Despite its international character, Italian remains the Curia's lingua franca, and an inability to speak the language well is usually an insuperable impediment to serious influence - unlike the inability to speak English, the now-universal language of commerce, science and diplomacy. The Curia also remains Italianate, which is to say laid-back, in its work culture: while the Curia does not acknowledge that staple of modern temporality known as the "weekend" and its offices are open for business on Saturday mornings, those same offices are only open in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Fridays (the days, Curial wags note, that Catholic piety traditionally assigns to the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary). An Italianate approach to crisis management - or, better, crisis non-management - is also pervasive, rooted in the sense that "we've seen it all before, so there's no reason to get into a flap". That "thinking in centuries" approach has its undeniable advantages in a world in which everyone is supposed to have an opinion on, or answer to, everything, 24/7: it allows for situations to mature, for calm to be restored and for rational decision-making to take place. It can also result in a pope getting blindsided by events to the detriment of his authority, as Benedict XVI has learned to his regret and John Paul II learned before him. In April 2002, for example, John Paul was learning things about the American crisis of clerical sexual abuse that he should have known four months earlier. Once he knew he acted, and acted decisively. But he should have known earlier, and the Curia's entrenched scepticism about media-driven crises was one reason he didn't.

John Paul II was acutely aware that the election of the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, as well as his own free-wheeling personal style, unsettled the traditional managers of popes. Moreover, he was not a man who took much satisfaction from shuffling and reshuffling the boxes on an organisational chart. So rather than undertaking a wholesale re-examination of how the Curia ought to function in the 21st century, he left the basic Curial structure created by Pope Paul VI in 1967 intact, while running his own foreign policy out of the papal apartment - much to the chagrin of the papal Secretariat of State, some of whose senior members imagined that they knew more about, say, Poland, than the Polish pope. John Paul's most important Curial innovation was to jettison the tradition of the pope's spokesman being a Curial priest by installing the Spanish layman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, an accomplished journalist, as head of the Holy See Press Office. It was often said that Dr Navarro-Valls (who liked to joke that his early professional experience as a psychiatrist had prepared him well for dealing with the Vatican press corps) brought the Holy See's press operation "into the 20th century". To which the proper response was, "Yes, the first half of the 20th century." That was no mean accomplishment, given Curial resentments over a layman who was spokesman, confidant and private diplomatic agent of the pope. But Navarro-Valls's personal accomplishments were mistaken by many as a sign that the Curia had entered the world of 21st-century communications. It hasn't, as the first day of the Lefebvrist crisis made painfully clear: Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, Navarro-Valls's successor, was sadly unprepared for the informal press briefing he gave the day the story broke, because he hadn't been brought into whatever deliberations there had been about lifting the Lefebvrist excommunications. Thus the false impression was immediately created, and just as immediately hardened into "fact", that the Lefebvrist bishops had been restored to the full communion of the Church, which hadn't happened. That misimpression, the result of inept communications and bureaucratic blundering, intensified the outrage over Bishop Williamson's Holocaust denial. American Catholic black humour at this incompetence turned to memories of the legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel, who once asked of his woefully inept 1962 New York Mets, "Can't anybody here play this game?"