Leo XIV launches a sweeping, methodical overhaul of the Roman Curia: fresh faces replace Francis loyalists while groundbreaking Regulations impose transparency and accountability on Vatican bureaucracy.
Newsroom (25/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) In the space of a single week, the Vatican’s ancient corridors have begun to echo with footsteps that sound unmistakably new.
Last week Pope Leo XIV reached deep outside the traditional recruiting pool of the Secretariat of State and named Nigerian Archbishop Anthony Onyemucho Epko as Assessor for General Affairs – the first time in memory that the post, effectively the chief operating officer of the Holy See’s central bureaucracy, has gone to someone who did not rise through the Secretariat itself. On the same day the Pope appointed Romanian Monsignor Mihăiţă Blaj as Undersecretary for Relations with States and International Organizations. Neither name is believed to have been proposed by the current Substitute, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, a detail that seasoned Vatican-watchers immediately read as the beginning of Peña Parra’s exit.
The signals are multiplying. The Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny – one of the most visible symbols of Pope Francis’s pontificate – will turn eighty next year. Archbishop Epko’s move from undersecretary of that dicastery to the Secretariat of State leaves a vacuum that Leo XIV is expected to fill with someone closer to his own vision. Meanwhile, the Pope has already installed Augustinian Father Edward Daniang Dalong as vice-regent of the Prefecture of the Papal Household, a clear prelude to the replacement of the current regent, Archbishop Leonardo Sapienza. Even the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, Archbishop Diego Ravelli, is said to be preparing to accept a diocese; Leo XIV reportedly wants a master of ceremonies more attuned to his liturgical sensibility and has little patience for the spectacle of an archbishop functioning as “an altar boy.”
Most of these changes, informed sources say, will be formalized only after the consistory scheduled for January 7-8, 2026, whose cardinalatial promotions Leo XIV has not yet revealed.
Yet the personnel moves, dramatic as they are, form only one half of the story. The other half arrived quietly on desks across the Curia in the form of the new General Regulations of the Roman Curia, the long-awaited normative complement to the 2022 Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium.
Three years in the making, the Regulations mark the most thorough overhaul of Vatican administrative law in modern times. Where the old 1999 regulations treated the Curia as a constellation of semi-autonomous fiefdoms, the new text transforms it into a single, integrated administrative body governed by principles familiar to any modern state: traceability, motivation of acts, mandatory response to petitions, and internal appeals.
Latin, once the obligatory language of curial acts “as a general rule,” is now merely optional: “The curial institutions shall, as a general rule, draw up their acts in Latin or in another language.” Every letter or petition received by a dicastery must now be registered, assigned, and – most revolutionary of all – answered. Administrative decisions must be justified in law, recorded in a single (and now partly digital) register, and notified to the interested parties, including electronically. For the first time, the Holy See explicitly recognizes an internal administrative appeal against curial acts and the possibility of self-review.
The Secretariat of State regains the coordinating role that Pope Francis had deliberately diminished. Dicasteries are now structurally obliged to share documents, seek its opinion on sensitive matters, submit periodic and annual reports, and route to it every document addressed to the Pope. Joint signing of documents, conflict prevention, and unified publication protocols are spelled out in detail – a clear rebuke to the siloed mentality that produced so many mishaps during the previous pontificate.
Perhaps most strikingly, the Regulations impose a new relationship with the local churches. No curial intervention in a diocese may proceed without prior consultation of the bishop; no decision affecting consecrated life without dialogue with major superiors; no measure regarding ecclesial movements without respect for episcopal competence. The text speaks openly of protecting the “fundamental human rights” and dignity of those involved – a phrase almost unthinkable in earlier Vatican normative documents.
Digitization, too, finally enters the apostolic palaces as a legal duty: certified computer systems, mandatory digital archiving, scheduled transfers to the Vatican Apostolic Archives, and graded classification of confidential documents are now required. The fact that papal audiences still run on paper tickets and that the Dicastery for Communication remains one of the least digitized offices in the Curia is acknowledged only obliquely, in the gap between the new norms and present reality.
Taken together, the personnel renewal and the new Regulations amount to a quiet but unmistakable course correction. Where Pope Francis sought to decentralize and de-Romanize, Leo XIV is recentralizing coordination while simultaneously binding the center with modern administrative guarantees. Where Francis’s Curia was often accused of acting arbitrarily, Leo XIV’s is being tethered to the rule of law.
The process will not be swift. Many of the changes announced last week will only take effect in 2026, and the full implementation of the Regulations will require years of cultural change in a bureaucracy famously resistant to it. Yet for the first time in decades, the Roman Curia is being asked to behave less like a Renaissance court and more like a twenty-first-century public administration – accountable, transparent, and respectful of those it serves.
Whether it will rise to the challenge remains the great unspoken question hanging over the Leonine pontificate. For now, the footsteps in the corridors sound new, and that, in the Vatican, is already revolution enough.
- Raju Hasmukh
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