Rome, like other company towns, is an incubator for gossip. In the Eternal City, the talk is about who’s up and down for senior positions in the Roman Curia.
This is an especially fertile period for such rumours, because sometime in 2010 several important nominations in the Vatican will likely come up for a decision. At the moment, there is a long list of heads of offices who are over 75 years old and awaiting successors.
The list includes: Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re, Congregation for Bishops; Franc Rodé, Congregation for Religious; Claudio Hummes, Congregation for Clergy; Walter Kasper, Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and Paul Cordes, Cor Unum.
Over a leisurely Roman lunch on the weekend, one longtime Vatican watcher asked my reaction to speculation that Cardinal George Pell is under consideration to succeed Re at the Congregation for Bishops.
That rumour first surfaced in January in the daily Italia Oggi – although the paper hypothesized that the current apostolic nuncio in Italy, Archbishop Giuseppe Bertello, is in “pole position” for the job, and that Pell might wind up at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (the old “Propaganda Fidei”).
I have no idea whether Pell is indeed in line to take over the Congregation for Bishops or any other Vatican post. What I can say with some certainty is that Pell is perhaps the best living example of a certain species of ecclesiastical life that we might designate as the “rumour magnet.”
Since Pell took over in Sydney in 2001 and was named a cardinal in 2003, he has been prominently mentioned as a candidate for virtually every important Vatican post that has come open, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a job which actually went to then-Archbishop, now Cardinal, William Levada of the United States).
Bookmaker Paddy Power even listed Pell as a 16-1 shot to take over the Archdiocese of Westminster in 2008, apparently on the strength of the fact that Pell, who of course is not British, had once studied at Oxford.
If Pell had actually received all the Roman jobs for which he’s been prominently mentioned, by now he would virtually be running the Vatican all by himself.
FULL STORY Australia's Pell tops the chart as a rumour magnet (NCR Online)