“The usual nest of vipers"
“The usual nest of vipers, but today the real problem is rampant mediocrity”
Is someone in the Vatican deceiving us instead?
I ask Messori what a practicing Catholic may feel when hearing of how cardinals fight each other tooth and nail, when hearing of files slipped to journalists, of letters stolen from the Pope, of bank intrigues, murderers buried with state honours. “The Roman Curia,” he answers, “has always been a viper’s nest. However, in the past at least, it was the most efficient state organisation in the world. It ran an empire the sun never set on and it had an unparalleled diplomatic corps. What is left of that today?”
Strolling along the cloisters and then among the olive trees, this is how Messori describes the decadence: “The priests in the Roman Curia used to enlist the best people from all the dioceses in the world.
Bishops had plenty of clergy around them and had no problem letting them go. Today seminaries have either closed or they’re half empty. So if a bishop has a good priest to hand, he keeps hold of him. And the Pope is like Charles V, who had to run a vast empire and cried out in a depopulated Spain: ‘Give me men’.” But in Africa, I try to object... “The boom in vocations? I’m not kidding myself.
In Africa men enter the seminary for the same reasons they did here when we were dying of hunger. It’s a way of making a living.
And apart from that, celibacy is incomprehensible for African culture so the Church – let’s put it this way – turns a blind eye. Many priests have wives and children. What are you going to do, send them to Rome? To be bishops?”
He adds: “The decline in quality is obvious. There aren’t even any Latin speakers that are up to the job any more.
When Luciani was elected Pope, they were even forced to stop the press at L'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See's newspaper because there was a mistake in the Latin on the front page headline. Even John Paul II’s last encyclicals had Latin mistakes, imagine that.”
In short, the man who wrote two books with the last two popes feels that “the way the Church is limping along is down to the mediocrity of its personnel.”
However, is it simply a question of ineptitude?
We seem to be faced with resentment, rivalry, greed, maliciousness and infidelity.
“Malicious pettiness is often a characteristic of mediocre personalities. Talented people don’t need to stab others in the back.”
Link