How the Vatican works: an interview with Thomas J. Reese

Commonweal, Dec 6, 1996 by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

* MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS: What was the most surprising thing you found in doing Inside the Vatican?

* THOMAS REESE: I was surprised how many Vatican people talked to me. I was afraid I would get there and no one would. I interviewed over a hundred people. I couldn't have done the book without them. For the most part, they let me tape the interviews. Most didn't want to be quoted. The higher you went, the more willing people were to be quoted. The people from below knew their careers could not be advanced by being quoted, and that they could be ruined.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had no problem being quoted, nor did Cardinal Edward Cassidy. I had asked for five or ten minutes, yet Cardinal Ratzinger talked to me for forty-five minutes to an hour. He was very pleasant, very gracious. The interview was in English, which he speaks very well. I try to let the players speak for themselves. Ratzinger should be able to make his case, to explain what he's doing and how his congregation works.

* STEINFELS: Inside the Vatican gives a real sense of how the Vatican works. That will be part of its value to people. I assume most of this is a mystery to most of the world.

* REESE: Oh, it is. It's a mystery to most bishops.

* STEINFELS: The book raises questions about decision making, staffing, access to information, and other "style" questions.

* REESE: One of the fascinating things, and one I found difficult to do, was not only to describe the structure of the organization, but also its internal culture. That's why I talk about the impact of Italian culture and the European educational system on how Vatican officials think about bureaucracy; how they think about the role of teachers and how teachers teach.

It's not only a change of structures that's needed, but a change of mentality. What is the role of the papacy? What are the goals of the church? What should the church look like? To answer those questions, you have to go beyond social science to a theological vision of the church. I tried to save most of that to the last chapter because I wanted to be as purely descriptive as I could be. Once I did that, I knew people would want to know: "Well, what do we do now to make this institution work better?"

* STEINFELS: As a political scientist, you make a good case that the curia is the most efficient bureaucracy in the world.

* REESE: Efficiency is a measure of input vs. output. It's a question of what you think its output is. Or what you think they should be doing.

The Catholic church, for all of its hierarchical structure, has one of the flattest hierarchies in the world: the pope, bishops, priests, and laity. For a billion-member organization to have only four levels is extraordinary. If you take a look at the U.S. government or any kind of corporation, you will find twenty, thirty, forty levels of bureaucracy between the persons at the highest and the lowest levels.

* STEINFELS: You have a nice line in the book: "The curia is a product of history and not of management theory."A blessed condition?

* REESE: Absolutely. What makes this flat structure work are: First, the role of the pope in appointing bishops. He appoints people who basically agree with him. That means you don't have to do a lot of supervision. You don't have to tell them what to do. They're already trained and on board to do what you want them to do.

Second, there is the whole socialization process of seminaries and priestly culture and education that goes into the training of bishops. It's not like you hire someone off the street. Those are the kinds of things that make it work, that the major participants bring to the organizational structure.

* STEINFELS: The curia's preferred style of decision making is consensus. If something doesn't get substantial agreement, it goes back for more work, or for a decent burial. Does this work?

* REESE: It works in many cases. For example, if the Vatican is working on a document and they can't get consensus, it gets delayed, delayed, delayed. It can take a decade for a document to get out of the curia. That's not a bad situation.

On the other hand, decisions sometimes have to be made. A new bishop has to be appointed; you can't wait ten years. Or you have a situation where someone is seeking redress of an injustice. Then, the delay can be harmful.

Sometimes the delay and desire for consensus are helpful, sometimes hurtful. For example, the reform of Vatican finances took much longer than was necessary because of the desire to have consensus. Until they brought in Cardinal Edmund Szoka [former archbishop of Detroit], who knows how to make decisions, little happened. Without consensus but with the support of the pope, he reformed the Vatican's finances. He made enemies by doing what needed to be done.

* STEINFELS: A favorite American proposal for decision making in the Catholic church is more democracy: clear-cut, someone wins, someone loses.

* REESE: The American bishops don't operate on that principle. Their preferred style of operation is consensus and compromise. Most things need a two-thirds vote.