Francis shows how reform empowers

Depending on which side of the fence you stand on, Pope Francis’s scathing address to the Vatican curia was what happens when an outsider indifferent to institutional comforts and conventions assumes power and demands change or, if you take another view, the unprecedented speech was fleeting power speaking to real, permanent power in an attempt to rejuvenate a body grown insular and irrelevant.

Closing the year as forcefully as he began it, Pope Francis consolidated his position as one of the most popular pontiffs of modern times, possibly even more so than the recently-sainted Pope John Paul II. Francis has become, as his curia critics condescendingly conceded, “a darling of the media”. The Pontiff — he celebrated his 78th birthday this month — hardly courted the curia’s popularity when he listed 15 deadly sins — “ailments” he called them — he had witnessed since he took office 20 months ago. Too much micro-management, too little internal co-ordination, examples of boastfulness, showing off, claiming to be indispensible, a tendency to gossip and defamation, and clerics leading double lives were all listed on the charge sheet.

Francis has been direct in his opposition to careerism and has moved — and not sideways either — experienced executives from the Vatican. He has unblinkingly confronted the money-laundering scandal at the the Vatican Bank which undermined the integrity of the Church for decades. From next week, new accounting practices will be mandatory for all Vatican departments. Each will have to present detailed annual budgets, a discipline never imposed before.