{"id":8288,"date":"2003-12-21T22:56:23","date_gmt":"2003-12-21T22:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2003\/12\/inner_circle.html"},"modified":"2003-12-21T22:56:23","modified_gmt":"2003-12-21T22:56:23","slug":"inner_circle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2003\/12\/inner_circle.html","title":{"rendered":"Inner Circle"},"content":{"rendered":"

The WaPost on the Pope’s confidants<\/a><\/p>\n

Observers acknowledge that top officials are eager to lift daily burdens from the pope so that he can concentrate on key duties: naming bishops, creating dioceses, issuing documents and meeting with heads of state. Cutbacks in the pope’s schedule effect not only church business but also how many people have the ear of the pope, the officials say.<\/p>\n

For instance, interdepartmental meetings that used to take place monthly now occur every two or three months, reducing important opportunities for access to the pope. The meetings were designed to ensure that one Vatican department was not working at odds with another. In 2002, just before a visit to Russia by Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the secretary of state announced plans to upgrade official Catholic administration in Russia. The move upset the Russian Orthodox Church, which is wary of Catholic missionary ambitions, and helped sink efforts by John Paul to visit Moscow. “Kasper knew nothing about the plans. The lack of papal coordination can lead to incoherent church policy,” a Vatican official said. <\/p>\n

Some observers say they believe that the difficulty the pope had in coming to grips with the sex scandals afflicting the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and congregations in other countries had to do with his reduced ability to meet at length with officials outside his immediate circle. “It is natural that the pope becomes more isolated from the world when he hears less people,” another Vatican official said. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The WaPost on the Pope’s confidants Observers acknowledge that top officials are eager to lift daily burdens from the pope so that he can concentrate on key duties: naming bishops, creating dioceses, issuing documents and meeting with heads of state. Cutbacks in the pope’s schedule effect not only church business but also how many people…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nInner Circle - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2003\/12\/inner_circle.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inner Circle - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The WaPost on the Pope’s confidants Observers acknowledge that top officials are eager to lift daily burdens from the pope so that he can concentrate on key duties: naming bishops, creating dioceses, issuing documents and meeting with heads of state. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}