(ZENIT News / Vatican City, 11.25.2025).- The new General Regulation and Personnel Regulation of the Roman Curia, promulgated by Pope Leo XIV and set to take effect on 1 January 2026, signal a significant recalibration of how the Church intends to govern itself from within. Wrapped in the language of pastoral service and missionary identity, the two documents amount to a blueprint for a more accountable, transparent, and professionally structured central administration.
Although presented as provisional — ad experimentum, for a five-year period — the reforms are, in substance, anything but experimental. They reflect a clear continuity with the major constitutional overhaul initiated by Pope Francis in 2022 through Praedicate Evangelium, a text that reconfigured the architecture of the Curia but left its internal operating rules to be rewritten by a future pontificate. Leo XIV, elected on 8 May as the late Francis’ successor, has now taken up that unfinished work.
The new General Regulation applies to every organism forming the Curia: the Secretariat of State, the dicasteries, the tribunals, and the economic bodies entrusted with the Vatican’s finances. It creates a more coordinated administrative culture, beginning with something as banal — yet long overdue — as shared timetables. A minimum 36-hour work week is now mandated for all Curial institutions, coupled with regular meetings convened by the Secretary of State to harmonize their activities. It is a small but symbolic gesture toward a Curia that is meant to function as a single service body rather than a cluster of autonomous fiefdoms.
Where the regulations take a sharper tone is in matters of personnel. In a city-state often accused of opaque hiring practices and internal loyalties, the new rules impose strict barriers against nepotism. No office may employ close relatives of current staff, and recruitment is restricted to candidates whose professional competence is matched by a lived commitment to the Catholic faith, sound moral character, and — explicitly — a clean criminal record. These criteria apply to all staff, including the increasing number of lay men and women who now hold technical and administrative posts.
Leadership appointments, from prefects of dicasteries to their secretaries, remain the prerogative of the Pope, but the regulations codify a five-year term for such roles, reinforcing the reform-era principle that no Curial office is held indefinitely. Lay employees, meanwhile, will enter on probationary contracts lasting at least one year and no more than two, another step intended to professionalize a workforce historically shaped more by ecclesiastical custom than by modern personnel practices.
Transparent governance — a hallmark of Francis’ pontificate — receives particular emphasis. Every senior official must submit a biennial declaration confirming that he or she holds no assets in offshore financial centers and no stakes in companies that contradict Catholic social teaching. The omission of such declarations, or the submission of false ones, is now classified as a serious disciplinary offense
The Personnel Regulation also introduces clear labor protections that bring the Vatican closer to contemporary employment standards. Maternity leave begins three months before birth and continues for three months after. Annual vacation allowances are fixed at 158 hours. Confidentiality obligations are rigorously defined: no employee may give interviews or public statements without authorization, a measure trying to balance institutional discretion with the Vatican’s growing global visibility.
Disciplinary procedures now follow a graduated scale, from verbal warnings to the loss of employment rights, especially in cases involving intentional wrongdoing. Retirement ages, long inconsistent across departments, are finally standardized: heads of entities and clerical secretaries must retire at 75, their lay counterparts at 70. Subsecretaries and members of religious institutes will step down at 72. All members of Curial bodies conclude their service at 80 — the same age at which cardinals lose their right to vote in a conclave.
Alongside these detailed norms lies a broader ecclesial vision. Leo XIV describes Curial work as an ecclesial service marked by pastoral and missionary purpose, not as a bureaucratic occupation. The internal mechanisms of governance — budgets, contracts, schedules, disciplinary files — are meant to support that deeper identity. The regulations essentially seek to shape a workforce that is not only competent but spiritually aligned with the Church’s mission, a point the new Pope has stressed repeatedly since his election.
This reform also marks a decisive transition away from the regulatory framework established under John Paul II in 1999. While that earlier text served the Curia for nearly a quarter-century, it reflected an era in which digital communication, internationalized staffing, and financial accountability were far less demanding than they are today. Francis’ Praedicate Evangelium laid the theological and structural foundations for a modern Curia; Leo XIV has now moved to give it administrative coherence.
Whether these norms will achieve the cultural shift the Pope hopes for remains an open question. Curial reform is rarely linear: it depends not only on rules but on habits, relationships, and the willingness of clerics and laity alike to internalize the spirit, not just the letter, of new directives. Yet the architecture now exists. A Vatican long caricatured as resistant to change has, once again, placed change on paper.
The coming years will reveal whether these regulations can help forge a Roman Curia more transparent in its dealings, more disciplined in its internal life, and more united in its service to the global Church.
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