Monsignor, a film
made in 1982—in the midst of a very pro-business administration in Washington,
D.C.—depicts a Vatican steeped in matters of finance centering around a priest
whose degree in finance makes him a prime candidate to be groomed for the Curia.
That cleric, Father John Flaherty, helps the Vatican operating budget during
World War II by involving the Holy See in the black market through a mafia. In
the meantime, he sleeps with a woman who is preparing to be a nun and
subsequently keeps from her the matter of his religious vocation. The twist is
not that Flaherty is a deeply flawed priest, or that the Vatican he serves is
vulnerable to corruption inside, but that those clerics who mercilessly go
after him are devoid of the sort of compassion that their savior preaches.
The pope, exquisitely played by Leonardo Cimino, demonstrates
how upper-echelon leadership can transcend the managerial foci that so
preoccupy partisans. Put another way, the social distance that tends to come
with organizational figure-heads can give “the big picture” characteristic of “having
perspective” some role in seeing to it that narrow organizational politics do
not have the last say even in terms of what the criteria are to be. I suspect
that too many CEOs go with the advice from their subordinates, and thus
unwittingly buy into the managerial criteria charged with garden-variety one-upmanship.
In such cases, organizational politics triumphs over what is really important
from the standpoint of organizational mission statements.
In the film, the pope presides over the traditionalist cleric’s
castigation of Flaherty . The pope later reads of Flaherty’s sordid deeds, and
then speaks with the man presumably condemned. Rather than defend himself,
Flaherty says, in effect, “guilty as charged!” Rather than take Flaherty’s
misconduct as the most telling facet of the case, the pope observes that the
traditionalist’s tone was that of jealousy, without any hint of sympathy for
his brother in faith. The traditionalist’s utter lack of brotherly love stands
out in retrospect to the pope as further from Christ, hence more serious, than
Flaherty’s corruption. This prioritizing of values is made known to the viewer
with the sight of Flaherty’s mentor, rather than the head traditionalist, as
the next pope. In fact, the mentor reinstalls Flaherty in the Vatican after the
contrite yet corrupt priest has spent some years in exile at a monastery. The
film ends with the two men embracing, with facial expressions revealing true
brotherly love—a real contrast from the cold, stern expressions of the
traditionalists who had been so confident that the “prosecution” of Flaherty
would result in one of their own as pope.
The message presented by the film is therefore that in a
religion in which God is love, hardness in place of brotherly love is without
any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than unethical conduct. This is one way
of saying that religion does not reduce to ethics because more important things
are involved. This is not to excuse corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy
alone is repugnant to anyone who takes the clerics in the Curia at their word
that they are following Christ in their living out of the Gospel. Even so,
going after such hypocrisy without even sympathy for the human nature, which we
all share, evokes the Pharisees whom Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run
by Pharisees does more than unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by
Jesus because matters of the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far
as Jesus’s preaching is concerned.
