Religion: John Paul: Calling All Cardinals

The Sacred College convenes to talk of cashflow

As 120 Cardinals filed out of a modernistic hall at the Vatican last week, there stood Pope John Paul II, shaking hands, remembering everybody's name, offering a joke or a reminiscence to each prince of the church assembled. It was a disarmingly informal moment in a formal historic event. For the first time in four centuries the Sacred College of Cardinals had been specially summoned to discuss church affairs.

The week's agenda did not include such burning Roman Catholic issues as celibacy and doctrinal dissent. It was a practical plea for help from the church's center to key prelates around the world. The two prime topics: how to solve a financial crisis at the Vatican; and how to improve the Byzantine operations of the Curia, the world's oldest bureaucracy, which came in for implicit criticism during last year's papal elections.

Cash flow may be the reason that John Paul called such a meeting so early in his reign. The Vatican's tight financial secrecy has encouraged reports of fabulous financial holdings, by some accounts as high as $2 billion. In fact, when John Paul got his first look at the Vatican books, he was apparently shocked at how little wealth there is. Like more worldly organizations, the Vatican is plagued by galloping inflation and an increasingly high overhead. The major problem is the swollen staff of more than 3,000 which John Paul inherited from Paul VI, a born bureaucrat. Hard-pressed Vatican workers (typical clerk's pay: $150 a week) talk of forming a union. Out of charity for loyal veterans, John Paul wants to trim the payroll only through attrition. That means he needs more cash.

As the meeting ended, the Vatican issued a public financial communique, its first ever, revealing a 1979 budget deficit of around $20 million. The gap has been met by "Peter's pence," the aid offering from churches around the world, and other gifts. But the 1980 deficit will be worse and, the statement added, "within a few years the Holy See will find itself hard-pressed." Said one Cardinal, "The Vatican is certainly not Fort Knox." The meeting urged austerity at all levels. The balance sheet apparently did not cover the international mission office or the Vatican bank, and may exclude sizable investments as well.

As for the Curia, the Pope asked the Cardinals for proposals to improve its efficiency and harmony vis-á-vis the church in various nations. Despite rumors to the contrary, John Paul plans no big shake-up in structure like that by Paul VI in 1967, and he has kept incumbent officials in place. The secrecy of last week's meeting made it unclear what reforms the Cardinals proposed. Even so, the assembly was the clearest indication yet that the Pope from Poland intends to change the way the Vatican does business.