In the Vatican

The original, 1987 edition of "In the Vatican" by Peter Hebblethwaite is largely outdated now in many of its particulars (I haven't [yet] seen the 2000 edition, which may have had some posthumous updates, Hebblethwaite himself having died in 1995.) As John L. Allen's "Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election" (2002) rendered Hebblethwaite's "The Next Pope" (1995, 2000) largely redundant, so too has Allen's "All the Pope's Men" (2004), among other titles, surpassed "In the Vatican" as a view to how the Holy See is structured and why it operates the way it does. So if you're looking for a nuts-and-bolts gazetteer of Vatican forms and functions, I'd recommend you go elsewhere. That's not to say, however, that "In the Vatican" isn't worth reading. Both in content and in expression, Hebblethwaite has a flair that really stands out. Reading Peter Hebblethwaite, in fact, reminds me a lot of reading Christopher Hitchens -- in style, I hasten to note, not substance. Hebblethwaite described himself as a devout Catholic, and clearly has respect for the Church. You'd be hard pressed to find anything similar in Hitch's writings on the Church, notably his valediction for the late Pope John Paul II. Hebblethwaite is polemical and has a definite point of view, one solidly on the liberal side of the spectrum (at one point, he compares Opus Dei to the Moonies). This book isn't a quick and easy just-the-facts read. But I found it definitely worth the effort. After a quick historical survey and a probe inside "The Mind of Karol Wojtyla" (though I liked his summary of the late pope's thought in "The Next Pope" somewhat better), Hebblethwaite leads us through the structure of the Holy See, generally with one chapter per dicastery. He doesn't pull many punches, it seems to me, in the picture he paints, but to this outsider, at least, his arguments sounded reasonable and neither spiteful nor ad hominem. Given the election of Pope Benedict XVI, Hebblethwaite's look at the former Cardinal Ratzinger and his custody of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was especially interesting. In the final chapter, Hebblethwaite switches voices and presents the inaugural address of a fictional Pope Benedict XVI (really!) at the opening session of a new Church council, which he calls Lateran VI. Here the author clearly presents his own case for the changes, redirections, and reforms he believes the Church needs. None of these are especially surprising 200 pages into this book, but it's still an interesting rhetorical presentation (and entertaining, too -- especially the fictional pope's passing reference to "the late lamented Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger whose unaccountable breakdown was such a tragedy"). I'm sure Hebblethwaite is not to everyone's taste, either in style or content. But I found him both well-informed and with an arresting personal style. His reputation as an eminent Vatican-watcher is nowhere more apparent than in thes