The Vatican needs its own department of government efficiency.

No, this isn’t a suggestion that the next pope should be Trumpian or that a personality like Elon Musk should be ransacking the ecclesiastical offices in search of budgets to slash and agencies to gut.

Even so, the Vatican bureaucracy, like that of the United States government, is too big, sprawling, and unfocused, and its deficit spending is unsustainable.

God knows—and some of his believers do, too—how important doctrinal issues are, but this article is meant to address merely the governance and finances of the papal office and will not touch directly upon doctrinal controversies.

The church’s mission is supernatural. Its purpose is preaching in full the Gospel with its central mysteries of the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, and redemption from sin; nourishing souls with the sacraments instituted by Christ; and promoting other-worldly love in a hate-filled world. That is what Saint Peter did in Nero’s Rome, and it’s what his successors should do in today’s global anti-Christian environment.

The central government of the church cannot properly serve this other-worldly mission if it fails to govern its clergy and institutions justly. It will be defective in preaching the Gospel to the poor, the rich, and the middle class if it fails to perform good stewardship of its financial resources.

Much of what today’s Vatican bureaucracy does and says is a distraction from the core Christian mission. The pope’s cabinet departments, known as the Curia, have come more and more to resemble the ministries of secular western European states, complete with officials whose profiles match those aspiring to get invitations to Davos. The Catholic Church for years has preached the doctrine of “subsidiarity”—that government should be exercised as much as possible not centrally, but at the level most local it is competent to function. The Curia, sadly, has never applied this wisdom to its own  structure of authority.

For at least the past half century, the Vatican bureaucracy has been poorly supervised. Pope John Paul II, notwithstanding his other great qualities and accomplishments, was notorious for his lack of attention to Vatican governance. Pope Benedict XVI inherited a mess, allowed it to get worse, and gave up hope of reforming it. Corruption and backbiting were so overwhelming to the  morale of this scholarly church leader that he abdicated the papal office.

Some of Benedict’s best friends acknowledge this. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who was one of the closest confidants of both John Paul and Benedict, stated this candidly in an interview published April 27 offering his public advice to the cardinals entering the upcoming conclave: 

The pontificate of Benedict XVI was undermined by his meager aptitude for governing, and this is a concern that is valid for all times, including the near future. Woe betide, moreover, if it be forgotten that this is a question of governing that very special reality which is the Church.

Under Pope Francis, governance and finance went from very bad to even worse.

During the conference of cardinals in 2013 before they entered the Sistine Chapel for the secret balloting, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio made a powerful and positive impression with his remarks that the church had become too “self-referential.” It was generally believed that his election to become Pope Francis was a mandate not to change perennial doctrine, but to clean up and shrink the Vatican’s self-serving, scandalously corrupt bureaucracy.

Francis made early gestures toward that end, but he failed to follow through. He created an unprecedented fiscal coordination and oversight office called the Council on the Economy and moved the archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, to Rome, to run it.

Pell clashed with the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy, which proceeded to eat him for lunch, probably a long, lavish, five-course Roman repast washed down with a few bottles of Cesanese del Piglio.

Pell was forced to return to Australia to face charges of sexually abusing an altar boy. He was tried, convicted, served some years imprisoned in solitary confinement, and eventually released and fully exonerated on appeal. Suspicions persist that curial foes are responsible for promoting the false charges.

After Pell’s removal from Rome, the project of financial reform of the Vatican collapsed into a shameful past-time of finger-pointing, dismissals, indictments, and prosecutions of various Vatican actors including the cardinal who had been Francis’s chief of staff, Angelo Becciu.

The Vatican, warned Pell in an article written just before his unexpected death in 2023, “is slowly going broke.”

At the beginning of his tenure, the Argentine pope created another novel entity called the Council of Cardinals, numbering only eight (later nine) members, intended to give him streamlined advice on key matters of church governance. This body’s chief mandate was to prepare a complete reform of the Curia.

A reform plan could have been produced within a few weeks. Instead, years and years have gone by, and those members of the public who initially showed great interest,  have now largely forgotten the issue. Eventually a plan emerged that simply rearranged the deck chairs. Some Vatican departments were renamed, and power was redistributed, acts that did little to resolve the underlying problems. This had probably been Francis’s intention all along. Showy reorganization as a substitute for true reform is, sadly, easy-way-out for many people wanting to demonstrate “results” when put in charge of bureaucracies.

Francis convened a series of synods, that is, assemblies of prelates and experts, to advise him on the problem of governance. These sessions were organized to look like examples of “collegiality” in papal teaching and decision making—according to the principle that not just the pope but all bishops are successors of Christ’s original apostles. These assemblies have functioned mostly as window-dressing for decisions already made by Francis and his inner circle.

Any prelate who has wished to stay on the good side of Francis  praised “synodality” as a new “model” for the church. At the same time, as in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, there has never been consensus on what synodality actually means.

Church governance by Francis can be said to have begun out of tragedy—the bureaucratic disarray left by Benedict—and ended as farce. That farce is the institution Francis created called the “Synod on Synodality.”

What could be more self-referential than a Synod on Synodality?

Never should it be suggested that Elon Musk is Christ-like, but with no sacrilege intended, it could be said that there was something DOGE-like about Jesus’s response to the worldly abuses of sacred precincts like the Jerusalem temple.

“He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables,” says the Gospel of John. “He made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple courts,” According to Matthew, Jesus explained to startled worshippers, “It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

The world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and others who look benignly on the Church’s mission should pray that the next pope will make major progress against the iniquities of poor governance. These evils are so extensive that they keep the church from fulfilling its mission.