Out go the diplomats, in come the curial evangelists

Only those who spent the last year stranded on a Pacific island could have failed to hear the rumour that Pope Benedict XVI wanted Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to be his new Secretary of State. But the fact that the appointment was so widely anticipated does not diminish its significance.
To understand what Cardinal Bertone's appointment means we have to go back to the pontificate of Paul VI. Papa Montini elevated the Vatican Secretariat of State, which had previously operated in the shadow of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), into a kind of super-dicastery. The Secretariat thus had the power to insist that the Roman Curia subordinated doctrinal concerns to diplomatic exigencies, where the two conflicted.
Pope John Paul 1I's dramatic confrontations with despotic regimes distracted attention from the Secretariat's behind-the-scenes attempts at compromise. But the then Cardinal Ratzinger never hid his fear that were it not for the Pope's prophetic defence of human rights the Church would become absorbed with defending its own temporal privileges. He felt that the missionary imperative was being lost amid the backroom discussions and quid pro quos.
Cardinal Bertone embodies Benedict XVI's dream of a Roman Curia governed not by tentative diplomats but by dynamic evangelists. Having spent almost a decade working with Cardinal Bertone at the CDF, the Pope is convinced that his new Vatican Secretary of State will not allow political considerations to muzzle the proclamation of the Gospel.
The cardinal faces several stiff challenges. He will quickly have to master the inner workings of the Secretariat of State, maintain a critical independence from the diplomats he has been appointed to oversee, and implement a robust new Vatican foreign policy on religious freedom that will cause friction with some of the world's most insidious dictatorships. The Pope clearly believes that Cardinal Bertone is up to the job and that with the cardinal's help he can bring the Benedictine revolution out of the Curia and into the wider world.
Over the past few months Pope Benedict has appointed a string of doctrinally solid and high-calibre bishops to prominent curial posts. He has done so with astonishing speed and sensitivity. A little more than a year after his election, Benedict XVI has begun to effect a quiet transformation of the way that the Vatican is governed and acts in the wider world. And his gentle handling of Cardinal Sodano (who at 78 is well past the age of retirement) shows that he is capable of driving through reform without trampling on those who served so long and diligently under his predecessor.