Cardinal Castrillón was not, of course, the only senior Curia official who did not Google "Richard Williamson" and who did not check the fine print of the negotiations with the SSPX - who did not protect the pope he lived to serve. It is no secret in Roman clerical, diplomatic and media circles that Benedict XVI's choice as Cardinal Secretary of State, the Salesian Tarcisio Bertone (who had been Ratzinger's deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), has not developed a firm grip on the machinery of Curia governance. Bertone, whose personal loyalty to Benedict XVI is unquestioned, is much given to travelling. Some of his travels have become embarrassments, as in his fulsome embrace of Cuba's Raúl Castro as a reformer, or his glowing description of Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as a possible bridge between East and West. Happily for Cardinal Bertone, those gaffes (far worse than anything Benedict XVI was alleged to have done at Regensburg) drew little press attention outside the Italian hothouse. Yet to Vatican veterans, they reflected the mistakes of a man who does not do sufficient homework, who does not know how to use the Curial bureaucracy and who has not bent the Curia to the pope's will, but in fact has allowed it to reset its institutional default positions to those in place at the time of John Paul II's election. In the Curial system devised by Paul VI, the Cardinal Secretary of State functions like a prime minister in political life. If he is not firmly in charge, and known to be in charge, the system will relapse into forms of stasis that ill-serve the pope and his purposes. Thus senior American churchmen complain, privately, that much of today's Curia is dysfunctional, including such key dicasteries as the Congregation for the Clergy, the Congregation for Catholic Education and the Congregation for Institutes of Religious Life.

The administrative challenges of this pontificate do not stop with the Curia. Benedict XVI has also been poorly served by some of his nuncios, those ambassadors who represent the Holy See to national governments and local churches. Where the Church's legal position is insecure, or there is covert or open persecution, the nuncio can be an invaluable lifeline for hard-pressed Catholics, connecting them to the papal megaphone in Rome and its capacity to focus world attention on the depredations of tyrants. Where the Church's legal position is stable (which is, happily, more often the case), the nuncio's principal task is to recommend the appointment of new bishops to Rome. There, the decision on a nomination is ultimately the pope's. Making such calls is one of the gravest responsibilities of the modern papacy.

Yet in December 2006, despite warnings from Poles and others that potential Polish episcopal appointments ought to be quietly vetted with Poland's Institute of National Memory in order to avoid the nomination of men who had collaborated in egregious ways with the secret police during the communist period, the nuncio in Poland pushed through the nomination as archbishop of Warsaw of an otherwise impressive candidate, Stanislaw Wielgus, who turned out to have had an unfortunate record of collaboration with the secret police at one point in his career. The ensuing firestorm of criticism, which led to Wielgus's withdrawal from the Warsaw appointment, was a deep embarrassment to Benedict XVI, who had already made a successful pilgrimage to Poland and whose stock there was very high. Notwithstanding that fiasco, the nuncio who ought to have known and to have protected the pope but didn't remains in place. In the US, episcopal sees have remained vacant for as long as two years, thanks to inferior work at the nunciature in Washington. The relevant "superiors" in Rome know this, yet the situation remains unaddressed, because of a combination of Curial politics and the regnant Curial inability to rectify mistakes quickly.