In an extraordinary move, Lesley-Anne Knight, my successor as Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis (CI, the Church's international relief agency), has not been granted the nihil obstat (basically, official approval) by the Vatican's Secretariat of State to stand for another four-year term.
There is outrage in the Confederation.
According to the statutes, a list of candidates must be presented timeously to the Holy See which then rings the secretary of the applicant's bishops' conference to ascertain whether the candidate is 'in good standing' with the Church.
The list is sent to all members of the Caritas Internationalis Confederation (165 members globally, serving 24 million poor people and supporting projects worth US$5.5 billion). The Executive Committee then elects from that list and the successful candidate is presented to the General Assembly for ratification.
It is completely within the statutory right of the Holy See to refuse even an incumbent candidate, but not to judge how that candidate has fared in his/her job in terms of management, carrying out the Assembly-approved strategic plan, even serving the poor.
That is the task of the members of the Confederation according to its democratic constitution — and according to the members' greater knowledge of the services rendered by the Secretary General. If it were otherwise, the winning candidate would be an appointee of the Secretariat of State, not someone elected by the membership.
It seems to me that, in this instance, the Holy See is making a judgment call on the work of the incumbent which is the task of the Caritas membership. If Knight was in good standing with the Church four years ago, what has changed?
The reasons given for not granting Knight the nihil obstat (to my knowledge, the first time this has been done to an incumbent in the history of the Confederation) are outlined in a rather oblique way in a letter signed by Cardinal Bertone (the Pope's right-hand man) to all bishops' conferences.
It includes a reference to Durante L'Ultima Cena ('During the Last Supper'), a letter signed by Pope John Paul II in 2004, awarding CI 'public, juridical and canonical personality'.
This was negotiated and signed during my tenure as we all wished to make our special status with the Holy See clearer so that we could work in a more dynamic, cooperative manner with the social and political structure of the Church throughout the world while maintaining the freedom of action that was an integral part of our Catholic identity.
The Pontifical Council Cor Unum, as the Pope's organisation for 'charity', was given a special place — in the original Italian to seguire ed accompagnare, 'follow and accompany' (not 'supervise and guide' as the English translation on the Vatican website erroneously states), the activities of CI.
Cor Unum's staff, though not qualified, with one exception, in Caritas' work, were invited to all meetings where they could make a contribution. They attended occasionally and were usually silent as they seemed to regard their task as inquisitorial not collegial.
Cardinal Cordes, their then President, was invited to a special Confederation meeting concerning its Catholic identity and mission, held in Poland. He came for a few hours, gave a puzzling speech and then left, citing important work in Warsaw.
He in fact spent three days at a meeting of Communion and Liberation (one of the favoured lay movements within the Church) and missed the session on how Caritas regions throughout the world expressed their Catholic identity.
By contrast, when Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was Secretary to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, we combined forces to train African and Latin bishops in involving the Church in the World Bank's poverty strategy papers and in peace-building and reconciliation. That unfortunately ended when he was transferred, first to Geneva and then to Dublin.
We worked with Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent Observer to the UN in Geneva, in organising a global meeting of grassroots Catholic organisations working with people living with HIV/AIDS. This changed positively the relationship between the Church and UNAIDS.
There are many other examples which deny any kind of rift between Caritas Internationalis and the structure of the Church, especially over advocacy positions, and it was Caritas which sought more cooperation, not less. Lesley-Anne Knight, to my knowledge, tried to follow that tradition. Yet the opposite view seems to be the nub of the nihil obstat in Cardinal Bertone's letter.
I have no doubt that Christ is at the heart of the work carried out by Caritas in the Church's name, and that is recognised by the people the agency serves — the poor.
In Bam in Iran after the earthquake, Caritas Iran together with other Confederation members ran (and still run) a large program to alleviate the sufferings of the people affected. One old lady, a Moslem like everyone in that area, asked one of the Caritas workers for a Bible.
The worker said that wasn't possible as it was not the task of Caritas to proselytise (as Pope Benedict wrote in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, 'God is Love') and if she gave her a Bible the authorities would close down the program anyway.
She asked 'You're Moslem. Why do you want one?'
The old lady replied 'There are many people helping us here but you people are different. I want to understand why you treat us with such respect and love.'
'Respect and love' — two elements perhaps lacking in the current brouhaha.
Duncan MacLaren was Secretary General of Cariitas Internationalis 1999–2007 (two terms) and before that Director of International Relations at Caritas Internationalis. He spent in all 11 years in the Vatican. He intends to write a memoir of his time there.