According to the group of “diplomats” the current Secretary of State, who is not a diplomat, has done his time. They say they fear he want[s] to appoint another non diplomat as the head of the Secretariat of State and so someone needs to explain to the Pope how wrong it would be to insist on going down this route.
That is pretty much the sum of the reasons for all these incredible leaks in the past few months: blackmail from a set of privileged clerics who wish to regain former influence (text from Vatican Insider). How much has the Holy Father decried privileges, careerism, the filth in Church politics! It is iniquitous to submit our 85-year-old Pontiff to this disgusting power struggle for... what, exactly? How is the Lord being promoted by this succession of embarrassing leaks?
The Church needs thorough purification, today more than at almost any other time in History: cabals of strange unbelieving men dominate many chanceries around the world and much of the Curia. But purification will not come from the wrath of some scorned diplomats. Cardinal Bertone is not, as the Spanish saying goes, a "saint of our devotion", but it is the Pope that is harmed by this unending pettiness. His Holiness has larger and greater things in his mind - in the first place, the unity of the Church, purified by the Cross.
It is through him that one must enter the service of shepherd. Jesus highlights very clearly this basic condition by saying: "he who... climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber" (Jn 10: 1). This word "climbs" - anabainei in Greek - conjures up the image of someone climbing over a fence to get somewhere out of bounds to him.
"To climb" - here too we can also see the image of careerism, the attempt to "get ahead", to gain a position through the Church: to make use of and not to serve. It is the image of a man who wants to make himself important, to become a person of note through the priesthood; the image of someone who has as his aim his own exaltation and not the humble service of Jesus Christ.
But the only legitimate ascent towards the shepherd's ministry is the Cross. This is the true way to rise; this is the true door. It is not the desire to become "someone" for oneself, but rather to exist for others, for Christ, and thus through him and with him to be there for the people he seeks, whom he wants to lead on the path of life. ...
The relationship between the Cross and unity is revealed: the Cross is the price of unity. Above all, however, it is the universal horizon of Jesus' action that emerges.
If, in his prophecy about the shepherd, Ezekiel was aiming to restore unity among the dispersed tribes of Israel (cf. Ez 34: 22-24), here it is a question not only of the unification of a dispersed Israel but of the unification of all the children of God, of humanity - of the Church of Jews and of pagans.
Benedict XVI
May 7, 2006
