Francis: Christ's vicar or Curia's caretaker?

In 1963, Morris West penned "The Shoes of the Fisherman." His novel was No. 1 on The New York Times' best-seller list that year. In 1968, it was the basis of a film starring Anthony Quinn in the title role of Kiril Lakota, the metropolitan archbishop of Lviv, who had been imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp for 20 years.

Lakota is unexpectedly freed by his former jailer, who had become premier of the Soviet Union. Lakota is sent to Rome and becomes a cardinal. When the pope dies suddenly, the conclave of cardinals deadlocks on the choice of a successor, and Lakota emerges as the next pontiff.

Lakota takes the name Pope Kiril and is immediately confronted with a worldwide threat of nuclear war that grows out of a dispute between China and Russia and exacerbated by a famine brought about by American trade restrictions against China.

He realizes that in order to avoid a nuclear conflagration, the Catholic Church must act. At his papal coronation, he removes his tiara in a gesture of humility and announces that the church will give away a majority of its wealth to feed the starving. Although the Curia, the church's hierarchy, is aghast at Kiril's stunning move, the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square below stands as one with the pope.

All of this, of course, is fiction. But might there be a lesson in it for Pope Francis now?

The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI and the installation of Pope Francis I has already left its mark on the Catholic Church and in the minds of millions worldwide. The new pope breaks with tradition in a myriad of welcome and beneficial ways.

He comes from Latin America where more than 40 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics live. He is the first pope who is a Jesuit, an order of Roman Catholic priests who are known for their intellectual prowess, their scholarship and their iconoclasm. Additionally, Francis is known for being approachable, humble and an outspoken priest on behalf of the least powerful — the poor, the disabled and the sick, whether they are believers or not.

Jesuits also take a vow of obedience to the pope. And that itself raises intriguing questions. The Rev. Nicholas Steeves, a French-American Jesuit pursuing doctoral studies in Paris, said, "Who will the pope obey now? How will this obedience work?"

And that is the central question. Will Francis be content to benefit from the immense amount of good will that has accompanied his selection, and not rock the Roman Curia's boat? Or will his obedience be to God and thus be the basis for breathing long overdue reform into a church in retreat and crippled by the moral black hole that is the Roman Curia.

The Roman Curia is the central governing body of the entire Catholic Church. Its authority comes from the pope. Its job is to carry out the pope's will, and not to substitute its own.

But in fact the Curia has taken on a life of its own and has become expert in resisting efforts to reign in its independent exercise of authority.

Criticism has mounted not only from Catholics in general but also from many cardinals who believe the Roman Curia is unresponsive and obsessed with aggrandizing its own power. All of this is made significantly worse by the fact that the Curia operates in secrecy. Secrecy is the shroud that conceals and perpetuates the Curia's corruption.

Writing in The New Yorker earlier this month, Alexander Stille said, "The leadership of the Catholic Church is a closed Roman fortress, hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of the 1.2 billion ordinary believers outside." No better proof of the church's insularity is the fact that it is hemorrhaging parishioners. In Europe, the church has been hollowed out. Even in Latin America, long a bastion of Catholicism, the church is losing worshippers to Pentecostal Protestantism.

In America, discontent with the church has been rising for decades and has reached epic proportions with the widespread scandal of priests who are pedophiles. In fact, the 22 million ex-Catholics in the United States are the second or third largest denomination here.

And the malaise goes far beyond the sex scandal. It encompasses the assault on American nuns by the Curia, the debates concerning women priests and the matter of homosexuality.

The Catholic Church in America is decades late and billions of dollars short in addressing the scandalous and criminal behavior of priests who have molested children and then been protected by the church.

Instead of insisting upon standards that mandated transparency, criminal referral and zero tolerance coupled with due process, the church engaged in a cover-up that started here and found willing accomplices in the Curia in Rome.

In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan recounts a story about St. Francis of Assisi, the man whose name the pope chose for himself. Francis of Assisi is reported to have visited the church of St. Damiano. In prayer there, he heard a voice saying, "Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling into ruin." St. Francis was in the church alone!

Part II of this column will appear in Sunday's edition.

The Shadow is in prayer for the pope, but Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe