{"id":543,"date":"2009-06-13T14:44:15","date_gmt":"2009-06-13T14:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/vatican-employees-no-rest-for.html"},"modified":"2009-06-13T14:44:15","modified_gmt":"2009-06-13T14:44:15","slug":"vatican-employees-no-rest-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/vatican-employees-no-rest-for.html","title":{"rendered":"Vatican employees: No rest for the…weary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q: <\/strong>How many people work at the Vatican?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> About half of them.<\/p>\n

Ba-da-boom! Only that rimshot was reportedly delivered by Pope John XXIII himself. Though I’ve never found the citation, it is–as we say at the tabloids–too good to check out. And it sounds like Pope John. It also sounds like the Vatican I knew when I worked there in the 1980s–and why should it change now?<\/p>\n

Well, somebody up there is trying. Last month, RNS reported<\/strong><\/a> that the Vatican was raising the retirement age by two years. Starting January 1, 2010, “newly hired lay staff will retire at 67 instead of 65, while newly hired members of religious orders and priests (below the rank of bishop) will retire at 72 instead of 70.” There is no change for bishops and cardinals working at the Vatican, who can retire at age 75, though they often continue beyond that.<\/p>\n

This isn’t some German efficiency push by Der Papst Benedikt XVI–just the stupid economy. <\/p>\n

\n

“Even the Vatican is feeling the crisis and we need to be careful about spending like everyone these days,” said the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, deputy director of the Vatican press office. “Austerity budgets are required to survive,” he added.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And it’s what the U.S. needs to do, but which pol will sacrifice his or her career to deliver the news? <\/p>\n

On the other hand, the Vatican is just now getting around to actually clocking the hours that Vatican workers work–and it isn’t pretty. <\/p>\n

As the Italian news agency, ANSA, reported, the Vatican last October issued swipe cards to  all employees “from the lowest office staff to the grandest heads of departments — even if they are priests or bishops.” That’s the first time they’ve been required to record their hours since the practice was abolished in the 1960s by–yes, “Good” Pope John.<\/p>\n

\n

“According to reports out of the Vatican, elder clerics are complaining that clocking in and out is a headache when they have to leave the office on twice-weekly pastoral duty. The timekeeping scheme is part of a new meritocracy drive at the Vatican, which is set to introduce performance-related pay next year.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That would be this year, 2009. The “elderly clerics” may have a point. But the Jesuits who run Vatican Radio had us lay folk on a punch-in time card way back when. Not that one couldn’t get around that. Not that I ever did… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Q: How many people work at the Vatican? A: About half of them. Ba-da-boom! Only that rimshot was reportedly delivered by Pope John XXIII himself. Though I’ve never found the citation, it is–as we say at the tabloids–too good to check out. And it sounds like Pope John. It also sounds like the Vatican I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nVatican employees: No rest for the...weary? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/vatican-employees-no-rest-for.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vatican employees: No rest for the...weary? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Q: How many people work at the Vatican? A: About half of them. Ba-da-boom! Only that rimshot was reportedly delivered by Pope John XXIII himself. Though I’ve never found the citation, it is–as we say at the tabloids–too good to check out. And it sounds like Pope John. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}