Major shake-up at Caritas Internationalis leadership

Dec 02, 2022

By Loup Besmond de Senneville
Pope Francis has removed the top officials of Caritas Internationalis (CI), the Rome-based coordinating body of the 162-nation Catholic charity confederation, and has entrusted temporary administrators with the task of revising its statutes and boosting staff morale.

Cardinal Luis Tagle, the CI president, broke the news on November 22 to more than a hundred representatives from Caritas agencies from around the world who were in Rome for a two-day working meeting on international cooperation.

Obviously caught off guard, they responded at first with stunned silence, followed by forced applause.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, the 76-year-old Canadian Jesuit who is prefect of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, then explained Francis’ decision to those gathered. “No evidence emerged of financial mismanagement or sexual impropriety, but other important themes and areas for urgent attention emerged from the panel’s work,” he tried to assure them.

“Process of discernment”
“This is a call for walking humbly with God and a process of discernment,” Cardinal Tagle told the delegates after reading the decree, which includes his own dismissal. He then quietly left the meeting. While the 65-year-old Filipino cardinal no longer presides over Caritas Internationalis, the former archbishop of Manila who has been leading the Dicastery for Evangelisation since 2019, is the lone member of the former leadership team to retain a position in the organisation. The Pope has asked him to “liaise” with the confederation’s 162 members, which are mainly under the auspices of the world’s bishops’ conferences. All the other CI officers (vice presidents, secretary general, treasurer and ecclesiastical assistant) have been relieved of their duties.

The Pope has named Francesco Pinelli, a former top executive in the energy sector in Italy, as the temporary CI administrator. He has also appointed Maria Amparo Alonso Escobar, currently the CI advocacy officer and former Caritas representative to the United Nations, as vice-president. Fr Manuel Morujão, a Portuguese Jesuit based in Rome, has been named to provide “personal and spiritual accompaniment of the staff”.

Aloysius John, who had been Caritas Internationalis’ secretary general since 2019, was supposed to be at a midday press conference to talk about CI projects in various countries, but he was summoned to the Vatican to be told personally of the Pope’s reform of the confederation and his own removal.

“Deficiencies in management and procedures”
While the announcement was abrupt and came as a surprise to many, to say the least, the Holy See insisted in a press statement that there were solid reasons for the move. It noted that an audit was set up to look into “the organisation and well-being in the workings of Caritas Internationalis and its alignment with Catholic values of human dignity and respect for each person”.

That audit, which revealed “real deficiencies... in management and procedures, seriously prejudicing team-spirit and staff morale”, is what prompted Pope Francis to change the CI leadership. It is understood that he and his aides felt that the management in place was too weak to allow Caritas to function properly, especially since the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

Faced with this problem of competence and management, explained Vatican sources, Francis has given the temporary administrators six months to revise the statutes of Caritas Internationalis. A new plan will need to be presented during the next CI general assembly, which is due to take place from May 11-16 in Rome.

It was “a difficult decision to make”, Cardinal Czerny admitted to the Caritas representatives attending the meeting. But he said it was “an important and constructive change, even if at first glance it may seem surprising and shocking”.

Francesco Pinelli, the new administrator, also seemed surprised by what he described as his “unexpected” appointment from the Pope. “I accepted purely in a spirit of service”, he told the Caritas delegates, assuring them that he wanted to “begin processes of reconciliation” within the confederation.--LCI