I Listen to George Weigel

If George Weigel tells me something about Catholicism or the Papal Conclave, I listen.   He's the E.F. Hutton of Catholic commentators.   So this commentary, prompted by the bad decision of the Vatican to stop American Cardinals from giving daily press conferences in which a man like Cardinal Dolan could do so much to explain Catholicism and the New Evangelization to the world, gets my attention:

What all of thus suggests is the imperative need for a dramatic reform of governance at the highest levels of the Catholic Church in the new pontificate. Italian curialists once said, and with good reason, "We know how to do this." Now, many of them manifestly don't. And when one adds to sheer incompetence and a marked inability to connect the dots between actions and consequences (or, in the case of the former pontiff's title and vesture, symbols and consequences) the reality of what a distinguished Italian academic described to me as an Italian "culture of corruption" seeping behind the Vatican walls under Secretary of State Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone's re-Italianization of the Roman Curia, it becomes clear that, as Italian Vaticanista Sandro Magister wrote recently, the new pope's First Hundred Days ought to see a massive housecleaning and the first steps toward building a new institutional culture in the Church's central bureaucracy, so that it becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.