From today's installment of The Word From Rome by the National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent, John L. Allen, Jr.: "[D]espite the Catholic church's image as rigidly hierarchical and ultra-centralized, it actually is one of the most decentralized institutions on earth. A staff of some 2,700 people in the Roman Curia oversees the affairs of some 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide. Management guru Peter Drucker once calculated that if the same ratio were to be applied to the U.S. government, exactly 500 people would be on the federal payroll."
