c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ When the Vatican announced in April that Archbishop Francis George of Portland, Ore., would succeed the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, the Rev. Thomas Reese received more than 40 telephone calls from reporters around the country to get his take on the Vatican’s choice to head the nation’s second largest archdiocese.

“Reese is not just a stuffy theologian,” said Mary Ann Ahern, a local television reporter in Chicago who was one of Reese’s 40 callers. “He has an insider’s knowledge about the church and a lively sense of what really matters to the average viewer. He explains it all in layman’s language.”

A Jesuit priest with a political science Ph.D., Reese is perhaps the preeminent unofficial “talking head” for commentary on Roman Catholic Church issues and politics.

He is also a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, a Washington think tank specializing in the intersection of religion, politics, economics and science. Using his political science background, Reese has focused his efforts on research and writing about the hierarchy and organization of the Catholic church.

His interest in church politics began while he was a reporter covering the annual meetings of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops for America, a weekly magazine published by the Jesuits.

Reese said his role as a teacher to the media began because he usually dressed in priest’s clothing at the bishops’ meetings, and soon other reporters flocked to him for explanations about the often complex proceedings.

Ann Rodgers-Melnick, a religion reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, met Reese when she started covering the bishops’ meetings and called him a “reporter’s friend” and “absolutely invaluable if a reporter is trying to cover the Catholic church.”

“He doesn’t try and snow you with six-syllable ecclesial words, and he is very objective,” said Rodgers-Melnick. “A lot of people tell you they’re trying to help you, but they are really lobbying you. He genuinely tries to help you and to explain the church for what it is. He’s also just a heck of a nice guy.”

Two bookshelves surround the desk where Reese fields phone calls from the media, one stacked with political books and the other with books on the church. His goal has been to combine these dual passions into one career.

“I have tried to take the best tools of the social sciences and use them to explain the Catholic church as an organization,” he said in an interview.

Reese has written two books on the Catholic bishops in the United States, but it was his latest book, “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church” (Harvard University Press), that catapulted Reese to national prominence. That volume offered a behind-the-scenes tour of Vatican bureaucracy and tips on how Catholicism really works.

Reporters for major news organizations such as The New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio and CBS Radio now regularly turn to him for explanations on the inner workings of the Vatican. In recent television appearances he has discussed Holy Week in Rome, a Catholic perspective on the Heaven’s Gate sect and the international impact of Pope John Paul II’s recent trip to Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a media representative for the U.S. bishops, often refers reporters to Reese. “He’s a loving critic of the church, which is what we need. The church doesn’t need uncritical lovers,” she said.

Reese, however, turned down a lucrative offer from the MSNBC cable network for exclusive commentaries, saying he wants to be available to all reporters.

“I see myself as a teacher, but just not of classes,” Reese said. “The reporters are the ones who are out there. I try to help them to get things right and to ask the right questions.

“I also return phone calls,” he joked, explaining his popularity among journalists vying to get information on deadline.

Reese said the most frequently asked question is how bishops are selected by the Vatican.

“When I get that question, I say, `hold on, let me put on the tape”’ he said kiddingly.

Reese grew up in Southern California, but was more of a reader than a surfer in high school.

“I was a nerd before nerds were in,” Reese said in the sound-bite format that has made him a media favorite. He said he would probably be a computer geek in Silicon Valley if he had not felt called to become a Jesuit priest, the religious order that ran his high school. His brother, Edward, is also is a Jesuit.

Reese said studying politics at the University of California at Berkeley before researching the Catholic church helped him to keep his faith intact.

“You realize, actually, how good things are in the church after studying politics,” Reese said.

He thinks of himself as a workaholic at the office, but still makes time to serve as a priest at Holy Trinity parish in Georgetown, where he also moderates a young adult group, and to crank up some classical music and escape to a science fiction novel.

It took Reese four years to write the Vatican book, including the nine months he spent prowling through the buildings of the ancient city-state. While inside the Vatican walls, Reese carried with him a letter from a high-ranking Roman cardinal that helped to gain access to people and places usually not visited by outsiders.

By the time he’d finished, Reese had determined there were two categories of priests at the Vatican: those he said were on “the five-year-plan” and “lifers.”

The lifers were a little bit out of touch with what was actually going on in the real world, Reese said, while those on the five-year-plan usually had a specific job to accomplish and once finished were delighted to return to their home dioceses and parishes.

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Greg Burke, a Rome-based reporter for Time magazine, said Reese “paints a revealingly human portrait of Vatican life and that’s no easy task.”

Martin Marty, a church historian at the University of Chicago said Reese’s Vatican book “is a very interesting, comprehensive account, a first book for anyone who wants to learn the workings of the Vatican _ an urgent topic in these latter years of John Paul II.”

Reese said he learned that although Pope John Paul II is aging there is “absolutely no question (he) runs things.”

“The Pope’s in charge of the things he’s interested in, like international issues, the United Nations and his big emphasis on Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and Central Africa,” said Reese.

“Things he’s not interested in like the niceties of canon law, or liturgical reform, he pretty much ignores.”

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Not everyone agrees with Reese’s views on the Vatican.

In a recent issue of Crisis, the independent conservative magazine, George Weigel, another Vaticanologist from Washington, D.C., and author of a forthcoming biography of the pope, challenged Reese’s widely accepted conclusion that “the relationship between theologians and the papacy is worse today than at any time since the Reformation.”

Weigel labeled this idea “peculiar as a historical judgment.” But in a telephone interview, Weigel called Reese a friend who “is a bit hard to avoid if you’re paying attention to these things” at the Vatican.

Reese said his next project is to examine the relationship between the Catholic church and the Internet.

“The printing press helped bring us the Reformation. What will the computer do?” he asked.

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AP-NY-04-29-97 1733EDT