In an article for yesterday's L'Osservatore Romano, the head of the CDF, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, thematizes Francis's curial reform, which he sees as an outgrowth not only of Benedict's injunctions against relativism, but also quite directly of the Second Vatican Council. The excerpt below is available here; the following translation is my own.

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At the heart of the Church are the Gospel, the truth, and salvation. History teaches us that every time the Church is freed of a worldly mentality and from mundane ways of exercising power, the path is opened to spiritual renewal in Jesus Christ, its head and source of life. The reference point for teaching, of life and of the constitution of the Church, is not the dominium of things but the ministry of the Apostles: "Not that we lord it over your faith; rather, we work together for your joy." (2 Cor., 1:24)

This emerges in all attempts at reform, in capite et in membris [in the head and in the members], for example in the Gregorian renewal of the eleventh century, in the Tridentine reform of the sixteenth century, or in the new springtime of the Church with the Second Vatican Council, where biblical, patristic, liturgical, and ecclesiological renewals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries converged.

The Lord instituted the Church as a universal sacrament of salvation for the world, "so that all men might be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Tim., 2:4) The Church cannot understand itself, and cannot justify itself before the world, by the standard of power, of wealth, and of prestige: A reflection on the nature and mission of the Church of God is, thus, the basis and prerequisite of every true reform.

Faced with man's fragility, there is always the temptation to spiritualize the Church, that is to relegate it to the scope of mere ideals and dreams, to the abyss of temptation, sin, death, and the devil, as if to reach the glory of the resurrection we must not also cross the valley of suffering and pain.

The curia is not a merely administrative structure, but essentially a spiritual institution rooted in the specific mission of the Church of Rome, sanctified by the martyrs Peter and Paul: "In exercising supreme, full, and immediate power in the universal Church, the Roman pontiff makes use of the departments of the Roman Curia which, therefore, perform their duties in his name and with his authority for the good of the churches and in the service of the sacred pastors." (Christus dominus, 9) From this theological description, the Second Vatican Council itself prompted a reorganization of the curia in accord with modern times.

The Church is challenged by global secularism that, with a radicalism hitherto unknown, tends to define man without God, closing the door to transcendence and destroying the common foundation of humanity. In the "dictatorship of relativism" and the "globalization of indifference," to borrow the expressions of Benedict XVI and Francis, the boundaries between truth and falsity, between good and evil, are mixed. The challenge for the hierarchy, and for all the members of the Church, consists in resisting these worldly infections and in caring for the spiritual diseases of our time.

Read the original excerpt here, or Müller's full piece, "Purificare il tempio," here.

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.