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Paul has streamlined many of the baroque papal ceremonies and abolished the archaic privileges of Rome's Black Nobility. He has not only internationalized the Curia but also has brought about the most sweeping reform in that musty bureaucracy since 1588, by abolishing a number of useless offices, limiting appointments to five-year terms and providing the church with a kind of executive prime minister in the form of the Vatican's Secretary of State.
"On matters of structure," says one official of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Paul is willing to modernize. But not on matters of faith and morals." Theologically, the Pope is not a progressive thinker. He has repeatedly referred to himself as a student of Jacques Maritain, the gentle French philosopher whose "integral humanism" was a sensitive rethinking of the insights of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain was a fresh and life-giving force within Catholicism during the '30s and '40s, most notably in his defense of political democracy against the charms of fascism (Paul, in his years of service with the Vatican Secretariat of State, strongly opposed Mussolini). Since the Second Vatican Council, however, Maritain has turned his back on any kind of theological or philosophical progress. So has Paul. Some Vatican officials date the increasingly negative tone of Paul's speeches from the publication two years ago of The Peasant of the Garonne, in which Maritain railed against the errors of theologians who would abandon the "perennial philosophy" for the seductive lure of existentialism or other modern "fads."
Vulgar Objects. Like Maritain, the Pope firmly believes that the tradition of scholastic philosophy is a timeless mode of expressing the truths of the Christian faith. His encyclical on the Eucharist contended that the late-medieval word transubstantiation was the only way of expressing the mystery of the consecration, when the bread and wine at Mass become Christ's body and blood. His new creed, promulgated last July, was a disappointingly unimaginative restatement of doctrinal orthodoxy that differed only in minor details from the language of the Council of Trent. His argument against contraception in Humanae Vitae rested on a traditional understanding of natural law—the theory that the function of human organs is defined by their nature. This particular interpretation has been abandoned by most Catholic philosophers as crude and mechanistic.
Despite Paul's admirably progressive reform of the Curia, the men who administer it are still for the most part conservative. The Secretary of State is the venerable Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, 83, and his chief assistant is the equally reactionary Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, 47. A brilliant administrator, Benelli is gradually emerging as one of the most important men in the Vatican—largely because he is considered the principal pipeline for information from the