does it survive?

There's a paradox here. The. Vatican is at once the most centralized -- in doctrinal control -- and decentralized - in operations -- organization on earth. The author spells out the amazing numbers: about a billion Catholics; 4,200 bishops; 164 nations with diplomatic relations; all the nuns, prints, altar boys until altar girls were allowed -- the stupendous thing is that this little coterie in the Vatican orchestrated even the altar girl affair down to the last detail.

Such a small coterie with so much control over people's most intimate lives could get the job done only by being very sure of itself. Don't worry, writes Hutchinson: The curia is. The author seems to have no problem with the pope. But curial arrogance, he implies, would never have worked for the Twelve Apostles. Journalists, not surprisingly, are favorite victims of this hauteur. The author takes consolation from the fact that the curia treats everyone equally. Bishops coming in from the boonies (that is, anywhere beyond the Tiber) better watch out: "More than one U.S. bishop, accustomed to being treated like a celebrity or CEO back home -- in other words, as an all-powerful autocrat in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars -- has cooled his heels for days in Rome, waiting for some snotty curial monsignor to make room in his busy schedule to see him."