One of the greatest crises that the Church was facing when Pope Francis was elected a year ago was its creaking form of governance. The new pontiff has made its reform one of his priorities. The key question is: how far is he willing to go in limiting his own powers? Church governance was the same unreformed creaking feudal monarchy when Francis became Pope a year ago, as it had been for generations before the Second Vatican Council. This prompted Nicholas Lash to ask in The Tablet whether the shutters were not coming down on Vatican II and lamenting that the Church’s quasi-civil service, known as the Roman Curia, had actually intensified its centralised control and in so doing had frustrated the episcopacy in the “recovery of a proper sense of episcopal authority and the de