Dear Andrea,

if we go through the last ones 100 years we discover that the office of Secretary of State has been held by men very different in character, temperament, human quality, origin and social class to which they belong, think big Rafael Merry del Val (1903-1914), coming from one of the families of the most noble European aristocracy, to which he succeeded Peter Gasparri (1914-1930) nicknamed in the acid corridors of the curia he shepherd, coming from a family of poor Abruzzese shepherds who emigrated to Lazio, but no less great and talented than his predecessor.

What to say about Eugene Pacelli (1930-1939), on which any word would be superfluous.

Another great figure Louis Sweater (1939-1944) friend and most faithful man to Pius XII.

Then Pius XII, from the 1944 al 1958 he did not assign the job to anyone, remaining de facto without a secretary of state and acting as his own secretary of state. A choice that history has not yet clarified and on which only hypotheses can be made, which, however, remain so.

And to follow:

Dominic Tardini (1958-1961), another great figure, how it was Hamlet Cicognali (1961-1969).

Then Paul VI chose a man without color, smell and taste, Jean-Marie Villot (1969-1979). It was not a mistake at all but a very deliberate choice. Paul VI, perhaps he was left with the bitterness of not having become Secretary of State at the time, the secretariat had a very specific idea of ​​his own, to realize which he needed a man with three precise characteristics: mediocre, apathetic and lazy.

Of Agostino Casaroli (1979-1990) she said what there was to say.

Angelo Sodano (1990-2006) he is a man who perhaps one day will be re-evaluated, also because he was the last of the diplomats. Fanciful and almost always ungenerous black legends have been created about him, while in truth he was a most faithful servant and executor of John Paul II.

With Tarcisio Bertone a free fall begins which up to twenty years before would never have been conceivable even by a short story author fantasy.

And here I stop, nothing else out of modesty.

Dear Francis,

it seems to have gone back to the last delicate and tragic years of the pontificate of John Paul II, when the Supreme Pontiff was now totally debilitated by the disease. Between 2000 and the 2005 we asked ourselves several times: «… who is, which governs the Church?».

In those years, to be fair, while on the one hand the appointments of the most unlikely bishops came out, thanks above all to the work of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, at the time prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was prefect at the time, documents such as the Lord Jesus Sacramentum.

The question “who is governing the Church?», today we have been asking it for many and for years now, since June of 2013, after the first ones 100 days of pontificate.
I don't know what to answer, because I really don't know, who governs it.

What I can say instead is that contrary to the documents of the last years of John Paul II, today documents are coming out in the balance between boutade of the goliardic association and unconsciousness in the wild.