If They'd Made Me Pope: Amending the Unwritten Constitution
Part III: "The vast riches of the Church’s bureaucratic tradition are virtually unplumbed in these modern times."
Several years ago, I visited a Dominican friend of mine who was being ordained to the transitional diaconate in Washington, D.C.. When I jokingly mentioned that either one of us could be elected pope, he laughed right in my face and said I would be a terrible pope. (He added that so would he.) My friend was right, of course, but it still got me thinking harder: what makes a good pope? What should a pope actually do?
Now we have a new pope, so, on the off chance Pope Leo XIV is browsing De Civ looking for ideas, this ongoing series tells what I’d do If They’d Made Me Pope.
Constitutional Matters
Parts of the Church’s unwritten constitution are divinely instituted. There must always be bishops, serving a particular collection of priests, who in turn serve a particular group of Catholics, non-Catholics, and the poor. These clerics must always be given the sacrament of Holy Orders by one who has already received it, ensuring an unbroken succession of apostolic authority stretching back to Jesus.
Many of the Church’s other arrangements, however, are merely customary and can be changed. That is good, because some parts of the Church’s current constitutional settlement are bad! As I argued several years ago, the Church is currently configured in a historically unusual shape that, among other effects, perpetuates the child molestation coverups.1 The bankruptcies, financial and moral, will continue until a pope pulls a Gregory the Great and substantially reforms the contingent provisions of the Church’s constitution.
If they’d made me pope, I would.
I’d better warn you up front: this will be controversial. Interesting, I hope, but you might end up thinking, “Huh, guess there’s a reason his friend laughed in his face.”
Nevertheless, I am in earnest.
Shock and Awe the Curia
Nothing eats away at a government’s capacity to operate like corruption. It drains resources, perverts personnel, and alienates the governed. Popes Benedict and Francis were elected, in large part, to deal with corruption in the Vatican bureaucracy (known as the Curia). They failed.
Curial corruption drove Benedict to the first papal resignation in centuries. Corruption created The Box,2 then caused The Box to vanish. Corruption perpetuated Fr. Maciel’s abuse depredations, as well as others’. It led the Vatican into its latest financial scandal, the conviction of a cardinal for embezzlement, and the implication of the Secretariat of State (who remained in office, and led the first ballot’s voting at the conclave!).
Corruption is old: it drove Bishop Paul “Chink” Marcinkus from office as head of the Vatican Bank in the 1980s. Corruption is current: when Pope Francis put Cardinal Pell in charge of a reform commission, +Pell seemed like he was actually serious about cleaning up the Vatican’s filthy finances, which made a lot of Vatican deep-staters very upset, and then, suddenly, surely purely by coincidence, Pell was criminally charged in Australia for supposed sex abuse crimes that it was physically impossible for him to have committed. That was the end of financial reform in the Vatican, to the point where Pope Francis publicly instructed his “auditors” to politely keep the financial crimes they uncovered on the D.L.. In 2022’s Praedicate evangelium, Francis rearranged some deck chairs on paper, but the translation to reality was ineffectual.
It’s only been seven years since the world learned about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the corruption that kept him in power. That scandal didn’t just implicate the Curia, but the entire college of cardinals. Many such cases! After twenty-five years of horrific sex abuse revelations, where cardinals are almost always worse than their subordinates at addressing the abuse (and rewarded for dragging their feet!), none of it even surprises anymore. Each new case of curial, cardinalatial, or clerical corruption hits the soul with the dull thud of rotten meat striking the bare metal floor of the dumpster.
If today were 2005, I would support incremental, well-studied changes in the Curia. “Measure twice, cut once,” “reinventing government” and all the rest of the slogans.
Today is not 2005. I have watched the college of cardinals and the Curia consume two papacies and torment many souls. I was once told that the window of opportunity for bureaucratic reform starts to close the moment you take office, because that’s when the bureaucracy starts working overtime to get its hooks into you, to make it seem like there is no other possible way of doing things than how they are currently done. Thus, any deep reforms you don’t initiate in the first month will never happen. After watching the last two papacies, I believe it.
The college of cardinals is a medieval novelty. Originally, the clergy of Rome elected the Pope. Eventually, the Pope started appointing important and valuable non-Romans to honorary positions as Roman clerics, “incardinating” them into the diocese of Rome, largely so that they could serve the Pope as the core of the Curia. Later still, the Pope barred all Roman clergy from participating in the papal election except for these “(in)cardinals.” This made good sense at the time, but the role of “cardinal” ain’t in the Bible.
The college of cardinals has outlived its usefulness. I would eliminate the rank. Send every cardinal back to his home diocese, strip him of the title, and leave him a “mere” bishop.3 Let him keep the red hat as a souvenir, and that will be the end of it.
I would also dismiss all Curial heads-of-department of less than cardinal rank, including laypeople and members of religious orders. The entire Curial leadership must be axed. Send home all bishops and archbishops currently in Rome as well. Whatever it is they’re doing there, it’s part of a larger pattern that no longer serves the good of souls, so go home, everybody. I would do this immediately, on Day One, in the habemus papam speech itself.
Then, rebuild with trustworthy Catholics who have integrity and fresh eyes, ideally those who have experience as civil servants in functional Western governments. Auditing services, especially for finances and child abuse, should be outsourced to reputable non-Catholic firms, because those firms won’t get wobbly in the knees because they’re working for the pope. That means they won’t just tell him what he wants to hear. Too many diocesan curias get bad advice (or, worse, collaborators) by hiring people who are “playing for the team.” I’ve seen it.
Much of the Curia, unfortunately, does not need to be rebuilt at all. The Vatican's job is not to figure out the New Evangelization, its newspaper is superfluous, and its comms department is famously so bad it’s probably worse than just not having a comms shop at all. So on and so forth down the Curial line. The notion of the Pontifical Academy for Life is lovely, and I have a great fondness for some of the company they keep.4 However, the implementation of the Pontifical Academy for Life is dubious, and the idea that we need to tie up bishops and clerics running this thing from Rome when those bishops and clerics are desperately needed to run actual dioceses ‘n’ schools 'n' stuff is actively destructive. Close it. Indeed, close all the Pontifical Academies.
I admit, this decapitation strike against every Curial cabal at once is a frighteningly DOGE-like approach to a now-ancient institution, and I am not a fan of DOGE. This approach will undoubtedly affect some innocents. But those innocents aren’t being killed or jailed. They aren’t even losing their paychecks. They’re simply being reassigned to other paid postings closer to home. Sometimes, you need a Caesar Augustus— wise, kind, and ruthless. The pope who faces the Curia faces one of those times.5
Fake Bishoprics
Bishops are successors of the Apostles and by divine institution are placed over specific churches that they govern with ordinary power under the authority of the Roman Pontiff. —Canon 329 of the (abrogated) 1917 Code of Canon Law
Bishops… presid[e] in place of God over the flock, whose shepherds they are, as teachers for doctrine, priests for sacred worship, and ministers for governing. —Lumen Gentium, 20
In the Catholic Church’s constitutional self-understanding, the bishops are pastors of a flock.
In the Catholic Church as it exists today, there are some pretty glaring exceptions to this!
We maintain a list of hundreds of dioceses that are extinct. The diocese of Parthenia was swallowed by the desert at an unknown date well over a thousand years ago. The diocese of Urbs Salvia was largely destroyed by the Visigoths in the early 400s, and later “Wasted away” from the other ills of the era. There are zero people within the historic boundaries of many of these dioceses. All have now been fully replaced by other dioceses. It would be absurd to appoint a “bishop” of Urbs Salvia; he would be a shepherd to no one.
Georg Gänswein was made bishop of Urbs Salvia in 2012 in recognition of his long years of service as Pope Benedict’s personal secretary. He wasn’t just ordained the bishop of Urbs Salvia, either. He was made Archbishop! To be sure, Gänswein seems like a nice guy. But where’s this bishop’s flock?
Many bishops working in the Vatican have a similar arrangement. Most Curial cardinals are assigned as titular priests or deacons of a specific parish, rather than a diocese. Especially powerful cardinals are assigned as “titular bishops” of actual dioceses, Rome’s seven ancient suburbs… except, when you look, it turns out each of those dioceses is confined to exactly one parish anyway (and the cardinal doesn’t even run that parish). This allows all these bishops to focus on their day jobs in the Vatican bureaucracy.
The Church’s large dioceses are also replete with so-called “auxiliary bishops,” who assist the actual bishop. My diocese is thus currently governed by +Bernard Hebda, archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and by +Kevin Kenney, bishop of… Chunavia, an apparently extinct town located somewhere between modern-day Durrës, Albania and the mouth of the Mati River in the mid-1300s? To the best of my knowledge, Bishop Kenney has never even seen Albania.
The first germs of this bizarre practice showed up in the 1200s, where it caused a scandal and was suppressed.6 It returned in the 1500s under Pope Leo X, partly in response to the atrophy of the ancient office of archdeacon. “Auxiliaries” and “titulars” then metastasized pretty severely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Is the titular bishop technically on the up-and-up? Sure. It’s legitimate. These bishops all validly exercise their episcopal authority. However, is it a good idea that honors the fundamental role of bishops in the Church’s constitution? No, I don’t think so!
To his credit, Pope Francis began to ease off this titular bishop stuff. Missionary bishops (“vicars apostolic”) have seemingly stopped receiving titular bishoprics in recent years. Francis had very little regard for the custom of making sure his top cardinals were nominally assigned to a bishopric near Rome.
However, they were still bishops without a flock!
No more of that. To every flock, a bishop; to every bishop, a flock of his own.7 Need an assistant? Get an archdeacon.8 Many titular bishops are fine men doing fine work who will go on to be fine bishops. Yet their office makes a mockery of the episcopal calling. No more.
Smaller Dioceses
Hearing of my plans to abolish auxiliary bishops, you may object: it’s unreasonable to expect one man to serve as the bishop of Los Angeles, responsible for the spiritual well-being of over four million Catholics. Surely no man can shoulder that load—even with an archdeacon.
Quite right! That would be wildly unfair!
A bishop in 600 A.D. might have a few thousand men, women, and children in his flock. In 1086, England had around 1.7 million residents and 20 dioceses, averaging 85,000 humans per diocese. Today, there are 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide and 3,172 ecclesiastical jurisdictions, each containing an average of over 400,000 Catholics (plus far more non-Catholics).
The twelve Apostles, at the very worst, had to deal with the city of Rome, with a total population between 500,000 and 1.2 million, with only a fraction of a percent of them Christians, likely under one thousand.9 My bishop, +Hebda, has a population of 3.3 million in his sprawling diocese, a quarter of them Catholic, in nearly two hundred parishes, spread over more than 6,000 square miles.
In many ways, St. Peter had it easier than Bernie Hebda! By some measures, a lot easier!
Vast modern dioceses lay unreasonably heavy burdens on bishops. I’m sure many of them would prefer martyrdom to dying on the cross of diocesan administration. The size of each diocese (and their vast administrative demands) also prevent them from serving as true spiritual pastors to any meaningful number of people—least of all their priests, who often feel isolated and alienated from their bishops. This is no good. We owe it to the bishops and their flocks to reduce the strain.
It seems probable that no bishop can effectively serve more than 30,000-50,000 people, for the same reason that democratic representatives can’t serve more than that. Dioceses should be no larger than that.
If I were pope, I would give all dioceses worldwide one year to submit proposals breaking themselves up into smaller administrative units containing no more than 30,000 Catholics. The Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, for example, would have to split into at least 25 separate dioceses. (These smaller dioceses would, presumably, share certain resources, such as I.T., and they probably wouldn’t all need their own marriage tribunals.)
I’m sure there would be plenty of problems surfaced in those plans. I think we could solve them. Worldwide implementation would begin with the dioceses most supportive of the changes.
Strengthen the Metropolitans
In every workplace where I’ve ever worked, there’s been a more or less hard rule that no manager can have more than about ten direct reports. It’s impossible to maintain relationships, communicate expectations, or (when necessary) impose accountability when a manager is responsible for more than about ten people. Management of those reports is, all by itself, a significant part of the job, even when things are running smoothly and everyone’s on the same page, and even when the manager has other responsibilities. I meet with my manager for an hour once a week, and with my team for an hour once a week, just to maintain the relationships, and count myself extremely blessed to have so few meetings.
So it’s probably not great that the pope has over 4,000 “direct reports.”10 Virtually every bishop in the world is appointed exclusively by the Pope, is deposed (fired) exclusively by the Pope, and reports directly to the Pope. They do not get an hour a week with the Pope on Zoom. They get about fifteen minutes once every five years.
This is bazonks. Bishops are effectively unaccountable unless charged with a crime by the secular state, and sometimes not even then. The Pope is too swamped to notice.
My proposal to make dioceses smaller would make it even worse, by increasing the number of bishops worldwide to something like 45,000. Yet even without that proposal, it’s past time for Rome to admit it: in a Church of over a billion people, Rome cannot make all the calls. It’s physically impossible, and trying to do the impossible harms both all concerned and some innocent bystanders (for example, the Romans, who are effectively deprived of their bishop, because he’s too busy dealing with The World).
Constitutionally, the way the Church looks right now is weird. In the early Church, you had the five patriarchs: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Each of these patriarchates governed its own Catholic Church, united with Rome in doctrine, faith, and morals, but with its own liturgical rite and internal governance. Ultimately, Rome was the first-among-equals (with jurisdiction to match), but the bishop of Rome was only primarily responsible for those bishops within his rite, not every bishop in the world.
Over time, as the Church grew, metropolitan bishops arose. Metropolitans were bishops of important dioceses who wielded limited governing powers over the other dioceses within a province, which further relieved pressure on the central authority. These metropolitans were designated “archbishops” to show their limited authority over other bishops.
Technically, this is all still in place, but historical drift has knocked it out of whack. There is still a Catholic Patriarch of Alexandria, +Ibrahim Sidrak. Ditto Antioch, where Patriarch Béchara al-Rahi reigns. There’s now even a Catholic Patriarch of Baghdad! Meanwhile, the Pope remains Patriarch of the West. But the balance is a little lopsided: Alexandria has 13 living bishops, Antioch 46, Baghdad 24, and Rome 5,110.
Meanwhile, metropolitans have kept their titles but have been virtually stripped of their powers. The modern code of canon law (Can. 435-437) makes clear that the modern office of metropolitan is a dead letter. They do not appoint bishops. They do not depose bishops. Bishops do not report to them. Their sole accountability power is to send reports about bad bishops to, you guessed it, Rome. You wouldn’t expect this to work, and, sure enough, it doesn’t.
I would increase the powers of metropolitans over their suffragan bishops. I would not let them freely meddle in the affairs of other dioceses, but I would redraw canon law so that most canonical proceedings that are today appealed from the diocese to Rome are instead appealed to the metropolitan. I would substantially increase the metropolitan’s role in the appointment of bishops (more on that below). Finally, I would allow metropolitans to convene provincial synods for trying and deposing bishops who, through heresy, malfeasance, or scandal, have shown themselves unfit to continue in office. Right now, only Rome can do that. Now, I’ve looked around the Church hierarchy these past twenty years and, babe, Rome couldn’t depose bishops fast enough if it sold the whole Vatican Museum to fund the trials.
You may be thinking, hey, with all these new bishops, we’re going to need some kind of new office, a “metropolitan-of-metropolitans.” Once again, the Church’s vast treasure-house of bureaucratic traditions supplies! We already have metropolitans-of-metropolitans. They’re called primates, and they served a function very much like what I am proposing… until canon 438 (and its predecessors) stripped them of it.
Organizationally, this can work. Multiplying the number of bishops to keep pace with the number of Catholics is a reasonable thing to do.11 It only sounds radical because it is incompatible with our current org chart, but we don’t have to invent a new org chart to fix that. We just have to go back to an old one we already had.
Appointment of Bishops
Abandon modern innovations, retvrn to Tradition: the pope should renounce the papal power to appoint bishops, while reserving the papal power to confirm or veto bishops.
Today, the pope directly appoints virtually all bishops. However, this is an extremely recent development, kicked off more or less by the conjunction of the First Vatican Council in 1870 (which dogmatically established the pope’s universal jurisdiction), followed in 1871 by the Italian Law of Guarantees, which gave the pope the power to appoint all the bishops of Italy (instead of King Victor Emmanuel II) (the king retained a veto). There followed a sequence of secularizing states renouncing their episcopal powers, most importantly France in 1905. At the same time, Rome started to systematically fight against the right of these no-longer-Catholic governments to interfere in ecclesiastical matters. Soon enough, Rome was left holding all the cards. For the first time in Church history, Rome, and Rome alone, appointed virtually12 all the bishops of the world.
This has not been good for Rome, and it has not been good for the Church. It is well-known throughout the Catholic world that a few well-cultivated contacts in Rome get you much further up the career ladder than personal holiness or the love of your flock.
We live in an era of itinerant bishops.
St. Augustine was born in Souk Ahras, Algeria, traveled hundreds of miles, as far as Carthage, Rome, and Milan… then returned home to be ordained a priest of Hippo, just 60 miles from where he was born. He was then elected bishop of Hippo, and, though famous throughout the Christian world, he served that diocese for the rest of his life. This was typical of the era.
Today, the path of my old bishop, Harry Flynn, is more typical: an upstate New Yorker, ordained in Albany, he was one day appointed bishop of Lafayette, Louisiana—a diocese a thousand miles away, where nobody knew him and he didn’t know anyone. It was a job +Flynn desperately tried to avoid. Then he was, once again, ripped away from his flock in Louisiana and shipped north to the Twin Cities, another diocese to which he had no connection.13 All Catholics know their bishop is really only visiting, so we never really make him our own. I have little love for Archbishop Flynn, but is his checkered past so surprising when we consider that biography? When we treat bishops like replaceable cogs in the global Catholic corporation, is it any surprise that so many of them end up acting like middle managers?
We also live in an era of isolated priests. The bishop can cut their pay, give them vacation, reassign them to Siberia, put them up for promotion... anything, for any or no reason, without recourse. Priests have relatively few rights, often lack means to exercise them, and are conditioned in seminary to accept indignities, even evil, as “holy obedience.” On top of all that, we expect them to have no idea, at ordination, who’s going to have absolute rule over their lives in five years’ time when the current guy gets transferred to Rome, and no say in his successor when he’s named. Power flows through the hierarchy exclusively in one direction, from top to bottom.14 Unchecked by anything outside this power structure, a series of overt and covert cliques have developed like cancers. Inevitably, clerics end up accountable to those cliques, not to the faithful.
This, in a word, sucks. It is not The Immutable Form of the Church. It’s a historical anomaly not yet two centuries old. Clerics who have done well in this cold system will say that all we need is more holiness, but this is wrong. Personal holiness can occasionally defeat a bad system, but a system is defined by the incentives it establishes. Our system is designed, top to bottom, to reward sycophancy and “team play” while punishing boat-rocking. That set of incentives gave us the abuse crisis, and it will continue to give us the abuse crisis until we change the incentives.
Early on, bishops were elected by their dioceses. “Let the bishop be ordained after he has been chosen by all the people,” writes Hippolytus. St. Ambrose was famously made bishop of Milan before baptism “by acclamation,” which really means, “because the laypeople in the back of the church starting chanting ‘AM-brose, BISH-op, clap-clap-clapclapclap’ until the consecrating bishops shrugged and said okay yeah Ambrose it is.” Pope Leo the Great prescribed the general requirements of election in a letter:
I beseech and implore you, and under the invocation of God I accost you: prohibit, brothers, such things [the coerced imposition of unknown bishops on a diocese], and remove every cause of dissension from your provinces. Indeed, we have accosted you before God, so that you will not allow these things to happen any longer. Let those who are to become priests be chosen in peace and quiet. Let the election bear the signatures of the clergy, the testimony of the honored laymen, the consent of the order [bishops from neighboring provinces] and of the people. (Patrologia Latina, Vol. 54, Pg. 634, Col. 639)
Canons 4 & 6 of the Council of Nicaea, without disturbing this electoral process, describe how the “consent of the order” to a bishop-elect should be ascertained:
It is by all means proper that a bishop should be appointed by all the bishops in the province; but should this be difficult, either on account of urgent necessity or because of distance, three at least should meet together, and the suffrages of the absent [bishops] also being given and communicated in writing, then the ordination should take place. But in every province the ratification of what is done should be left to the Metropolitan.
…And this is to be universally understood, that if any one be made bishop without the consent of the Metropolitan, the great Synod has declared that such a man ought not to be a bishop. If, however, two or three bishops shall from natural love of contradiction, oppose the common suffrage of the rest, it being reasonable and in accordance with the ecclesiastical law, then let the choice of the majority prevail.
Bishops were elected directly by their dioceses and consecrated by local bishops. The pope has always had an ultimate, inviolable veto (although this is by no means explicit at Nicaea and would remain controversial for centuries), but, historically, the pope was only a backstop, nothing like the driving force he has become today.
This process worked well for a thousand years. It was usurped by the secular powers,15 then eventually restored to the Church. However, it was not restored to the dioceses, where it most properly belongs, but to an overworked, overwhelmed, overcentralized version of the papacy in a post-Reformation defensive crouch.
I suggest that each diocese, upon the death or retirement of its bishop, gather in conclave, adapting the current procedures of Universi Domenici Gregis as closely as possible to the diocesan context. This is because, as I’ve recently written, the papal conclave is a very well-designed electoral system that will tend to generate better results than most alternatives. Any Catholic in the diocese, as well as all bishops of the province, should be admitted to the general congregations leading up to the conclave, and some should be invited to speak. The actual conclave should be undertaken by diocesan clergy.16 The winning candidate should be acclaimed by the people (“Habemus episcopum!”), then swiftly consecrated by the provincial bishops. We assume, of course, that the metropolitan bishop and the majority of the provincial bishops consent, and that the pope (provided with notice of the election and a few days in which to respond) does not issue a veto. If, instead, the candidate is rejected by any of these authorities, alas, back to the conclave.
This mode of election would enjoy the signatures of the clergy (through their votes in conclave), the testimony of the honored laymen (through their participation in the general congregations), the consent of the order (through their consent to consecrate) and of the people (formally through their Habemus episcopum, practically through their participation in the general congregations). It would ensure a bishop close to his people, especially his beleaguered clerics. It would put an end to these modern itinerant bishops shipped from strange lands to other strange lands. Finally, it would give the transitional presbyterate strong incentives to give a darn about their parishes, not just their résumés (smaller dioceses would intensify this effect).
No appointments system is perfect, and there are always risks. Episcopal appointments became centered in Rome in large part over fears that individual dioceses, left to their own devices, might elect heretics. Indeed, this has often happened! However, if the Francis papacy taught ultramontane theological conservatives anything, it’s that placing Rome in control of appointments doesn’t give you any guarantees. Rome changes! For the past few years, down-the-line orthodoxy has been much more of a concern for the U.S. bishops’ conference than it has been for Rome! Thus, the best argument for centralized appointments falls short.
With sincere respect to the hard work put in by the good men of the Dicastery for Bishops (including, ahem, recent alumni), I am confident that returning closer to the Tradition would beat the tar out of the Dicastery for Bishops.
I see no obstacle to electing the pope in the same way, except that, in lieu of local bishops, it seems fitting for the pope’s election to be confirmed and consecrated by his fellow patriarchs. By adopting this reform, I would, in all likelihood, be making myself the last non-Roman pope…
…at least until circumstances change again, leading some future reformer to once again make new constitutional arrangements. As always, the cycle continues.
Concluding Explanation
All these changes, of course, are not change for the sake of change. Nor are they, perish the thought, change for the sake of Progress.
These proposals return to the truly traditional Church—not the Church of the late nineteenth century, but the Church of the first millennium—in order to rebuild bonds of love and service where there is, today, a great deal of alienation, therefore indifference, therefore sin. Between clergy and bishops, bishops and other bishops, bishops and lay, between Rome and everyone else, there is much in need of repair.
One sign of success will be the first time a diocese goes against legal advice in order to do right by one of the flock. Today, the diocese always chooses the lawyers, and the lawyers always choose to protect the diocesan assets, not the diocesan faith. Love should make this impossible, so we must make better conditions for love to flourish. If not love, then, at least, the less perverse incentives imposed by this reformed system might still do the trick.
Next Time: Part IV: Restoring the Rule of Law
The Rest of the Series: Roundup: If They’d Made Me Pope
Child molestation is, unfortunately, bound to happen in any institution that provides adults with trusted access to children. Molesters will always be drawn disproportionately to professions like schoolteacher, cleric, pediatrician, scout leader, and—alas—parent. It is my understanding that the rate of clerical sex abuse is approximately comparable to rates in those other institutions. What has made the abuse scandal so incredibly damaging to the Church is the willful blindness, indifference, and even complicity of non-molesting colleagues.
Yes, there is some of this in every institution, too. And, yes, the media hates the Church and so covers it differently. For example, in the newspapers, molestation by a teacher is always a problem with the teacher, but molestation by a priest is always a problem with the entire Church. Aaron Zinger’s 2024 post on unmarked systems sheds indirect light on this dynamic.
Nevertheless, the institutional Church’s depraved indifference to abuse is unusually entrenched.
We must, of course, target and punish molesters, but molesters are not the Church’s distinguishing problem. Our distinguishing problem is the indifference to molestation. That can be explained in one or two cases by unusual evil, but, when the indifference is this widespread, we must look to structural explanations: what parts of our system are causing the Church to put so many depravedly indifferent people in positions of power? Alternatively, if they are not indifferent when they are installed, what parts of our system cause them to become depravedly indifferent once in office?
I can’t tell you how pleased I am to finally have the contents of The Box confirmed. I believed in The Box and its corrupt contents ever since the first rumors surfaced over a decade ago. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” I guess.
If there’s already another bishop back home, the cardinal is now auxiliary bishop… but that won’t last long, as you’ll discover in the next section of this article.
Particularly Richard Doerflinger, currently #37 on the Academy’s list of academicians, and a friend.
There is a small but nonzero chance that someone—a disgruntled Curial cabal, some mafiosi skimming money off the Curia, someone—will respond to so bold an attack on the Curia by assassinating the pope and hoping for better luck at the next conclave. For this reason, the pope who moves against the Curia must move immediately to secure his succession. More importantly, he must show the world that killing him won’t stop what’s coming, because the next pope will do the same thing. Having just dismissed the college of cardinals, that isn’t so easy.
As you will shortly see, other constitutional reforms proposed later in this document make replacing the college of cardinals fairly straightforward. However, those will take time to put in place, and then a little more time to perfect.
As a transitional measure, I would name a dozen good Catholic men and women I know personally (and whom I trust) as papal electors. I would designate the eldest cleric among them the dean of the papal electoral college. I would publicly instruct them on my mission and their duties, especially their duty not to allow my death to deter the work I had begun. Then I would order them to, in the event of my premature death, carry out the electoral procedures of Universi Domenici Gregis, with themselves acting in the place of the (no-longer-extant) college of cardinals. (This would require hasty amendments to Universi Domenici Gregis, replacing all references to “cardinals” with “designated electors,” and probably a couple other tweaks.)
Hopefully, they would never actually meet and would never elect a pope, because my other reforms would be in place by the time of my death, as an old man, many years distant.
Some dioceses had gone extinct due to invasion by the Muslims, and there was still hope of their restoration, so the lines of bishops were maintained as a sort of government-in-exile. As it became clear that these sees would never be retaken, these “wandering bishops” gradually became both a practical problem and a scandal to the faithful, so Clement V banned their consecration.
If you’re enough of a Catholic nerd to worry about what I would do to personal prelatures or personal ordinariates, this line should reassure you: those bishops have flocks, so they’re fine. I’m making enough enemies here without getting Opus Dei riled up. Besides, I hear they have some pretty scary albino assassin monks.
…or a chorbishop, or a protosyncellus, or an archpriest, or…
As rich as the Catholic tradition is in art, doctrine, or ethics, the vast richness of the Church’s bureaucratic tradition is virtually unplumbed in these modern times.
Probably less, perhaps much less. Rodney Stark’s model suggests 0.02% of the Empire was Christian by the end of the first century, and Peter died around 65 AD, barely halfway there. 0.02% of the city of Rome’s population would be about two hundred souls under Pope St. Peter’s care.
There’s 5,300 or so bishops in the world who are in communion with Rome, but some of them are in Eastern Catholic Churches, whose relationship to Rome is more complex.
Will we need a “primate-of-primates”? Maybe. By my math, 1.3 billion Catholics divided into dioceses with 30,000 believers and one bishop means 44,000 bishops worldwide. If each metropolitan has 10 suffragan dioceses, you end up with 4,000 metropolitan bishops (44,000 ÷ 11). If each primate has jurisdiction over 10 metropolitans, that’s 363 primates reporting directly to Rome. That’s a lot better than the 3,000-5,000 bishops reporting to Rome like today, but I still think the Pope should have well under a hundred “direct reports.” If every primate were under the jurisdiction of some kind of primate-of-primates, that would leave only 33 such officers under the sole jurisdiction of Rome. That seems good.
Can the office of patriarch serve that function? Maybe. One cannot casually “spin up” new patriarchates the way one can decree a new metropolitan. The patriarchate’s role in the Church’s ancient unwritten constitution is more complex than that, and I don’t actually want to divide the Latin Rite into dozens of micro-rites. The question requires, at minimum, further study.
The Catholic Church does have an office called the “Latin patriarch” or “minor patriarch.” However, as the Catholic Encyclopedia 1913 concedes, these were a mere “imitation of the East” that “have never been more than mere titles.” It would probably not make much sense to further abuse the term by giving the “Latin patriarchs” new powers distinct from those of real patriarchs.
I’m content to start with shrinking dioceses, empowering metropolitans, and restoring primates. That would be great progress on all fronts. The question of whether we need a primate-of-primates, and the further question of whether that can be a patriarch, can safely wait for another day.
There are a few minor exceptions to Rome’s exclusive appointments power:
In France’s Alsace-Moselle region, an 1801 concordat has anomalously remained in force. (At the time secularizing France abandoned appointment of bishops, this region was under German control.) The concordat allows the President of France to appoint the bishops of Strasbourg and Metz, subject to papal approval. In practice, I understand France doesn’t want to be seen as involved in religious affairs, so defers to Rome, but it still does the actual appointment.
In China, the Chinese Communist Party has been appointing bishops (who are then consecrated by other valid bishops in the “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association”) without papal consent, over the Vatican’s strenuous protests.
I am told that, in some German, Austrian, and Swiss dioceses, the cathedral chapter has retained “the right to elect the bishop from a terna presented by the Holy See, elect the bishop outright, or present a terna to the pope for appointment.”
The major bishops of the Eastern Catholic Churches are elected by church synods. The pope’s sole role is to confirm (or, if necessary, veto) the winner.
Twentieth-century additions to the Code of Canon Law forbade the Church from giving any secular power additional privileges in the bishop-selection process, but the Code honors existing agreements. Alas, China doesn’t care what the Code says, and, during the negotiations with China, it seemed that Pope Francis didn’t much care, either. (N.B.: as the supreme legislator, Francis was free to implicitly dispense himself from any and all legal requirements, and often did, so this was legal, albeit IMO pretty stupid.)
Note this well: the Code does not forbid the Church from devolving bishop-selection privileges to other Catholics. It only bars involvement from the secular powers.
This is especially rough in the Twin Cities, given our polite but consistent freezing-out of non-natives.
There is an exceedingly limited form of local influence in the current appointments process.
Each bishop is chosen by the pope, but he usually chooses based on a recommendation by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops. That’s a collection of forty or so current bishops, all of them appointed by the pope, to help him make decisions about bishops. Maybe three of them have ever heard of your diocese. Maybe one of them, if you’re lucky, has ever actually set foot in it. None of them has ever heard of anyone in your diocese, except perhaps a “well-connected” local cleric with enough ambitions of higher office to cultivate relationships in the Dicastery for Bishops.
In short, the Dicastery is acting from relatively little information, and they know it. Their recommendation, then, depends heavily on recommendation of the Apostolic Nuncio, the papal ambassador to your country. The nuncio’s recommendation is a list of three names (called the terna), with the Nuncio’s top choice at the top. The nuncio is theoretically supposed to base the terna on recommendations from local bishops in your ecclesiastical province, who compose a secret list of recommendations every three years. He may or may not actually do so. Since both the provincial recommendations list and the terna are secret, it is impossible to know whether he does, or how often he doesn’t.
At no point does any non-bishop in your actual diocese get to even make a polite suggestion—unless, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’re close with your bishop and he invites you personally to make suggestions before he submits his recommendations to the local province. The pope, and his direct appointees, drive the process at every stage.
To be sure, it shrank first. Both lay people and clerics (outside the cathedral chapters) changed with the rise of feudalism. They gradually fell under the sway of secular powers. For just this reason, the right of election was gradually restricted to fewer and fewer clerics, in many cases ending up with just the chapters being allowed to elect the bishop.
The Church didn’t end up in its current situation because it’s stupid, but because history is complicated and circumstances change. Nevertheless, circumstances have changed again, and it’s time to return to a more primitive, traditional model for electing bishops.
I think serious consideration should be given to the possibility of admitting select others to the actual conclave, especially local religious sisters and the heads of respected local lay institutions, such as the president of the local Catholic college or the beloved head of a local Catholic charity.
This assumes, of course, that these institutions are still meaningfully Catholic, and do not merely wear Catholicism as a skinsuit. That is a dicey proposition in many dioceses.
In any event, if laypeople are included in the conclave in any capacity, the eventual winner probably should have to win both an appropriate majority of total votes and the votes of at least a bare majority of clerics. This is because the so-called “power of governance” in the Church properly belongs to clerics. This does not mean that clerics have any talent for governance, nor, indeed, any competence. The idea that the Holy Spirit makes clerics good at running anything is funnier than several single-season UPN sitcoms put together.
Nevertheless, the Church’s unwritten constitution places clerics in the position of formally taking decisions, so episcopal elections probably must be decided by clerics. Any attempt to unsettle this arrangement would be very theologically and culturally fraught, and might not be possible for theological reasons. I’m here to reform the Church’s constitution in order to better honor its ecclesiology, not to disrupt it.
"The college of cardinals is a medieval novelty"
That the Catholic Church has been around for long enough that this statement isn't laughable serves to explain why getting rid of the corruption within it is so hard, thanks to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
I just posted a lengthy essay on some very similar notes - including some of the same structural problems in the episcopacy (particularly in the west). I also think the seminary system is an antiquated disaster (based on my experience).