All the Pope's Men Read Free

flotsam and jetsam that make up the daily business of the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church. A few times a year, I go up to the papal apartments to watch the Pope receive some head of state or other dignitary, and sometimes I get a chance to exchange a quick word with the Pope afterward. (The Pope, unlike presidents and prime ministers, does not give interviews.) Almost every day takes me into the Vatican on some bit of business. I’ve taken a seemingly endless string of curial officials to lunch and dinner, the two occasions of the Roman day when most real business seems to get done. I’ve been to hundreds of roundtable discussions, conferences, symposia, book presentations, and press conferences held by every imaginable group, movement, and force in the Catholic Church. I also move when the Pope moves, so I followed John Paul II all over the globe—to Greece and Syria, Kazakhstan and Armenia, Bulgaria, Canada and Guatemala and Mexico, Poland, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Over the years, I’ve probably interviewed at least two hundred people who work in the Roman Curia in one way, shape, or form and spent countless more hours in informal conversation about their lives and work.
    My task is to make all this activity intelligible for an English-speaking audience, helping readers understand why the Vatican does what it does. Like Margaret Mead in
Coming of Age in Samoa
, I see myself as engaged in a sort of cultural anthropology, trying to explain the way inhabitants of a remote island—in this case, a 108-acre walled compound in the middle of Rome—think, act, and live. I do this every week in the pages of the
National Catholic Reporter
and in my weekly Internet column on the NCR website called “The Word from Rome," as well as from time to time on CNN and National Public Radio. I also lecture in America and Canada, taking questions of the “everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask" variety about the Vatican, the Pope, and the Catholic Church. I’ve lived in Rome for four years, learning to negotiate the “cultural gap" that so often separates the people I write about from those I write for.
    One final point about my aims and assumptions. I said above I want to foster informed and respectful conversation. Part of respect is taking others at their word about the logic for their decisions, and treating seriously the arguments they provide for particular actions and choices. Thus when I cover the Vatican, I do not start with the assumption that Church officials are guilty until proven innocent and that the Vatican’s motives for any given decision can be assumed to revolve around power and self-interest unless shown otherwise. To tell the truth, my experience is that most of the time Vatican officials are trying to make the best calls they can for the common good of the Church, based on the information available to them and the political and theological convictions they hold. One can debate the wisdom of those judgment calls, and I hope this book will provide tools to do that, but the debate will suffer from fatal confusion unless the challengers appreciate the values Vatican officials are seeking to defend and the logic that led them to particular decisions.
    What I have just written may come as a jolt to those of a certain mentality accustomed to thinking of Vatican officials as the heavies, casting the outsiders, prophets, and reformers as the heroes. I understand that view. In my career I’ve had the good fortune of knowing some of these prophets, and they can indeed be impressive people, pressing the Church to realize its best self. On the Catholic left, such figures might include Sr. Joan Chittister or Fr. Hans Küng; on the right, one thinks of Fr. Richard Neuhaus or Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska. Although all are quite different from one another, they share the courage to speak out about what they believe is wrong with the Church, to risk giving offense for the sake