The "Domino Effect"

In today's edition of Il Messaggero, Orazio Petrosillo -- the paper's resident Vaticanista who sounded the warning siren on the Sepe appointment to Naples two weeks back -- says that, in the mind of Benedict XVI "The true reform of the Curia... won't be made up of the waltz of appointments and the makeup of the dicasteries, but in a slow purificaion of faith, at the risk of giving the impression of inactivity."

At the same time, however, we're told to expect the appointment of a new Secretary of State on the 10th of June, if not the preceding Saturday. And that the retirement of Angelo Sodano will set off a "domino effect" of appointments across the church's central administrative structure.

The Pope made the front pages of the big dailies today, not for the Sepe move, but a speech given yesterday to Spain's new ambassador to the Holy See, Francisco Vazquez Vazquez, in which he said that "the family must not be supplanted or obfuscated" by other constructs which would wish to diminish it.

"The Church proclaims without reserve the primordial right to life," Benedict said, "from its conception until its natural end, the right to be born, to form and live in a family."

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