It often startles outsiders, especially business school graduates and policy wonks, to discover that senior managers in the Vatican are frequently appointed with little regard for expertise in their area of responsibility. The president of the Council for Health Care, for example, has no background in medicine; the prefect of the Congregation for Education is not an educator; the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship is not a liturgist; and the prefect of The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the office that oversees missions, is not a missionary.This is brand new text (January 30, 2004). If anyone has any doubts about Allen's catholicity or journalistic integrity he or she should read this text. It's so self-explanatory, that it doesn't need a comment. If someone has any questions about it, please post it here.
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From an Anglo-Saxon point of view – influenced by the Enlightenment, scientific thinking and capitalist notions of efficiency – such an approach cannot help but seem cavalier. How can the pope’s top advisors give him proper advice if they don’t have a grasp of their fields? It would be as if President Bush were to appoint someone who’s never handled a foreign policy job to run the State Department, or Bill Gates were to turn over Microsoft’s R&D operation to someone who never booted up a computer.
In the cultural world of the Holy See, however, shaped more by Augustine and Aquinas than Adam Smith, content-area expertise has never been the highest value. The system puts the premium on loyalty, understood as internal assent to the philosophical and theological fundamentals of the church. The role of a superior in the Vatican system is not to make the trains run on time, but to make sure they all head in the same direction.
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In a Jan. 28 interview with NCR, Stafford, who despite being American is thoroughly familiar with the cultural tradition of the Vatican, endorsed this view.
“I think that the church has relied too much on experts. That’s one of the great problems we’re having in the United States,” he said. His argument is that bureaucrats, therapists and social scientists, among other classes of experts, have sometimes played too strong a role in determining the American church’s policies, one factor he sees contributing to the sexual abuse crisis.
“The basic necessity for leaders within the church is prudence – a virtuous life and an ability to make discerning judgments from common sense, based on the common good,” Stafford said. “Our reliance upon experts is one of the great faults of the post-modernist society.”
One person’s negligence, in other words, is another’s prudence. All of which helps illustrate how, in many ways, Anglo-Saxons are from Mars, the Vatican from Venus.
It would be very interesting to see if there is ANYTHING good at all that the Vatican does - according to the NCR, of course.
Please, post ANY text from the NCR that would appear to agree with the Vatican on ANYTHING.