Way In
Turning back the clock
No man knows the time or hour? Not if you’re a Roman Catholic priest. Punctuality and efficiency are watchwords at many workplaces, but clocking in and out is now usually the preserve of factory shift workers. At the Vatican, however, officials have decided to reintroduce the system more than 50 years after it was last phased out.
New hi-tech swipe cards have been issued to all 2,000 employees in the city state, but Third Way understands that lay staff have been rather more accepting than some of the elderly clerics, who remember with fondness the Pope who banned them in the first place.
Pope John XXIII – ‘the Good Pope’ – was a progressive who believed that Catholic employees should be allowed a degree of flexibility in their working arrangements. Once, when asked how many people worked in the Vatican, he replied ‘About half’.
Time-keeping measures are being reintroduced across Italy, however, most notably in its public services where the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is determined to eradicate ‘slacking’ among the nation’s employees. Pope Benedict has not yet commented on whether he shares these aims.
At the Vatican, the scheme is part of a new meritocracy drive. Soon, priests will also be evaluated annually by line managers who will judge their performance as ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘adequate’ or ‘inadequate’.
By way of compensation, a bonus scheme is also to be introduced to supplement Vatican salaries. This is likely to be performance-related, however, which makes one wonder exactly what the criteria might be. Number of conversions? Number of masses celebrated? Of course, for three miracles or more the Roman Catholic has always offered the ultimate incentive...
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