The veteran Vatican correspondent and former Rome bureau chief for Catholic News Service was one of the very few in the media who predicted that 2013 would be a phenomenal year for the Church with the election of a new pope.

And Thavis wasn’t even based in Rome when he made his prediction. He had retired to his native Minnesota and had published The New York Times bestseller The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the- Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church.

“But once a Vaticanista always a Vaticanista,” joked Thavis, who kept his ear close to the ground — or rather his eye on the Internet — of his former Vatican news sources to read the curia’s tea leaves.
But it was more than that.

Thavis, after 30 years in Rome — perhaps the most informed journalist covering the Holy See — also knew that Pope Benedict would break from tradition by announcing his resignation. After all, late last year the Pope-emeritus had completed his books on Jesus of Nazareth, appointed a large number of cardinals as if he “seemed to be setting up a conclave.” And Benedict earlier had indicated it was “a duty” to resign and not drag the Church through a period of a pope’s extended ill health.

And, arriving back in Rome at the right place at the very right time, Thavis noted in his blog that Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was “a rising star” as a clear-sighted critic of the Vatican establishment.

Now, Thavis told an audience at Assumption University here May 28, where he was awarded the institution’s annual Christian Culture Gold Medal, he hopes this reformer will be able to “navigate a world he really doesn’t know very well.”

Thavis’s book might help.

The book breaks down the Vatican, demystifying its various offices and roles, and presents the real “humanness” of the institution that the world doesn’t see, largely because the people who cover the Vatican — the media — see it as a “monolithic” institution and more powerful than it actually is. Rome’s annual budget is “less than most American universities,” he said.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t strong personalities galore, many with their own agendas and protected turf, sometimes spouting off in ways that the media take to be the Church’s official position. All that means, Thavis said, is the Vatican can be very “decentralized” and “less like Machiavelli and more like the Keystone Kops.”

It’s a place, he added, “Where the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” This results in officials going rogue with outlandish statements like equating criticism of sexual abuse with Jews victimized in the Holocaust. Or misinterpreting the papal butler scandal. There, the suggestion was that the butler represented deeper skullduggery when “in reality he was an unbalanced, gullible man who had delusions of grandeur,” Thavis said. But how the butler got his job, so close to the pope, suggests a Vatican less corporate than old world patronage where getting even menial jobs “depends on who you know.”

Not that it takes away from the Vatican’s entrenched institutional values. And in many respects Rome can be its own worst enemy.

For example, Thavis said, the Church is still “secretive,” suspicious of outsiders and hidebound when it comes to communication. Yes the Vatican finally has web sites but the content is highly controlled and there are no such things as social media in the sense of online discussion. And the Church’s long time emphasis on academic or ecclesiastical language “can be offensive,” such as calling homosexual behaviour “disordered.”

Further, announcements even at this year’s conclave were made in Latin, which confused the numerous non-Italian speaking cardinals, let alone outside observers.

“The media I think misreads the Vatican,” he said, thinking there’s massive unified scheming behind the curtains when “the grand design is not there.”

Thavis hopes Francis “zeros in” on communication, and believes the new Pope is already changing the elitist face of the Church through his own actions, such as actually living his vow of poverty by eschewing the Papal Apartments, and speaking in a “simple and direct way” what Christ’s teachings are all about.

Francis, Thavis said, “is going to make (the Church’s) message easier for most people to understand.”

(Stang is a freelance writer in Windsor, Ont.)