Power struggle inside the Vatican

The Vatican power struggle is the institutional conflict that turns Lorenzo Quart’s assignment to Seville into more than a church investigation: the Institute for External Works (IOE) is trying to preserve its standing against the rising Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while the local church dispute offers both sides an occasion to exert influence. The conflict operates through appointments, reports, disciplinary procedures, and deliberate restraint; its pressure reaches from Rome to a parish whose repeated Mass may protect its building from demolition.

Institutions and the struggle for authority

The IOE’s director, Paolo Spada, explains that the Pope wants a proper investigation into the deaths and controversy surrounding the church, but regards handing the matter to the Holy Office as excessive. The prospect is not merely administrative: Cardinal Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz favors intervention “in the old style,” while Spada stresses that the immediate inquiry belongs to the IOE. Only if the investigation uncovers grave indications will the matter be transferred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Iwaszkiewicz pointedly replies that the Inquisition ceased to exist thirty years earlier, then repeats that nobody is burned anymore in a voice that makes the reassurance sound like a threat.

Spada presents that decision as part of a larger contest for influence. The two institutions once cooperated, he says, but relations deteriorated after the scandal that dismantled the Vatican financial apparatus and the Polish leadership’s turn toward orthodoxy. The campaign against the liberal sector has become an internal reckoning. Iwaszkiewicz’s Congregation is growing at the IOE’s expense, and Spada fears that the cardinal’s next objective is control of the institute itself. The question of who investigates the church is therefore also a question of who gets to define a scandal, direct the response, and report its meaning to the Pope.

Spada describes the Vatican as a state whose scale and authority coexist with an absolutist, medieval structure. Papal travel and televised religious spectacle furnish its public image; underneath, he sees a hard-line integrism represented by Iwaszkiewicz and his allies. In Spada’s account, institutional unity is maintained by keeping authority unquestioned. The Congregation’s growing importance since the 1980s reflects a Church increasingly prepared to discipline dissent, while the language of orthodoxy lends political force to that discipline.

Discipline, dissent, and the tools of power

The struggle is sharpest in Spada’s contrast between authority and coercion. He argues that the Church cannot function without authority, but that maintaining it need not mean restoring torture or the methods associated with the Inquisition. He identifies the Church’s familiar instruments against dissent as intellectual discrediting, excommunication, and the stake. His comparison makes clear that the burning is not presented as a literal current policy: the danger lies in a system that can punish and erase opponents through other means, even after the old spectacle has ended.

Spada’s remarks about past and present Church leaders place that danger within a history of competing ecclesiastical visions. He recalls the short papacy of Luciani, who was Pope for thirty-three days, and the hostility his remark about God having more of a mother than a father provoked among Iwaszkiewicz’s hard-line colleagues. Spada’s recollection is mordant rather than detached: the death of a gentler pontiff becomes, in his telling, an occasion to reflect on which kind of Church the political climate rewards. His warning is that the Church can silence dissenters or cast them overboard while presenting such acts as the preservation of unity.

Quart’s own remembered experience gives the institutional language a human cost. When the Holy Office is proposed as the next authority to intervene, he recalls Nelson Corona, a Brazilian priest associated with Liberation Theology, whose coffin Quart had supplied. The recollection connects the present contest over jurisdiction to earlier violence against a priest on the margins of the Church. The investigation in Seville may be described as a measured inquiry, but its possible transfer carries the shadow of what happens when discipline becomes persecution.

The assignment as an institutional maneuver

Spada sends Quart to Seville to identify the author of the computer message, maintain prudent contact with the local ecclesiastical authority, and conduct the investigation discreetly and reasonably. The assignment gives the IOE a formal role while limiting the danger of an immediate confrontation with the Congregation. Spada wants information and a substantial report that will show the Pope the institute is acting. The same report should keep Iwaszkiewicz at bay: the inquiry is at once fact-finding and a means of holding institutional ground.

Spada also confides that Quart is his best man and that he has valued him since Quart was a student at the Gregorian University. That trust does not make Quart safe. Spada warns that personal loyalty may make him vulnerable if the director falls; in the Curia, even a trusted subordinate can be sacrificed as a pawn. He does not promise a decisive victory. The IOE’s successes, he says, are postponements until the next attack, because Iwaszkiewicz will remain powerful for life and might one day become Pope. Spada and Quart, by contrast, are unlikely ever to be considered papabile or even to become cardinals, though their influence and ability to fight make them dangerous opponents.

Spada’s own calculation shifts as he speaks. The Seville hacker case is, in itself, a minor matter, and would ordinarily fall within the competence of the Archbishop of Seville and his dealings with parish priests. But the Pope’s interest creates a new arena for the Curia’s internal contest. Spada has selected Quart because a visible, substantial investigation can satisfy the Pope while demonstrating that the IOE remains active. The apparent modesty of the assignment is precisely what makes it useful: a local church and its priest become leverage in a struggle fought far above the parish.

Seville: jurisdiction, procedure, and material stakes

In Seville, the contest intersects with a concrete question of ecclesiastical discipline and property. Archbishop Aquilino Corvo says that secularizing the church, a prerequisite to its demolition, has become difficult because of an old privilege granted in 1687. Under its terms, while Mass is celebrated each Thursday for the soul of the benefactor Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, the church retains its fueros. Corvo confirms that Príamo Ferro says Mass every day, at eight in the morning, and two Masses on Sundays and feast days. The old privilege makes a recurring religious service an effective obstacle to a development scheme.

Corvo distinguishes his authority over discipline from a power to prevent a priest from saying Mass. He has asked Rome to suspend Ferro from office, but such measures move slowly; the Vatican computer intrusion has further tied the pending decision to the investigation Quart is conducting. Meanwhile, Banco Cartujano has a redevelopment operation ready and promises the diocese generous compensation, funding for a church in one of Seville’s poorest neighborhoods, and a foundation supporting social work among the Roma community. Corvo’s description makes the proposed transaction sound beneficial, but his correction from “my diocese” to “this diocese” hints at the institutional interests folded into the offer. Quart sees a prelate who wants the decision made without having to bear responsibility for it.

The privilege’s force depends on more than its age or legal wording: it has to be enacted. Macarena Bruner tells Quart that on Thursdays an archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch for an irregularity or lapse. If a priest failed to say the Mass or omitted the required formula, the church could be demolished, allowing the archbishop and Banco Cartujano to win. The ritual is thus simultaneously worship, a recurring condition attached to the building, and a point of surveillance in the redevelopment dispute.

The scene of Ferro celebrating Mass makes that overlap visible. At the eight o’clock service, he wears a pre-Vatican II amice and an old guitar-shaped chasuble; parts of the Mass not addressed directly to the congregation are spoken in Latin, although Church regulations since Paul VI required Mass in the local language to encourage understanding and participation. The details mark Ferro’s traditionalism and his partial resistance to ecclesiastical modernization. They also show why his practice can be read in two registers: to his superiors it is a disciplinary concern, while to the parishioners it is a living ritual around which the threatened church still gathers a community.

Responsibility, withdrawal, and the unresolved contest

Corvo makes his approach to responsibility explicit when he warns Quart that Ferro is mediocre and casts himself as the temporary administrator of the Church’s inheritance. He describes the compromises of his office: managing worldly assets while bound to poverty, bargaining with enemies, and sometimes condemning friends. He says Ferro’s case could have been resolved gradually, but that Rome’s intervention has changed the music and left the local archbishop to dance to it. After invoking the maxim that Rome has spoken and the matter is settled, Corvo presses the bell to bring Ferro in and declares that he will now be an observer. His language of resignation is also a withdrawal from responsibility, leaving others to carry out the consequences.

That posture returns after events at the church have brought the police into the affair. Corvo tells Quart that the matter belongs exclusively to Rome—or, in practice, to Quart—and that the archbishop’s office washes its hands of it, while formally offering support and prayers. Quart recognizes the same maneuver: the local authority disclaims responsibility for a conflict it has helped shape. He weighs the police investigation against the institutional need to inform Rome before a priest is detained. His preferred course is to find Ferro a good lawyer and defend his innocence unless evidence proves otherwise; if guilt becomes manifest, he would facilitate secular justice. Even at this point, he knows that institutional appearances matter, but the passage leaves open where his own conscience stands in relation to them.

The power struggle therefore has no simple victor. The IOE uses Quart’s report to demonstrate its usefulness and contain the Congregation’s reach; the Congregation remains a looming instrument of discipline; and the Seville archbishop can use procedural delay and carefully limited cooperation to avoid owning the outcome. Against those systems, the old privilege and the repeated Mass offer the parish a fragile, practical defense. Their persistence does not settle the Curia’s contest, but it reveals its stakes: authority is exercised not only through grand doctrine or papal decisions, but through the allocation of investigations, the pace of a suspension, the wording of a report, and the ritual performed at eight in the morning.