The Workings of the Church - Inside the Vatican and Curia

Dear CIOT Participants,

From my perspective, this month’s theme for CIOT has been challenging. There are many book-length studies that detail the workings of the Church in Rome, its structure, as well as various episodes of intrique in recent years. However, shorter, internet-available sources are harder to come by. I hope you will find the following links useful for our discussion. As always, I extend my thanks to Sister Pat, who always manages to put her finger on something extremely helpful.

Looking forward to seeing you all on March 6!

Yours in Christ,
John Frymire

Readings

A useful start (from Catholic Update 1082; revised 1989) is a short pamphlet, The Roman Curia: How the Church is Run. This is accessible as an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file. If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat Reader Software (which you may download for free), you may pick up a hard copy of the pamphlet at the church office.

There is a fairly recent (1996) book-length study by Thomas J. Reese, SJ, Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. Fortunately, Father Reese participated in a forum on this topic at Georgetown University, and the presentations have been transcribed and posted on the web. Commonweal also published an interview with Father Reese (6 Dec. 1996) about the book and the workings of the Vatican.

More recently, John Allen has published All the Pope’s Men, a book less concerned with the structures and functioning of the Vatican than with how the Vatican thinks, i.e. it’s institutional mentality [note: a few copies of this book are available in the Daniel Boone Regional Library]. There have been a number of reviews. A description and excerpt may be found at: http://www.enotalone.com/article/5152.html. Allen was interviewed by NPR regarding this book and others in 2004. Useful reviews include:

• Austin Ivereigh (The Tablet, 26 Feb. 2006)
• Andrew Greely (National Catholic Reporter, 15 Oct. 2004)
• John Hughes (America Magazine, Oct. 2004)

What about Church finances? Although a fairly recent article by Gabriel Kahn (Wall Street Journal, 7 April 2005) begins with a discussion of retail shopping in Vatican City, it goes on to discuss some of the general conditions of Vatican finances.

Hope some of the above proves useful and interesting!