John Paul II, CEO : To the Problems of a Modern, Contentious World, the Pope Brings a Management Style That Is Strictly Business

A PRIEST who works in relative obscurity in the Vatican bureaucracy was astonished not long ago to receive a formal invitation to lunch with Pope John Paul II, whom he had previously seen only on ceremonial occasions. For several days the priest fretted. Why had the Pope invited him? Had he done something wrong?

Hours before the luncheon was to begin, the man learned that a recent papal speech had touched on an area he had been working on for almost a year. “It was a delightful lunch and an instructive one,” says the priest, who hastily outlined his work on the problem before joining the Pope and a handful of senior churchmen in the private dining room of the papal apartment. “Instructive because I learned that when you receive his invitation you’d better know why you were invited and come prepared. It’s strictly business. He doesn’t ask you there for small talk.”

The story, which the priest recounted only on condition that he not be identified, offers a hint of Pope John Paul’s executive style. Unlike the entrepreneurs and business moguls of the secular world, John Paul doesn’t have to concern himself with balance sheets and stock performance, nor need he lose any sleep worrying about efficient production of widgets. He is not a businessman, by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, as leader of 840 million Catholics and guardian of one of the world’s largest and least understood organizations, John Paul’s management strategy in many ways parallels that of men who have run massive corporations.

Like Chrysler’s Lee A. Iacocca, IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. and EDS’s H. Ross Perot, John Paul has a clear view of his organization’s goals and has devoted himself tirelessly to teaching others about them. Like his corporate counterparts, he has surrounded himself with energetic subordinates who share their leader’s vision and has inspired them to action. And while the Pope’s warm, relaxed graciousness might at first seem out of place in a corporate board room, it seems to let his employees know that he expects nothing less than their very best efforts in everything they do.

That doesn’t mean that the Pope’s modern management techniques have assured smooth sailing for the church--far from it. Roman Catholicism is in the midst of the most massive upheaval it has experienced in this century, as growing numbers of Catholic activists, particularly in the United States, challenge the Pope’s conservative teachings on such emotional issues as divorce, birth control, premarital sex, homosexuality and the ban on women priests. At the same time, the church has been elevated to a new level of world controversy. Just recently, John Paul’s audience with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has been implicated in the World War II deportation of Jews to concentration camps, triggered a tremendous uproar, which was partially calmed by a subsequent meeting with Jewish leaders and a papal letter expressing sorrow over the Holocaust. And the Pope’s repeated calls for human rights, often delivered publicly in the shadow of dictatorships, have fanned the flames of controversy still higher.

One cannot measure the efficiency of a Pope as one does a chief executive officer, because the “product” of any church is in some real sense immeasurable. Still, a close look at John Paul, on the eve of his first visit to the West Coast, reveals not only a spiritual leader but also an accomplished, remarkably popular executive.

IN COMMAND OF THE CURIA

THERE WERE SIGNALS from the beginning that Pope John Paul would vigorously manage his church. Early in his papacy, John Paul ordered a swimming pool to be built at Castel Gandolfo, a kind of papal Camp David outside of Rome, so that he could swim laps for exercise. When some churchmen criticized the expense involved, the Pope replied that building the pool would cost considerably less than convening another conclave, the meeting of cardinals that is called when a Pope dies.

Other Popes might well have given in to critics among their own troops, even in such trivial matters. For as the usually affable Pope John XXIII, faced with an intransigent Vatican bureaucracy, only half-jokingly told friends, “I am only the Pope here.” The quip captured a view of the bureaucracy, known as the Curia, that has been shared by many supreme pontiffs: that it is an autonomous, self-protecting apparatus whose staff of mostly Italian clergy resists papal control. But in the view of most of the members of today’s Curia, John Paul has succeeded in banishing that administrative inertia and instead brought a heightened sense of purpose.

The staging ground for that effort has been the Pope’s dining table, which some whimsically refer to as his executive desk. But cuisine takes second place to the business at hand. Pope John Paul invites subordinates and experts in many fields to join him at virtually every meal, whether it is the heavy breakfast that he favors, the usually large and long lunch, or a light dinner. “You don’t know how good a part of my ministry is this table,” he sometimes says, to put his guests at ease as they sit down.

Those who work with him daily say John Paul’s dinner-table approach to running the central administration of the church camouflages a demanding work schedule and an expectation that others will work equally hard. “He’s a tremendous administrator,” says Bishop Justin Rigali, the Los Angeles-born chief editor of the Pope’s speeches and writings.

Joaquin Navarro Valls, the Pope’s press secretary, has been a frequent guest at the papal table because he is a key player in getting the message of the Pope across to the public. “If a good administrator is one who can take from the people around him the very best, then he is very, very good,” Navarro says, noting with a sigh that he usually leaves the pontiff’s dining room “with a long list of things he wants done.”

Many also say the efficiency and zeal of those who run the Vatican have improved substantially since John Paul took over almost nine years ago, at least in part because the Pope’s interest in their work carries an unspoken message of its importance. “If the Curia was running at 50 rpm in 1978, now it is running at 150 rpm,” says Navarro.

Still, there are some on the outer reaches of the Vatican bureaucracy who wish John Paul were even more involved. “He’s too relaxed, too hands-off in the way he supervises the Curia, and his constant travel is too distracting for him to remain firmly in charge,” says a Rome-based Jesuit who has observed the Curia for years. “You can’t control something this vast and complex from a dinner table.”

The business of the church is not merely in the carrying out of daily tasks but also in the promulgation of church doctrine, and it is in this area that the Curia has been most stubborn in the past. Other Popes have thrown up their hands in frustration after attempting--often unsuccessfully--to bend the bureaucracy to their spiritual goals. John Paul has asserted and wielded his ecclesiastical authority more clearly than any Pope in this century, maintaining a hard line on such volatile social issues as abortion and divorce.

In fairness to his predecessor, Pope Paul VI, some of the groundwork for the change already had been laid before the Polish Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, was elevated to the throne of St. Peter. Paul had quietly internationalized the College of Cardinals to create for the first time a majority of non-Italians, and he had begun replacing lower-ranking Italians in the Curia as well, bringing an infusion of new ideas and energies to an administration that had been stuck in place for centuries.

Still, it was John Paul II who used these reforms in combination with his own forceful management style to bring the papacy to a new level of influence.

KEEPING THE FAITH

JOHN PAUL HAS employed the most fundamental of all management techniques to enforce discipline when it comes to church doctrine: He has systematically appointed strong men of his own mind to the Curia, told them what he wanted and let them do their jobs. Similar to a president’s Cabinet, the Curia is a collection of organizations that direct the spiritual and temporal affairs of the church. Thus, whoever controls the Curia controls the Church.

In some papacies, powerful Cardinals have succeeded in running things as they wished. “Sad to say, some Popes were overcome by their own weaknesses, or were timid and weak men, not what their times called for,” says Father Thomas Herron, an American who works in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the watchdog agency that guards the purity of Catholic theology.

But according to Herron and others in the Curia of Pope John Paul II, there has never been even the suggestion of a maneuver to outflank this Pope’s command. Moreover, during the first five or six years of his papacy, John Paul gradually changed the face of the bureaucracy, placing a small group of intellectually tough and disciplined men in key positions.

Chief among the Pope’s lieutenants is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 60, a brilliant West German theologian and longtime professor. Quiet and articulate, the Cardinal believes as does John Paul that the winds of change touched off by Vatican Council II in 1965 were blowing amiss. Instead of uniting the church as the Council’s liberalizing reforms were expected to do, Ratzinger has long argued that many church “progressives” misinterpreted and distorted the Council’s intentions.

“Instead (of unity) one has encountered a dissension which seems to have passed over from self-criticism to self-destruction,” he has said. At John Paul’s direction, Ratzinger cracked down in the name of orthodoxy, disciplining liberal theologians such as Father Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America, whose views on sexuality and birth control flew in the face of church doctrine, and Father Leonardo Boff of Brazil, who was ordered to undergo a year of silence because of his use of Marxist analysis in his writings.

But while decisive in applying discipline, neither the Pope nor Ratzinger has been unforgiving. “Not once in his almost nine years as Pope has he used his power of papal excommunication,” marvels a Curia official. “And in every case of discipline, he has left the door open for reconciliation.”

Probably less influential but more prominent in the public eye is a deft Italian diplomat-politician whose elevation as one of the pontiff’s closest advisers surprised many Vatican insiders. He is Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, 72, architect under Paul VI of the Vatican’s policy of opening diplomatic windows to the historically anti-Catholic Soviet Bloc--a policy that John Paul II, as a Polish cardinal chafing under Communist rule, had bitterly opposed. When John Paul was elected Pope, most observers expected him to drop then-Monsignor Casaroli as one of his first orders of business. Instead he elevated the studious Italian to the office of secretary of state and bestowed a cardinal’s red hat. Associates say the two men disagree on almost every subject except the policy of openings to the East, which John Paul now actively pursues.

As for Casaroli, he is known as a wily pragmatist who will do what is necessary to protect his boss. He is credited, for instance, with solving a particularly thorny diplomatic problem that arose when the Pope visited Poland in 1983. Before the trip began, the Pope had agreed to publish a transcript of the exchange of remarks between himself and Poland’s Communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, in the official Italian-language Vatican newspaper. Vatican officials were horrified when Jaruzelski delivered an obdurately inhospitable speech, and they asked Casaroli how to get out of the commitment without breaking the Pope’s promise. His recommendation: “Print it in Polish.” So they did.

Other senior lieutenants on the papal executive team include Cardinal Jean Jerome Hamer, a 71-year-old Belgian, once known as “the Hammer” because of his firm orthodoxy when he worked as second in command of Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. John Paul placed him in charge of supervising the monks, nuns, priests and others in religious and secular orders. He recently cracked down hard on a group of 24 members of American religious orders, most of them nuns, who signed an advertisement that implied that the church’s position concerning abortion was still open to debate.

There is also a shadow cabinet of old friends of the Pope’s from Poland. Many are lay intellectuals whom the Pope frequently invites to the papal apartments for meals. “They slip in and out so quietly that no one really knows who all of them are,” says one Vatican source. Do they influence him? “I don’t think they try to involve him in small intrigues,” the source says. “He’s not the sort of person to sit still for that.”

THE MEDIA MISSIONARY

POPE JOHN PAUL probably will be remembered by more people than any Supreme Pontiff before him because so many more--by some estimates, as many as half the people living today--have seen him in person, on TV or in newspapers and magazines. That’s been no accident. Pope John Paul has embarked on 36 trips out of Italy.

As the most modern of pontiffs, John Paul has been particularly aware of the media and used them unabashedly to get his message across. About 50 to 75 journalists from more than a dozen countries fly with him wherever he goes, and there are usually at least a thousand more waiting for him when he arrives at a foreign destination. And, unprecedented in papal history, he talks to the reporters who follow him, walking calmly up and down the aisles of the papal plane answering questions.

For years, church officials had discussed greater use of television to carry their message to the masses, but without result until a few years ago when Pope John Paul named Archbishop John Foley, a priest who was also a journalist, to the key post of president of the Pontifical Office for Social Communication. Now the church has its own television operation, the Vatican Television Center (CTV), which distributes videotapes to television stations around the world. CTV cameras accompany the Pope everywhere, recording such photo opportunities as a ski trip with the president of Italy, a visit to a synagogue in Rome and the blessing of a group of bare-breasted tribeswomen in Papua New Guinea.

Savvy use of the media has occasionally helped the Pope communicate his message eloquently without saying a word. On a trip through an impoverished section of the African nation of Togo two years ago, after visiting the lavishly appointed palace of the country’s president, the Pope stopped his motorcade without warning next to a thatch-roofed mud hut and paid a visit to its inhabitants. There, with cameras whirring and reporters scribbling, he listened to a woman describe the hardships she faced in providing for her children. Said Vatican spokesman Navarro: “He wanted to make clear that he was aware that wealth and poverty exist side by side in Africa.”

Helping immeasurably in communicating his message are the Pope’s natural gifts of intelligence, presence and personality--and energy, most of all energy. On last year’s papal trip to Australia, after 11 days of hard travel, little rest and bad food, most of the journalists and Vatican officials who had accompanied him from Rome were on the verge of collapse. But John Paul appeared fresh and energetic, with an occasional stifled yawn the only evidence of a travel schedule that had brought many of his travel companions to their knees.

John Paul is also widely recognized and respected as the most cosmopolitan Pope of modern times. Unlike many clergymen, his considerable knowledge of the world was built on a foundation of hard and varied experience--as a laborer, actor, poet, playwright and trained philosopher who suffered under two of the most oppressively totalitarian systems in history, Nazism and Communism. He dated girls before he decided to become a priest. And he exhibits such eagerness to work that it sometimes shames his subordinates into putting out more effort.

“How can anyone fail to be inspired by a man who exerts so much effort himself,” says Father John Navone, an American Jesuit theologian who teaches at the Gregorian University in Rome. “What Pope on the day of his elevation said ‘I’m going to learn Spanish,’ because it’s the language of the largest single group in the church? And he did, rather quickly.” In fact, John Paul speaks seven languages, three of them (Polish, German and Italian) flawlessly, and the others (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) fairly fluently. He even speaks some Japanese and Korean.

Yet for all of John Paul’s speeches and personal appearances, for all of his phenomenal ability to communicate with others, few claim to know him well. Friends say his public persona, as a robust and sometimes almost garrulous pontiff, contrasts sharply with a quiet and contemplative private man who volunteers little but listens pensively to what others have to say.

One Polish friend, writing his memories of Karol Wojtyla, reported that at seminars he often appeared not to be listening at all, but working instead on an unrelated subject. Yet when the discussions were finished, Wojtyla summarized and critiqued them brilliantly. Said another man, who sees John Paul at close quarters four or five times a year: “You see flashes of this or that aspect of his character and personality when you talk with him. But on a deeply personal level, he remains an enigma.”

CONSERVATISM AND BEYOND

WHETHER THE TIMES called for John Paul’s doctrinal conservatism probably will be argued well into the next century, but even those who oppose his orthodoxy on such matters as birth control, abortion and women in the priesthood--or the more esoteric questions of papal infallibility and authoritarianism--must concede that he has not turned back the clock of Catholicism. Every major teaching of the church that the Pope has addressed since 1978, often to howls of protest from liberal Catholics in North America and northern Europe, was firmly in place and reiterated by Pope Paul VI and Vatican II before 1978.

“It’s false and ignorant to picture the Pope as a tough guy imposing his conservative prejudices on the faith, as some have done,” contends a leading church official at the Vatican. “Probably the two most controversial issues of his papacy have been the questions of contraception and the ordination of women. He has said nothing new about them. The only thing new is that he came at a time when divisions in the church were such that some kind of stock-taking had to occur.”

This clergyman and others argue that in order to meet his first responsibility as Pope, which is to preserve the church and build on it, John Paul could do no less than restate the church’s teachings clearly and authoritatively. The often cited “spirit” of Vatican II had led many to reinterpret those teachings in significant ways, creating divisions and widespread doubts among the faithful that John Paul had to dispel.

“The Pope in any epoch is called to bear witness to the faith,” says an official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “The Catholic Church--every priest in his pulpit--is telling how the message of Jesus of Nazareth applies to our world. This teaching in 1987 implies a faithful continuity. You can call that conservative, but conservative is a word that is wholly inadequate to describe the Pope.”

It certainly is, at least in social, economic and political terms. Although ultra-orthodox in terms of doctrine and discipline, John Paul has indelibly marked his papacy with an unprecedented outpouring of liberal beliefs about the rights of human beings to a just society. He has railed against Marxism not only as an atheist system but as an affront to the dignity of the individual. Unfettered capitalism has been just as bad, he has said, caustically criticizing the “luxurious egoism of the rich.” Whenever he travels abroad he repeats his firm belief in the fundamental right of workers to unionize and of immigrants to find both a welcome and jobs in their adopted lands. He has devoted much of his attention to the appalling dangers of nuclear weapons, the arms race and environmental concerns, constantly urging world political leaders to find solutions before it is too late.

To many of his associates, it is John Paul’s vigorous concern for these ills of the modern world and his efforts to move other men toward temporal solutions to them that will be remembered long after the liberal-conservative struggles over his doctrinal pronouncements have been forgotten. John Paul may also go down in history as the Pope who began a new era of Christianity in the East, particularly if he realizes his hope to visit the Soviet Union.

Certainly, in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland he has been the single greatest influence in forcing the Communist government to respect the needs of the church. Government pressure against the church in other Communist countries has eased as well, although Catholics still suffer discrimination throughout the east bloc.

“If his papacy ended today, he certainly would not be remembered for changing the church, because he hasn’t changed the church,” says a Catholic journalist in Rome. “I don’t think a Catholic today has to view his church in any way different than he did 10 or 15 years ago. But his really very bold advocacy of human rights, often spoken right in the faces of dictators, will never be forgotten.”