Pope Francis and the Managerial Revolution
On HR in the Vatican
Happy Easter!
If you’re in need of some suitably rousing, celebratory music, here’s a personal favorite:
Yesterday, Pope Francis passed away. May he rest in peace.
I wrote an assessment of his legacy for Compact. While Pope Francis articulated remarkable critiques of technological civilization, his mode of governing the Church ended up accelerating the advance of managerialism:
Upon his election in 2013, some expected Pope Francis to undo the excesses of the imperial papacy, the model of centralized church governance associated with proclamation of papal infallibility at Vatican I. But even as Francis promised to prioritize horizontal governance, he leaned into the vertical exercise of power, “just doing things” in ways that would have stunned his predecessor Pius IX. He did so, however, in a novel way. The Francis papacy saw the rise and triumph of the managerial model within the Church. Francis wasn’t the first pope to make sweeping assertions of his juridical powers, but he was the first pope to give the Vatican a human-resources department. That change is part and parcel of a decisive and dangerous shift, which will prove hard to roll back.
Read the rest at Compact. If paid subscribers run into a paywall, email me at nathan.pinkoski@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf.
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I have one amusing Pope Francis anecdote. My wife and I flew to Rome for our honeymoon. We planned to go to St Peter’s for the special blessing of newlywed couples. But she forgot to bring her wedding dress, necessary to enter into the audience hall. So we spent the night before our early morning audience walking around Rome, trying to find a passable white dress that would permit us to make our way through to meet his Holiness. We had to make do with a white skirt, and thankfully the winter weather gave her plausible cover to wear a coat. Here’s my wife admiring her creativity:
When we met the Pope, he asked us to pray for him. We still do.
Francis wanted the church to become a little bit more like the world; Your final sentence; bravo, that’s brilliant, and yes that is the tragedy of his papacy.
If you want a religion, that’s more like the world, Protestantism has that nailed, offering up a veritable Smorgasbord of religious beliefs for you to pick and choose. Eternal damnation? No thanks, too gloomy.
Really, if Catholicism isn’t doctrinal and an intellectual continuum, it’s just protestantism or worse Disney with cooler buildings.
I have a feeling no pope can fix where we are going but Francis accelerated and exacerbated the problem.
Wow, the Dan Hitchens piece at first things was really really tough on Francis. His description of the first 10 years - as written in 2023 - was (to paraphrase), Francis had destroyed much and achieved very little. I know he can’t write this now that Francis has passed away but in 23 he was much more free.
I think Francis was by conviction a liberal and he governed in the manner of a squishy Peronist; Feckless would be an apt description for a secular leader but of course not the holy father.
It is not a stretch to guess he thought the church had to be more like the world around it to stay relevant. There’s also the simple explanation that he believed in the leftist progressive bunk. The bunco artist is not an unusual thing, but not something applicable to Christ’s Vicar.
Running something that big is not easy. He just wasn’t very good at it.