The hurly-burly is almost done. Pope Leo XIV’s Mass of inauguration in St Peter’s Square takes place tomorrow and then the new papacy begins properly.
As the first US pontiff becomes the 267th occupant of the Throne of St Peter, it would not be unreasonable to consider the likely fate of those Irishmen working at the Vatican, particularly given the high profile that at least one of them took in the run-up to the conclave where Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected pope in a surprise vote.
For now, all officials there stay in place, as announced by the new pope last week. They include prominent Irish figures: Dublin-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who as Camerlengo effectively ran the Vatican between the two popes; Archbishop John Kennedy, secretary for discipline at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican department, and Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary for the culture section of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, an administrative unit of the Curia.
There are good reasons to believe all will remain in place, if not ascend further as this papacy gets into its stride. Each is highly experienced in areas deemed critical to the Catholic Church by the College of Cardinals in discussions before the conclave: its finances, the issue of abuse and artificial intelligence (AI).
Cardinal Farrell (77), as Camerlengo of the Holy See, has probably become the best-known Irishman worldwide since Pope Francis died on April 21st.
It is unlikely Cardinal Farrell’s duties as Camerlengo will be needed any time soon. However, he has much more weighty roles (in the temporal sense) at the Vatican. Last November he was appointed by Pope Francis as sole director of the pension fund for the Holy See, covering former employees of both the Roman curia and Vatican City state.
This, the Pope said at the time, was because of “a serious prospective imbalance of the fund” leaving it unable to meet its obligations.
Cardinal Farrell has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame in the US. His appointment was due to the dire financial situation at the Vatican. Its last set of accounts, approved in the middle of last year , included an €83 million shortfall, while its pension fund shortfall has been estimated at €631 million.
In 2020, the pope appointed Cardinal Farrell to lead the Vatican’s Commission for Reserved Matters, a new office which oversees investments and spending related to sovereign or confidential diplomatic matters. That followed a scandal over the investment of more than $200 million (€179 million) by the Vatican in a London building.
In 2022 Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Farrell as chair of the Pontifical Committee for Investments with responsibility for ensuring all such were ethical and in line with Catholic teaching. And in January 2024, Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Farrell to head the Vatican’s Supreme Court.
Cardinal Farrell is something of a heavyweight at the Vatican, not least when it comes to finances, one of the main subjects discussed by the College of Cardinals at their meetings before the recent conclave began.
It is clear Pope Francis had great confidence in his abilities and there is no reason to think Pope Leo might believe otherwise.
What Pope Leo may do is relieve Cardinal Farrell of his role as prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, which he has held since it was established in 2016, to allow him concentrate on helping to eliminate the Church’s debt.
Another Irishman likely to remain in situ at the Vatican is yet another Dubliner, Archbishop John Kennedy (56) from Clontarf. He has been working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) since 2003 where his boss was the late Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.
Currently it has two new sections: a doctrinal section and a disciplinary section, while, in 2022, the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors became part of this Dicastery, but with its own staff and constitution.
In 2017 then Msgr Kennedy (he became an Archbishop last September) was appointed head of the disciplinary section at the CDF, becoming secretary of the newly named Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in 2022 with responsibility for leading investigations into credible clerical child sex abuse allegations worldwide.
Archbishop Kennedy is the highest-ranking Vatican official on clerical abuse cases.
A line in the sand in all of this was drawn by Archbishop Kennedy himself last October when the Vatican’s secretariat of state attempted to overrule his decision to laicise an Argentinian priest convicted by a church tribunal of child sexual abuse.
His decision was countermanded by the secretariat, which placed the priest under restricted ministry instead. Archbishop Kennedy went to Pope Francis and countermanded the countermand. The archbishop’s action was described by one Vatican commentator as “without precedent in the modern era”.
Pope Leo XIV has identified artificial intelligence as a focus of his papacy.
Last Saturday, in his first formal address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV recalled how Leo XIII, with the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed social consequences “of the first great industrial revolution” and referred to the church’s offer of “social teaching” in response to “the developments of artificial intelligence (AI)”.
On Monday last, in his first public audience with the media, he again referenced AI, speaking about the requirement for “responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity”.
Few at the Vatican are as knowledgeable about AI and social media generally as Navan man and priest of the Dublin Archdiocese, Bishop Paul Tighe (67). He has worked in that area at the Vatican for 17 years.
As secretary at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education he was one of the main movers behind the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova: (Old and New) Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, published with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in January.
As he put it earlier this year, in a podcast for America magazine, “AI can handle data better than we can but what AI cannot necessarily do is answer the deeper questions that we should be posing to that data: what is it to be human, what is intelligence, what is it that makes life worthwhile.”
Speaking to The Irish Times, Bishop Tighe recalled how the late Pope Francis feared AI would serve “the interests only of a powerful elite”.
He has travelled widely in Africa, Asia, North America and Latin America advising church bodies working with social media and is a regular attender at the Web Summit and the Biennale in Venice.
Bishop Tighe, referred to by some commentators as “the Vatican’s media guru”, has become something of link man internationally between the Church and contemporary culture in its many expressions.
Formerly director of the office for public affairs in the Archdiocese of Dublin, he was appointed secretary at the Vatican’s Council for Social Communications in 2007 where he is responsible for the Church’s contact with the media at an international level.
He helped lead something of a digital revolution at the Vatican where he was part of the team that instigated the Pope’s Twitter/X handle, @Pontifex and developed the popular ThePopeApp for mobile phones, as well as the vaticannews.va website, which is considered invaluable for Vatican watchers.
As part of his reforms of the Roman Curia in 2013, Pope Francis set up a commission chaired by the UK peer Chris Patten to reform communications at the Vatican, with Bishop Tighe as secretary.
It led to the creation of a new secretariat for communications which oversees all of the Vatican’s communications offices.
He did not, however, manage to revolutionise how the Vatican tells the world about the election of a new pope with smoke emerging from a chimney over the Sistine Chapel.
Speaking to the US Catholic Telegraph, Bishop Tighe said: “Here we are talking about social media, digital media and new technologies, [while] in the church our biggest communications moment is delivered by smoke.”
He, along with Cardinal Farrell and Archbishop Kennedy, are likely to feature in the Vatican’s hierarchy for some time to come.
