Letter from Rome: why Pope Francis is angry with the Roman curia

Pope Francis gathered his main Vatican collaborators for an annual meeting at the end of December which he described as "a way of expressing [their] fellowship "aloud" through the exchange of Christmas greetings. "

But this year's holiday gathering, mostly made up of bishops and cardinals, was actually a chance for the Jesuit Pope to once again distribute a good old-fashioned fraternal correction.

In a forceful speech on December 23 that lasted just over 30 minutes, he repeated - albeit in a slightly more subtle manner and often using the first person plural - the warnings he issued previous years against things like pride, rigidity, factions and clericalism.

"If we had to express the whole meaning of Christmas in one word, it seems to me that humility is the most useful," Francis told the leaders of the Roman Curia.

He lamented that "our time seems to have forgotten humility or to have relegated it to a form of moralism".

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