Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis's Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican by Gianluigi Nuzzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pernicious Arrogance

Popes may come and go but the Curia is always with us. Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Merchants in the Temple exposes the inner workings of the Roman Curia, the archaic and self-serving core of Catholic organisation.

While the specifics of his research and conclusions are topical, his underlying message is generic and essentially timeless. There is little essential difference today from the conditions which Martin Luther criticised in the 16th century or for that matter Paul of Tarsus identified in the 1st century. The picture Nuzzi provides is not just that the Catholic Church is organisationally corrupt. It is unmanageably corrupt and persistently self-destructive.

In other words, there is no clear means through which the centuries of Gormenghast-like tradition and structure can be cut through or improved by anyone, even the pope, to reach some effectively functioning heart. The question therefore arises: what makes it so intractable to improvement? Is there something peculiar about the Catholic Church that prevents it from embodying the ideals it espouses? I think there is, a sort of self-inflicted Achilles heel of arrogant self-regard that is the impediment to any serious reform.

All organisations spawn similar ills: careerism, fraud, cultivated ignorance and incompetence, exploitation of the weak by the strong, among many others. Religious organisations generate an additional set of malicious effects like hypocrisy, self-righteous rationalisation, and self-serving promotional activities among them.

But the Catholic Church goes all other organisations one better when it comes to organisational dysfunction by making itself virtually immune to the recognition much less the correction of problems through its doctrinal conceit. Dogmatically the Catholic Church is self-defined as a societas perfecta, that is it is a community which has everything it needs to perform its function in the world, namely the salvation of souls.

The origin of this idea of the societas perfecta isn't biblical but classical: Aristotle used it to describe the polis or civil state of ancient Greece. It was applied to the Church in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas and promoted assiduously by 19th century popes who felt that the Church wasn't getting its due respect from the increasingly secular European states. In one papal encyclical of the period, the doctrine is stated thus:

It [the Catholic Church] is a perfect society of its own kind and in its own right, since it has everything necessary for its existence and its effectiveness in and of itself, in accordance with the will and power of the grace of its Founder. As the goal of the Church is more sublime, its power is always far superior, and it can therefore not be considered less than the Civil state, as to not be in a state of subordination to such a state.

Although the idea of the societas perfecta has been soft-pedalled since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, it is still on the books, as it were, in both formal pronouncements and in the fundamental attitudes of those who run the organisation, the pope, the bishops, the clerics, and many of the lay folk who work within it.

The effect of the doctrine is pernicious in at least two ways. First, if the Church has all it needs to perform its salvific function, one might enquire what it is precisely that are the necessary and sufficient organisational characteristics the doctrine is referring to. However, such an enquiry would be vain. The response of the Church is effectively: Well, what's there already, what you see is what is necessary and sufficient.

What everything? Rituals? Structures of authority? Historical decisions? Yes, everything. Of course there may be the odd bad apple priest-paedophile or the occasional dissolute pope, or even whole portions of the organisation that collectively make serious mistakes morally and doctrinally. But these things are the equivalent of pilot-error and have nothing to do with the air-worthiness of the great Zeppelin of the Christian enterprise.

In other words, what is essential in the Church can't be distinguished from what is in the Church - the ultimate in Whig history. The doctrine of societas perfecta implies, therefore, an extreme hyper-conservatism lest some necessary baby get thrown out with the dirty, smelly bathwater accumulated over centuries. Unlike any theory of civil society, there is no earthly sovereignty of 'the people', or any other regulator, to keep excess in check or periodically throw the bastards out.

The second problem with the doctrine is that it inhibits any external pressure toward self-reform within the Church. There is essentially a single telephone line from the top of the Church direct to the divine, a line which no one has yet to hack or tap.

The point of the encyclical Immortale Dei quoted above is to put civil authority in their place; it is outside and subordinate to the realm of the Church. The encyclical is an institutional 'Bugger Off' to anyone external to the Church who has the temerity to criticise any aspect of the Church's organisation.

When the US bishops complain, as they frequently have done in recent years, that the government of the United States is being anti-Catholic, what they mean is that legislation has been passed which in some way touches on their ecclesial authority. And they don't like it of course, just as the executives of General Motors or Goldman Sachs or California Power and Gas don't like regulation which limits dangerous design, financial scams and consumer gouging. The difference of course is that none of these other organisations have such a well-developed theory of immunity from prosecution for their harmful effects on the world.

There is another doctrine of the Church that proclaims that it is a mystery. That is certainly the case when it comes to fixing the things that are wrong in it, from sexual abuse, to the oppression of women, to the insanity of its sexual doctrines. But there is far less mystery about the source of many of these problems and the inability to address them effectively over centuries. The organisational hubris expressed in the abiding doctrine of societas perfecta and embodied in unaccountable structures of ecclesiastical power like the Roman Curia are where reform has to take place.

There is only one thing I take issue with in the book: its title. Its vaguely anti-Semitic character is probably unintended by the author. Nonetheless it is a typical example of the off-hand deniable slur against Judaism that has passed into general culture. A bit like adopting black-face in vaudeville. It should really stop.

30Aug2018: The show never stops: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/wo...

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