Word: benelli
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When the man who was to become Pope Paul VI was serving as the No. 2 official at the Vatican Secretariate of State back in 1948, he chose shrewd, witty Giovanni Benelli as his right-hand man. Four years after assuming the papal throne in 1963, Paul installed Benelli in his own former job at State, and ever since then Benelli has been the tireless "executive director" of the Vatican...
Naming only three Italians, Paul surprised many Vatican observers in bypassing the Vatican's top diplomat, Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, and Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, one of his closest advisers and the Deputy Secretary of State. However, promotions would have removed them from their present posts, which cardinals do not fill, and Paul may consider them indispensable. Two of the new cardinals were in pectore (in the breast), meaning that their names will be kept secret unless the Pope discloses them; these secret cardinals might be his two aides. Recent appointments in pectore have been from Eastern Europe, but Paul last...
Arrupe requested a meeting, which was held last month in Paul's private library. While Arrupe's first assistant waited in an anteroom, the Superior General entered the library to find seated with the Pontiff Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, the No. 2 man at the Secretariat of State, where hostility to the Jesuits often runs high. The Pope was warm but firm. Arrupe's responsibility, he insisted, was to reimpose discipline and respect for tradition and persuade the increasingly egalitarian Jesuits not to change the structure of their order. Paul's message to the Jesuits: enough innovation...
This time, in a follow-up article in the Observer, he called the archbishop the Vatican's "universal hatchet man," adding that "there is no need for an embattled war psychosis which sees enemies lurking in every corner." Although Benelli is technically only a deputy to Papal Secretary of State Jean Villot, he functions as a kind of chief of staff to Pope Paul, overseeing and coordinating the activities of the entire Vatican bureaucracy, except in the area of diplomatic relations. Nicknamed "the Berlin Wall," he has the reputation of being authoritarian in administrative matters and an alarmist. Archbishop...
Despite the renewed tempest, General Arrupe declined to reprimand Hebblethwaite or dispatch fresh apologies to Benelli. Any action, said a Jesuit spokesman in Rome, would have to be taken by Hebblethwaite's superiors in England. The reaction was not surprising; many officials in Arrupe's own curia are known to concur quietly with Hebblethwaite's complaint...