Word: vaticans
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...while the Pope enjoys his homecoming this week (Monday he traveled to the small Bavarian town of Marktl am Inn where he was born), Vatican insiders say the beginning of the Benedict era back at the Roman Curia begins in earnest this fall. Some, in fact, predict that Bertone - a longtime trusted confidante of the former Cardinal Ratzinger - was handpicked to be Secretary of State in order to usher in a virtual revolution in the way Catholic Church headquarters operates. Through an effort that will be part downsizing, part priority overhaul, the theologian pontiff is said to want Church headquarters...
...first post the Pope had to fill was his own old job, to head of the Vatican office that oversees doctrinal orthodoxy. His choice of the then Archbishop of San Francisco, William J. Levada, was the first sign that Benedict would take his own counsel on key personnel changes. Defying conventional wisdom that the doctrinal capo had to be a European intellectual heavy hitter, the Pope chose the shy California native whom he'd known well when they worked together in Rome in the early 1980s. By choosing Levada it was also evident that the Vatican's theologian-in-chief...
...This key Curia post had been held by another Italian power player, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe. Replacing Sepe with Indian Cardinal Ivan Dias, archbishop of Bombay, was proof that the Pope isn't afraid to take on the Vatican status quo. It also was an acknowledgment that the man responsible for overseeing more than a thousand dioceses in the developing world might best be chosen from the developing world...
...what was more a shift in style than structure, the Vatican press office was passed in July from longtime papal spokesman Joaqu?n Navarro-Valls, a debonair lay member of Opus Dei, who often was a newsmaker himself, to the more low-key Jesuit priest Father Federico Lombardi, already the director general of Vatican radio and television. The choice shows the desire to better coordinate the Holy See's communication agencies, long seen as too disjointed...
...Timed together with Sodano's retirement comes the end of the Curia career for the governor of Vatican City, U.S. Cardinal Edmund Szoka, who will be replaced on Friday by Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, currently the Holy See foreign minister. This will leave the job of top foreign affairs official vacant. Among the names circulating are two linked to France: Italian-born Archbishop Fortunato Baldelli, who is currently nuncio (ambassador) in France, and Archbishop Christophe Pierre, 60, currently the nuncio in Uganda. Some observers say that Benedict still needs to find his voice on world affairs, and a forceful player...