How the church’s vast talent pool represents an ironic obstacle to reform

ROME – Fans of the Roma soccer team, one of the two professional squads in the Eternal City, are in a grumpy mood these days. In part that’s because of the team’s uneven performance, but even more so because of perceived mismanagement by its American owners, Texas billionaire Dan Friedkin and his son Ryan.

Things came to a head when the team’s popular coach, a beloved former player, was unceremoniously fired just four games into the new season, leading to the most devoted fans boycotting the first half-hour of the next home game and then marching into the stadium chanting the coach’s name.

It’s not that the Friedkins aren’t willing to spend – since they took over, they’ve pumped an estimated $1 billion into the franchise. It’s rather that those expenses sometimes seem more about building a new stadium and creating buzz rather than actually winning games.

Recently a lifelong Roma fan who lives across the street asked me, as an American, if I could explain. My answer was simple: To the Friedkins, Roma is like the Chicago Cubs. It’s a team with a passionately devoted fan base, who will fill seats, pay for bloated TV and streaming deals and buy swag, no matter whether they win or lose.

That, in a nutshell, explains why both teams are listed among the more valuable franchises in sports, despite the fact that the Cubs have won exactly one World Series in 116 years and Roma hasn’t won the Italian scudetto, or championship, since 2001. If people keep showing up no matter how disappointing the product, what’s the incentive to excel?

As we were speaking, it hit me: “My God, I could be talking about the Vatican.”

In fact, one of the premier ironies of contemporary Catholic life is that the seemingly endless pool of passionate and devoted Catholics out there, forever ready to serve if the pope asks, actually constitutes a principal obstacle to reform.

Here’s a dynamic I’ve watched play out over and over again in the Vatican during the 25 years I’ve been covering the place.

The Vatican has a tough job it needs someone to do – it might be finances, clerical sexual abuse, communications, human resources, whatever. They’ll recruit a talented person to do it, and then steadfastly refuse to give that person the resources, support and authority they need to accomplish the task.

(One minor example, among far too many: Some years ago, the Vatican hired a veteran lay professional to handle a particularly sensitive task, which had been proclaimed an urgent priority by the pope. It took the system a full six months just to issue a tessera, or card, to allow this person to enter the Vatican without having someone accompany them to and from the office.)

When this person eventually, and inevitably, crashes and burns, rather than resolving the underlying problem, Vatican mandarins simply go find someone else – because there always is someone else willing to take the job.

To consider the case I know best, I’ve known every Vatican spokesperson since Spanish layman Joaquin Navarro Walls, who served during the St. John Paul II years, before they took up the post. To a person, they’ve been incredibly smart, gifted professionals, and also people of deep integrity and commitment.

They’ve also gone into the job eyes wide open, knowing it’s basically an impossible task.

As things stand, a Vatican spokesperson has extremely limited access to the pope, almost never is in the room when important decisions are made, and is forced to wade through layers of bureaucracy to get an answer to even the least sensitive matters. In no other institution would anyone with even a modicum of background in communications, not to mention self-respect, ever agree to become the public face of an operation under those conditions.

When I inquired, as I inevitably did, why these people would agree to take the job anyway, all gave me some version of the same answer – that when the pope asked them to serve, they felt obligated to say yes.

With all due respect to people I consider friends, that’s just not so. In fact, I would argue they would have served the pope better by refusing until the system was changed in a way that would allow them to actually do the job for which they were being hired.

When a pope declares the Immaculate Conception of Mary a dogma of the faith, okay, then Catholics are obliged to accept it, because he’s the supreme teacher of the faith. If a pope asks you to work in the Secretariat of the Economy, on the other hand, it’s different. There’s no requirement of “religious submission of intellect and will,” to use the canonical phrase, to take a job you know full well can’t be done, at least as presently constituted.

Frankly, my suspicion is that lasting reform of the Vatican will never occur until Catholics around the world, especially lay professionals, refuse to work there until the system itself changes. As long as there’s always someone else ready to paper over a dysfunctional situation, there’s no real incentive to remedy the dysfunction.

To put the point differently, the greatest service a Catholic can offer a pope, no matter who it is, isn’t always saying yes. Sometimes, the better answer actually would be “no … at least, not like this.”