ON POLITICAL BOOKS

...Then, says Hofmann, during the conclave to elect a new pope after the death of John Paul I, with the tide turning in Wojtyla's favor, he helped things along by promising that he would control the Vatican curia—that is, the bureaucracy—and give the bishops more real power...

...But most of the time, that alibi won't wash, and surely not in this instance...

...Even as other papers get better about realizing the importance of the "culture" of the institutions they cover, the Times—with the happy exception of The Washington Talk page—still seems stuck with the old formulas...

...If they are ubiquitous in the Pentagon, they're even more so in the Vatican, and for the same reasons...

...He assiduously raised his visibility by making speeches, publishing theoretical tracts, getting a piece of the action on many of the big issues confronting the church, and traveling...

...The book is subtitled, tantalizingly, "A Slightly Wicked View of the Holy See:' but that's publisher's hype and not to be regarded as infallible truth...

...Surprise, surprise...

...In this country, the only place I can think of that is even in the same league is the National Security Agency...

...In 1981, a Vatican department fired a perfectly competent clerk because she had the temerity to marry a former priest...

...he has known aides to the last five popes...

...He quotes Fulton J. Sheen, the "television *0 Vatican...

...we have had the flu ." Controlling the boss...

...He has covered innumerable Joseph Nocera is an associate editor at Texas Monthly and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...It's as endemic at the Vatican as it is anywhere...

...A bureaucracy that is out of touch with the common folk...

...That's certainly true of most of the Western correspondents stationed in Russia...

...Paul Hofmann really does understand: "Bureaucrats naturally cling to their posts and privileges, and refuse to fade away even after their functions have become obsolete:' he writes at one point...

...For 35 years he was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and during much of his tenure he was stationed in Rome...

...Congdon and Weed, $18.95...

...On the one hand, as with any large bureaucracy, there is a larger purpose, a goal towards which the institution is supposed to be working...

...is a memoir, except that Hofmann's subject is not himself but his former beat...

...According to Hofmann, most mid- and lower-level curia officials don't have that much to do...

...Some of the time the author's excuse is a good one: if he wrote what he knew, he would be thrown out of the country...

...This is the particular curse of the Times...

...This is a work that truly understands that what goes on in the Vatican is not all that different from what goes on in the American government, or the Kremlin for that matter...

...Hofmann reports, however, that the incumbent pope has had a firmer grip on the bureaucracy than any pope in recent memory...

...This may seem obvious, except that—again, like any other large organization— the purpose is often impossible to discern, obscured as it is by the day-to-day machinations of the bureaucrats...

...As an explicator of what goes on behind the Vatican's walls, this book is a minor treasure...

...I had the same nagging feeling as I read this book as I do when a sportswriter puts out a good "story of a season" book, or a foreign correspondent writes a best-seller about the country he has just finished covering...

...He explains where popes get their spending money...

...Yet I continually found myself even more intrigued by another side of 0 Vatican!—its illumination of the immutable ways of bureaucracy...

...Thus is he able to explain—among many, many other things—how Karol Wojtyla's reputation among his fellow cardinals grew to the point that he had a chance to become pope...

...Vatican stories, including the Second Vatican Council...

...And yet, much as I enjoyed reading 0 Vatican, there is something about it that bothers me...

...Hofmann's purpose is considerably nobler...

...And elsewhere: "Civil servants, even competent and incorruptible ones, usually cling to the status quo, are jealous of their jurisdictional fields, and are annoyed by outside interference...

...Now comes Paul Hofmann, offering us the chance to peek through the Vatican keyhole, via his new book...

...Hofmann calls the Vatican "The World's Oldest Bureaucracy:' but it is his feel for how all bureaucracies work that makes his descriptions especially delicious...

...In a sense, 0 Vatican...

...The eternal struggle between the home office and the troops in the field...

...In the case of the Vatican, that purpose is supposed to be furthering the teachings of Jesus Christ...

...Thus Hofmann is also able to offer us this insight into the enormous influence of Francis Cardinal Spellman, the long time archbishop of New York: "He brought fat checks, in dollars, for the pontiff and various church projects, and didn't forget to tip the Vatican flunkies?' The book is full of similarly intriguing observations...

...As Hofmann writes (quoting a Dutch priest) in his very first paragraph, "Nobody [in the Vatican] ever mentions Jesus Christ!' That Paul Hofmann was the man to write this book there can be little doubt...

...I suspect the reason Hofmann didn't report most of this information in the pages of The New York Times was that neither he nor his editors considered it "news:' The death of a Pope is news...

...But an explanation of how things work—and why—is soft and mushy, and might even require—horror of horrors—some judgments by the reporter...

...he makes sense out of the Vatican's troubled (of late) finances...

...For the man in charge, having an "ecclesiastical assistant" is a symbol of power, and for the (usually) young priest, well, as Hofmann points out, "[He] moves in high church circles, picks up useful information, and makes contacts that will be valuable for his career...

...Namely: why wasn't I able to read all this good stuff at the time, in the newspaper or the magazine that employs (or in this case, employed) the author...

...once a secretary to a cardinal, who appeared quite healthy, told Hofmann, "We are going out little these days...

...he has attempted to write, to use his own phrase, "a 'sociology' of the Vatican:' and in this he has largely succeeded...

...It's a great deal for book publishers—but it leaves the rest of us out in the cold, often until it's too late to matter...

...he describes how the Vatican got into the modern art collecting business...

...Wojtyla—now Pope John Paul II—didn't become Pope by staying home in Poland and minding the store...

...A bureaucracy that conforms to its own narrow rules, even when they violate the dictates of common sense...

...I fear that good reporters like Paul Hofmann largely will continue to know much, much more than they tell us in its pages...

...The Kremlin comes to mind, and maybe a xenophobic country like Albania, but that's about it...

...An innovation in the curia that would surely be applauded by priests at large:' writes Hofmann, "might be a papal order to all Vatican bureaucrats to get out of their offices periodically to make house visits in the shantytowns that ring Rome, or help operate day-care centers for slum children . . .." Oh, and don't worry about where they'll find the time...

...I don't think Hofmann did much new legwork to write this book...

...He has a good eye for shifting nuance—an important asset for a Vaticanologist—and he seems to have heard every bit of gossip that floated through Vatican City in the 20-odd years he was on the case...

...Although the book is far from perfect—the prose is a little too languid and some of the chapters seem padded and repetetive—it is nonetheless the closest any outsider has ever come to illuminating the culture of the Vatican...

...Much of the reason THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY/APRIL 1984 John Paul II was elected in the first place was that the majority of cardinals were fed up with the high-handed ways of the Italian-dominated curia...

...and for 20 years and more he has been cultivating Vatican sources...

...Hofmann is one of the best of the the very small handful of reporters who might be called Vaticanologists...

...and on and on...

...Vatican special assistants also tend to identify with their boss...

...Special assistants...

...Office chiefs',' writes Hofmann, "who may be cardinals or archbishops, are frequently maneuvered by monsignors, who make all the decisions without seeming to!' Even the pope can be led around by the curia if he allows it to happen...

...Vatican II is news...

...And for the student of American government, there is an added kicker: although Hofmann never makes the point explicitly, the similarities between what goes on in the Vatican and what goes on in, say, the Pentagon are so obvious they practically leap off the page...

...More shrouded in secrecy and myth and obscure (and obscurantist) bureaucracy...

...rather he mined his old notebooks and collected from them a lot of the nuggets he gathered over the years: reminiscences of various popes and cardinals and Vatican power-brokers he had met during his tenure with the Times, or stories of Vatican intrigue that had been told to him during dimly remembered lunches...

...bishop" of the 1950s, as saying, "I could have gone higher and higher in the church if I had paid the price...

...a papal visit to Poland is news...