VATICAN CITY, VATICAN – OCTOBER 05: Cardinal Reinhard Marx attends the opening session of the Synod on the themes of family at Synod Hall on October 5, 2015 in Vatican City, Vatican. The main themes of this Synod of Bishops are ‘The vocation and mission of the family in the Church and the contemporary world’. (Photo by Giulio Origlia/Getty Images)
Source : Huffington Post
The Clash Between George Pell and Reinhard Marx
As the faithful wait for the Holy Doors to open up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the prison gates have opened for Francesca Chaouqui; from effigies of a new beginning to a sign that, once again, nothing’s new under the sun.
Even though she was immediately released since she collaborated and is not in any case criminally responsible — profiles that a journalist isn’t fit to judge — the young lobbyist rises up today, not only in the media but also in history, symbolically, as the image of a watershed moment and a changing of the guard. Not to mention a spring betrayed. From the Vatileaks of dilettante cardinals to those of professional consultants; prelude to a battle of the titans that has jeopardized and shaken a bi-millennial building to its core. There’s a lot more going on here then synod skirmishes over the family.
For the benefit of those to come, a Spanish monsignor from Rioja and a PR expert from the Magna Graecia have put faces on the first true scandal of Pope Francis’s era, centered on his people, selected by him, with a cast selected in an improvident manner and who took the stage following his election. Above and beyond individual responsibilities, all of which will be ascertained by the proper authorities, the two most high-profile people in COSEA (Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See), the commission Pope Francis set up in order to impose his authority over the Vatican’s financial agencies, have been suddenly transformed into an emblem of an entirely out-of-control Babel.
The collective memory flashes back to July 2013, when Francesca Chaouqui suddenly became all the rage in the modern media, more celebrated and lauded than a Nobel Prize-winning economist: halfway between a young, Mediterranean, tanned Joan of Arc — the avenging angel of the Curia’s misdeeds, and a Saint Chiara in a Wall Street dress suit, impassioned crusader for transparency and the Pope’s advisor for all things financial.
A surreal role worthy of the best Brecht play, above and beyond the chiaroscuro effects, between hermetic backdrops and comedic turns, but which must not be underestimated by mistaking supporting roles for protagonists. Vatileaks was an Italian Job, complete with the dialect-inflected accents of assemblies from Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and other Italian regions sucked into a fratricidal game of Risk. But the clash currently underway for hegemony over the Holy See’s economic patrimony is an affair broken down into German and British, the languages of the agencies born of COSEA’s institutional overhaul: the Secretary and the Economic Advisor. These two structures are sustained by two giants in clout and size from both a physical and political point of view: Australian Cardinal George Pell, and his Teutonic counterpart Reinhard Marx.
Categories: CHRISTIANITY