Skip to main content

Pope Francis denounces ‘cancer’ of cliques, ambition in Vatican

Pope Francis has a tradition of giving the Curia a tough-love Christmas greeting, inviting the Vatican bureaucrats who help govern the 1.2-billion Catholic Church to a Jesuit-style examination of conscience before the new year.


Pope Francis. 
Pope Francis has once again used a Christmas greeting to dress down Vatican colleagues, denouncing the “cancer” of cliques and how bureaucrats can become “corrupted” by ambition and vanity.
“Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush,” Francis told cardinals, bishops and priests who work for him on Thursday. “You need patience, dedication and delicacy.”
Francis acknowledged that there were plenty of competent, loyal and even saintly people who work in the Holy See. But he also said there were others chosen to help him reform the Vatican’s inefficient and outdated bureaucracy who had shown themselves not to be up to the task.
When these people are then “delicately” removed, Francis said “they falsely declare themselves martyrs of the system, of an ‘uninformed pope’ or the ‘old guard,’ when in fact they should have done a mea culpa.”
Francis has a tradition of giving the Curia a tough-love Christmas greeting, inviting the Vatican bureaucrats who help govern the 1.2-billion Catholic Church to a Jesuit-style examination of conscience before the new year.
His most blistering critique came in 2014, when he listed the “15 ailments of the Curia” that some suffered, including the “terrorism of gossip,” ”spiritual Alzheimer’s” and of living “hypocritical” double lives.
Thursday’s speech was tamer, and promised to focus mostly on the Vatican’s relations with other countries and faiths.
But Francis spent a good chunk of his remarks on in-house business, making reference to a number of controversial and mysterious exits of Vatican officials in 2017 that once again raised questions about his ability to reform.
Some of the major heads to roll this year included the Vatican’s first-ever auditor general, the respected No. 2 in the Vatican bank and the Vatican’s hard-line orthodoxy watchdog.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ukraine crisis: Exchange of hundreds of prisoners takes place

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko attends a ceremony to welcome prisoners of war (POWs), released after the exchange with pro-Russian separatists, upon their arrival at an airport in Kharkiv, Ukraine December 27, 2017. (Source: Reuters)  Ukraine and separatist rebels in the east of the country have exchanged hundreds of prisoners, in one of the biggest swaps since the conflict began in 2014. Around 230 people were sent to rebel-held areas in return for 74 prisoners who had been held by pro-Russia rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, BBC reported on Wednesday. It was the first swap in 15 months. The release and exchange of prisoners was one of the points in the Minsk peace agreement, signed in 2015. The deal has stalled since and analysts say the swap does not signify wider progress. Both sides continue to hold other prisoners. The number of prisoners swapped was lower than initially announced after dozens of people who were meant to be returned to rebel-held terr...
Post a Comment
Read more

As many as 12 killed in New York’s deadliest fire in decades

More than 160 firefighters helped bring the blaze under control. (Source: Fire Department New York/Twitter) A massive fire ignited accidentally by a three-year-old boy swept through a five-story apartment building in New York, killing at least 12 people including a toddler and injuring four others in the deadliest blaze to hit the city in decades. The fire broke out around 6:50 pm (local time) yesterday on the first floor of the Prospect Avenue apartment in the Bronx borough of the city and spread quickly, officials said, adding that the cause of the blaze is under investigation. “We found that this fire started in a kitchen on the first floor,” fire commissioner Daniel Nigro said. “It started from a young boy, three and a half years old, playing with the burners on the stove. The fire got started, the mother was not aware of it – she was alerted by the young man screaming.” The boy’s mother fled with her two children, leaving the door to the apartment open – allowing t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Over 1 lakh illegal immigrants arrested in US in 2017

On January 25, Trump issued an executive order to set forth the Administration’s immigration enforcement and removal priorities. (Representational Image) The US authorities have arrested 143,470 illegal immigrants this year, according to a latest report. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in its annual report that it has made 143,470 administrative arrests in fiscal year 2017, increasing 30 per cent Year-on-Year, Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. An administrative arrest is the arrest of an alien for a civil violation of the immigration laws, which is subsequently adjudicated by an immigration judge or through other administrative processes. Of the total arrests, 110,568 occurred after January 20, which is a 42 per cent increase over the same time period last year, according to the report. US President Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20 this year. On January 25, Trump issued an executive order to set forth the Administration’s immigrat...
Post a Comment
Read more