Pope Francis yesterday said Church administrators should work towards a more efficient collaboration based on absolute transparency. Photo: Reuters

Pope Francis, starting two days of closed-door meetings with the world’s Roman Catholic cardinals, yesterday called for greater efficiency and transparency in the Church’s troubled central administration, the Curia.

Pope Francis was elected in 2013 with a mandate from the cardinals who chose him to reform the Curia, and has made plain his determination to bring the Church’s hierarchy closer to its 1.2 billion members.

In brief, public comments before the meetings started, he said Church administrators should strive for “greater harmony in work of the various departments and offices, in order to realise a more efficient collaboration based on absolute transparency”.

The Italian-dominated Curia’s power struggles and leaks were widely held responsible for Benedict XVI’s decision two years ago to become the first Pope in six centuries to resign.

Last December, Pope Francis delivered a stinging critique of the priests, bishops and cardinals who run the Curia, saying that careerism, scheming and greed had infected them with “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

Church administrators should strive for greater harmony in work of the various departments and offices

The cardinals are the Pope’s closest collaborators in Rome and around the world, and were in Rome for a ceremony on Saturday to induct 20 new “princes of the church”.

The closed-door meetings, known as an extraordinary consistory, were due to hear reports on Vatican finances and on the worldwide crisis involving sexual abuse of minors by clerics, as well as Francis’s project to reform the Curia.

Cardinal Wilfrid F. Napier of Durban, South Africa, a member of a council advising the Pope on economic reforms, told the Catholic News Service on Wednesday that the group had run into resistance from some departments that had earlier enjoyed financial autonomy.

In November, the Vatican issued all departments with a manual on economic ethics and accountability as part of Pope Francis’s effort to clean up the Holy See’s finances after a rash of scandals.

Meanwhile, the Vatican is considering setting up an environmental think tank, a spokesman said yesterday, which could influence the opinion of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics on such thorny issues as climate change.

Fr Federico Lombardi said the proposal was discussed at the same closed-door meeting of cardinals from around the world.

“We see a growth in the awareness of environmental problems and in the importance of reflection, commitment, and study of environmental issues and their relation to social and human questions,” he told reporters at a briefing.

Pope Francis has said that man is destroying nature and betraying God’s calling to be stewards of creation.

Last month, he said he believed man was primarily responsible for climate change and he hoped a UN summit in Paris in November, due to agree a global pact to limit greenhouse gases, would take a courageous stand.

The Pope’s keenly-awaited encyclical, or message to the whole Church, on the environment is due in early summer.

Lombardi said it would provide guidelines for the Church’s “serious and considerable” commitment to environmental issues. The spokesman said the environment office would likely come under a new Curia department grouping justice, peace and charity issues.