All the Pope's Men Read Online Free Page A

enough for Roman Catholics merely to have the Pope as a symbolic figurehead. The Church needs structures with teeth in order to make decisions, and to keep its 1-billion-strong worldwide membership in some kind of basic unity. Decisions have to be made about what the Church teaches, how it worships, and what position it’s going to take on important issues. Thus the Catholic Church needs a central administrative system through which information can circulate, contacts can be maintained, and decisions can be communicated and enforced. If Roman Catholicism did not have the Vatican, it would have to invent it.
    This was what Pope Innocent III meant when he wrote to the bishops of France in 1198: “Although the Lord has given us the fullness of power in the Church, a power that makes us owe something to all Christians, still we cannot stretch the limits of human nature. Since we cannot deal personally with every single concern—the law of human condition does not suffer it—we are sometimes constrained to use certain brothers of ours as extensions of our own body, to take care of things we would rather deal with in person if the convenience of the Church allowed it." Pope Sixtus V was equally candid in 1588 in Immensa aeterni
Dei
: “The Roman Pontiff, whom Christ the Lord constituted as visible head of his body, the Church, and appointed for the care of all the Churches, calls and rallies unto himself many collaborators for this immense responsibility . . . so that he, the holder of the key of all this power, may share the huge mass of business and responsibilities among them—i.e., the cardinals—and the other authorities of the Roman Curia, and by God’s helping grace avoid breaking under the strain."
    The aim of this book is to explain how the Vatican thinks, not to focus on its structures. Yet those structures influence the psychology and culture, so some understanding of terms such as
Vatican
,
Holy See
,
congregation
,
superior
, and so on is essential. This chapter covers that basic ground, laying out the vocabulary one needs to have and offering an organizational overview that will at least hint at who’s who and what’s what. Think of this as a basic survey course in college that lays the foundation for more advanced study, a kind of Vatican 101. This will be quick and, for experts, frustratingly schematic. Readers wishing a deeper treatment will want to consult the classic on the subject,
La Curia Romana: Lineamenti Storico-Giuridici
by Niccolò del Re, published by the Vatican Publishing House in 1998. It is a comprehensive work, truly the best resource for this material, and much of the highlights in this section are drawn from Re’s book. For those who don’t read Italian, the best resource in English is
Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church
, by Fr. Thomas J. Reese, editor of the Jesuit-run
America
magazine.
    THE POPE
    A properly theological understanding of the Pope as the successor of St. Peter and the instrument of unity for the Church is offered in chapter 5. Here we’ll take a more functional approach, asking what does the Pope
do
? One good way of answering that question is to consult the
Code of Canon Law
, which is the supreme law of the Catholic Church. Its answer is clear: the Pope is the man on whose desk the buck stops. Canon 331 describes the papacy this way: “The office uniquely committed by the Lord to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, abides in the Bishop of the Church of Rome. He is the head of the College of Bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the Pastor of the universal Church here on earth. Consequently, by virtue of his office, he has supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, and he can always freely exercise this power." To use the language of political science, the Pope holds full executive, legislative, and judicial power in the Catholic Church. There are no “checks and