Two appointments made big news out of the Vatican this week, one to the leadership of the US capital see and the other to the top spot at the Vatican department tasked with overseeing religious orders and congregations worldwide.
Robert Walker Cardinal McElroy got Washington, DC, to the surprise of many and bemusement of everyone except the most egregious papal Renfields, owing not least to the heft of the baggage he brings to the office.
McElroy is accused of sitting on information he received regarding Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick, the convicted serial sex offender (and olim Archbishop of DC).
McElroy rose to prominence after being created in the 2022 consistory that also saw Vatican lifer Fernando Vergez Alzaga LC raised to the red (making Vergez the first member of the order founded by disgraced the disgraced criminal pervert, Marcial Maciel, to receive the red hat). McElroy is a “Francis bishop” in the mold of Chicago’s Blase Cardinal Cupich, and also very much Cupich’s protégé.
In 2022, it was already evident to Church watchers and Vatican insiders that Cupich—a member of the Dicastery for Bishops, the Roman curial department responsible, inter alia, for vetting prospective candidates and making recommendations to the pope regarding episcopal nominations—is a powerful man.
But power is not popularity. Cupich has never been too terribly popular among the bishops of the United States. Neither has McElroy. Popes do not often rely on popularity contests to inform their decisions in these regards.
The prevailing wisdom has it that Pope Francis wanted someone in DC willing to mix it up with the incoming Trump administration, and McElroy’s public stances on issues ranging from immigration to inclusivity in the Church and society more broadly may suggest he fits the bill.
As Charles Collins of Crux has noted, however, McElroy’s rise is ultimately tied to Francis. Francis has baggage of his own. The ascendant populists of the political right around the world are less and less likely to ignore papal or pope-adjacent baggage—skeletons, as Collins says—when the Church pushes against their agenda.
“That was easy,” McElroy told Washington’s outgoing Archbishop, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, in a moment caught on a hot mic after his meet-and-greet presser on the day of his announcement.
Expect the honeymoon to be short.
The really interesting appointment of the week—it came on the same day as the McElroy announcement, raising not a few eyebrows and forcing both scribblers and editors to make a hard choice—was of Sr. Simona Brambilla as Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
The 59-year-old Italian religious woman has a fascinating bio and an impressive resumé. She trained and worked as a nurse before entering religious life and has continued in medical practice throughout her career. She served as a missionary in Mozambique before taking a leadership role in her congregation, the Consolata Missionaries, of which she was Superior General for some thirteen years.
Brambilla also holds the PhD in psychology from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Institute of Psychology. Her dissertation leveraged her missionary life experience and focused on evangelization and inculturation in Mozambique. She taught at the Greg’s psych institute for several years, concurrent with her turn as her congregation’s General Councilor, during which time she completed her doctoral work.
Sr. Simona Brambilla is no slouch.
That’s one of the reasons for which Brambilla’s getting tapped for the top job at Consecrated Life is by far the more interesting of the two appointments that grabbed headlines this past week.
The prefect’s office at Consecrated Life is a cardinal’s billet, one usually filled by a cardinal archbishop. If the fellow named to the job is an archbishop but not yet a cardinal, he takes the title of pro-prefect until he gets his red hat, which will usually come in the next consistory for the creation of cardinals.
The reason for this is straightforward: Prefects need to be able to tell anyone who isn’t the pope what to do. The Church is hierarchical, whether you like it or not. A mere priest can’t tell a bishop or archbishop what to do, because a bishop does not have to obey a priest.
Sure, if the priest happens to be speaking with the authority of the pope, it may be in the bishop’s interest to obey the priest, but he would also be well within his rights to say, “If the pope wants me to do that, he can tell me himself.”
In the hifalutin’ jargon of ecclesiology and sacramental theology, we say that bishops possess “fullness of Orders” and with it the threefold munus of teaching, sanctifying, and governing.
Basically, senior officials of the Roman Curia have been high-ranking members of the Church’s governing hierarchy as a practical matter of orderly administration. It is why secretaries of dicasteries—or at least secretaries of what used to be called Congregations, i.e. curial departments with governing power rather than a merely consultive role (as had the old Pontifical Councils)—who are the fellows who usually do things, have usually been archbishops.
Under Francis, however, a new theory of governing power has come into vogue.
“The power of governance in the Church doesn’t come from the sacrament of Holy Orders,” then-Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda SJ (now a cardinal) told reporters gathered for the 2022 roll-out of Pope Francis’s new fundamental law for the Roman Curia, Praedicate Evangelium, “but from the canonical mission,” i.e. from the pope.
“Whoever is in charge of a dicastery or other organism of the Curia does not have authority because of the hierarchical rank with which he is invested,” Ghirlanda also told reporters in 2022, “but because of the power he receives from the Roman pontiff and exercises in his name.”
He or she, it turns out.
Suffice it to say that’s not how the majority of folks have understood the business for most of the Church’s history.
In broad strokes, the trouble with Ghirlanda’s theory is not in what it affirms. That the Roman Curia governs in the pope’s name is axiomatic. The problem is in what it denies, i.e., that those who exercise governing power in the pope’s name need not possess the governing authority of the Church conferred in the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
Until now, Ghirlanda’s has been little more than a theory. There is a layman in charge of the Vatican’s comms dicastery, but that outfit’s powers and mission profile are peculiar and circumscribed. Pope Francis has appointed women—including Brambilla—as secretaries to several dicasteries.
Now, however, Pope Francis is really putting his theory to the test.
Vatican watchers, legal scholars, and theologians have wondered whether the next pope might not decide that every one of Sr. Brambilla’s acts taken on her own authority should be null and void, simply because she neither possesses nor participates in the governing munus of the Church.
In any case, Pope Francis has given a fairly strong indication he is not convinced his theory has legs. Alongside Sr. Brambilla, Pope Francis has named the 65-year-old Angel Cardinal Fernandez Artime SDB as pro-prefect.
A pro-prefect has the same canonical authority as a prefect, which means—on paper, at least—that the dicastery has two heads. If official decisions and other acts of governance appear with Brambilla’s signature and the countersignature of the pro-prefect, who is an archbishop (and a cardinal), then the unholy mess and tangle of such an eventuality will be avoided. Even if Brambilla has no authority to govern, Fernandez does.
On a purely practical level, having both a prefect and a pro-prefect is an even better recipe for dysfunction than having a cardinal in a subordinate office within a dicastery headed by another cardinal, as happened when Pope Francis raised then-Fr. Michael Czerny SJ of the Section for Migrants and Refugees in the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development when that dicastery was under Peter Cardinal Turkson. (Czerny now runs that dicastery, and Francis has given the red hat to Czerny’s successor on the Migrants and Refugees desk, Fabio Baggio CS.)
There is a sense in which none of this really matters at all, except insofar as it serves as further evidence—were any needed—of Francis’s penchant for personal rule and preference for ruling by papal fiat. None of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia have any real governing authority of their own anymore, anyway.
The only thing apparent from this latest development is that Francis has hedged his bet. The appointment of a pro-Prefect (a red hat, no less) suggests not even Francis fully believes his pet theory.
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Cupich, McElroy, Tobin, Wester, et al: Few listen to a word they say. As for Francis, most stopped listening to his expletives a long time ago. In case no one has noticed, circuses stopped coming to towns across the USA a long, long time ago. Someone needs to tell the Barker-in-Chief.
The current Pontiff clearly dislikes the USA and only tolerates Americans. If you happen to favor things with a bit of Tradition about them, well, you really have no friends in Rome. Bet on it.
I don’t need PF or his political lieutenants. So be it.
Americans aren’t too fond of Peronists and some of those other special refugees that fled to Argentina after WWII…But hey it was a great subject for a Broadway hit….”Evita”…!!!
Hostile comment,u must be one of those conservative Republican Catholics. Afraid of change,well it’s here too bad you can’t take it.its either change or die.
On the other hand, constant “change” can be the deepest rut of all.
That’s what the reformers have said for the past 500 years….How many protestant denominations are there…???!!!
The real circuses are still coming. And some of us still listen to and respect the Pope.
Did Jesus ever envision such a kafkaesque bureaucracy when He preached on hillsides, cleansed the Temple, and hung on a Cross? Somehow I think not. (Forgive me if such a sentiment borders on Protestantism. It’s not intended to.)
Enjoy Ken.
The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky played by Sir John Gielgud. Explores your theme perfectly…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QxhvTAevdU8&t=497s&pp=2AHxA5ACAQ%3D%3D
About the two appointments to head the “Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life”, we read: “The only thing apparent from this latest development is that Francis has hedged his bet. The appointment of a pro-Prefect (a red hat, no less) suggests not even Francis fully believes his pet theory.”
OR, why the backwardism of any kind of “theory” when in its place you can have a two-headed “process”? As in this instance, silent acquiescence by a red hat to the coupled (!) and habituated process of a new alter-magisterium? As “facilitated” from the non-ordained…an acquiescence by ordained guardians of the previously real and now more decorative Magisterium? As groomed earlier in the silent non-response to the dubia….
IS THIS the long-awaited definition of “synodality”? Institutionalized (so to speak!) schizophrenia? “Time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; realities are more important than ideas; the whole is greater than the part” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013). Neither a synodal Church nor a churchy Synod, but both?
ST. AUGUSTINE: Regarding a personal double life: “…it is no monstrous thing partly to will a thing and partly not to will it, but a sickness of the mind. Although it is supported by truth, it does not wholly rise up, since it is heavily encumbered by habit. Therefore there are two wills, since one of them is not complete, and what is lacking in one of them is present in the other” (Confessions, Bk. 8, Ch. 9:21).
On «stupidity».
https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings/an-epidemic-of-stupidity-and-its-danger-to-society-and-democracy
The more there is the less it is recognized for what it is.
All this sinister stuff going on in plain sight, a new normalization.
If Sister Brambilla were a feminist, she would be insulted because she will not be exercising fully the office of a prefect. In effect, the Cardinal is the prefect, and she is the pro-prefect because ultimate issues (those of governance) require his signature. Another bergoglian mess.
Exactly. I’m no feminist but I do find it insulting that one places such a well-formed, highly-competent woman in a specific rôle where she requires a minder. This seems to be a unique twist on the Peter Principle.
Simply excellent.
This whole mess stinks of the “ executive privilege “ in our current politics!
“Fernando Vergez Alzaga LC raised to the red (making Vergez the first member of the order founded by disgraced the disgraced criminal pervert, Marcial Maciel, to receive the red hat).”
That is technically true but does a disservice to Cardinal Ferrell who was in the LCs from 1961-1984. Yes, his Eminence was promoted to the episcopacy as McCarrick’s housemate after he jumped ship for DC. This does not mean that Cardinal Ferrell wasn’t formed by Fr. Maciel. Perhaps Cardinal Ferrell’s close collaboration with both Maciel and McCarrick makes him uniquely qualified for all of the various promotions he has received from Pope Francis.
Two words for Big Mac:Rachel Mastrogiacomo. (IYKYK)
Celebrity hierarchs of “their decapitated Body of Christ” here:
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/mcelroy-mccarrick-and-catholic-left/
Altieri pegs the subject the appropriate Hazmat warning. Moral contamination is deadliest because its effects unless reversed are eternal. [Alert. A confusion here. Altieri first addresses the Sr Simona Brambilla issue, the name seemingly morphed into Brandmilla suggesting a typo].
The rest is well known by the Church cognoscenti, one that Francis runs his own bizarre show as he pleases, that dicastery heads have no authority. I would rehash the previously eminent CDF or DDF that has been purposely morphed into a theological groundbreaking platform rather than the defense of the faith. This change occurring after approx 5 centuries. Yes, Cdl McElroy is Hazmat material and should be avoided.
Brandmilla has been corrected. Peter Beaulieu who usually has excellent insight in these scenarios perceives the Pontiff ‘hedging his bet’. Maybe so. Nonetheless, if the plan is to win, reinforcement is expected. The American Church, along with the African, poses a threat to Church doctrinal hegemony. Although the American Church has a longer history and with that resources. So it would be in Francis’ interests to subdue the troublesome Americans, with the McElroy appointment to key Washington DC.
Yours truly did NOT offer the opinion cited, which instead came from Altieri (who is quoted), but rather refuted it with an entirely different interpretation.
Sorry about the careless misquote.
I’ve been known to do that sort of thing. Maybe it was just last week, or maybe the week before…or both.
If Cardinal McElroy is appointed to “mix it up” with the Trump Administration, one has to wonder if the Vatican knows anything about the US political scene. Mr. Trump will be in office only 4 years. Will we get another Archbishop of DC when the next President comes?
I suspect most of the pro-Trump Catholics are traditional Catholics who will not pressure Trump to go left with McElroy.
And what about a bishop’s obligation to save souls? to nourish the spiritual life of his flock? Where is that in all of this? Is everything political with this pope?
Everything.
He seems to have chosen that Peronist-Jesuit path long ago.
Whatever he Pope’s intentions in appointing Cardinal McElroy to Washington, I’m guessing it wasn’t because of his stalwart adherence to, and promotion of, the Church’s traditional teachings.
McElroy was not merely accused of sitting on information on McCarrick – he admitted to receiving Sipe’s letter and very lamely attempted to justify his inaction. For some reason the columnist does not deem it appropriate to mention the Rachel Mastrogiacomo case. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the story was broken and covered by guerilla reporters? What difference should that make if it’s true? Again, the facts have been well documented and have not been denied, only ignored, by McElroy and the rest of the hierarchy. It is particularly galling that the appointment of this heretic and probable criminal has been greeted with such fulsome praise from official Catholic institutions such The Catholic University of America. It makes them complicit in his misdeeds. After enduring McCarrick, Wuerl and Gregory, there is no reason why the Catholics of the Washington Diocese should accept McElroy, especially since his appointment is a direct attack on them by Francis and the Vatican.
McElroy can “push against Trump” (and faithful Catholics) all he wants. The hierarchy has been neutered. No one listens to any of them anymore. They have “done it” to themselves.
Not to put too fine a point on the point, but I agree that they made eunuchs of themselves for themselves.
I see that Tobin is chiming in to support McIlroy. Can Cupich, Stowe and a few others be far behind? Should be interesting.
Will be very interesting to see how things play out. Perhaps a push from the left will balance the extreme right forces in DC. The “Barque of Peter “ desperately needs the ballast to be moved to the center of the hold directly over the keil. Perhaps, just perhaps the Cardinal is the right man for the job. Time will tell. No need to sabotage him before he has a chance to prove himself. We must practice Christian charity.
As to the appointment of the sister, we should be open minded and also give her a chance. Perhaps there are more women religious than men and the move makes sense. After all, she is accountable to a man for final decisions.
“Perhaps, just perhaps the Cardinal is the right man for the job. Time will tell. No need to sabotage him before he has a chance to prove himself. We must practice Christian charity.”
Truth always trumps charity, and once again, your progressive ideology is clouding your judgment regarding important matters. Please explain why it would be appropriate to extend charity to a church leader who actively and intentionally protected sexual predators in the Church? We don’t need to give him a chance to “prove himself.” He has already demonstrated his true character for all discerning eyes to see. Why are you defending the indefensible here?
Video (21 min. 52 sec.) Janet Smith EXPOSES controversial background of Cardinal McElroy
Thank you, Mr. Altieri.
While I might express my usual disgust about the Pope’s continued ecclesial elevation of the members of Uncle Ted McCarrick fraternity (i.e., Cupich, Tobin, and McElroy), my comment here instead focuses on the reporting of the Vatican Discasteries.
These bureaucratic functions obviously have a cost but as far as I can determine little real effect on or benefit to Catholics worldwide trying to live their lives as faithful disciples of Christ.
Based on my multi decade experience in the corporate world where there was periodically a need to right size the corporate entity to remove staff units that simply didn’t add real value to the entity to justify their cost, I wonder if the Vatican couldn’t benefit from a similar focus, call it zero base budgeting, reengineering, right sizing, whatever.
Interesting comments on this piece. At its simplest definition, Cdl. McElroy’s appointment is business as usual. The Cardinal will be viewed by the politicos and their media sycophants as just one more representative of a DC pressure group. Courted when useful and ignored when not. The people in the pews will most probably do a lot of ignoring while reconsidering their budget as relates to the Church. And there will be the good Cardinal, standing in the midst of it all and wondering why he was ever given this splendid misery.
Whatever he Pope’s intentions in appointing Cardinal McElroy to Washington, I’m guessing it wasn’t because of his stalwart adherence to, and promotion of, the Church’s traditional teachings.
A priest can’t tell a cardinal what to do, but he can tell him where to go….😆 La Cardinalessa…Papa making a mess as usual….