BESET by an ever-rising tide of sex abuse allegations, Pope Benedict XVI has announced a reshuffle of top positions at the Vatican which suggests that traditionalists still have the upper hand. A staunchly conservative French-Canadian, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, was put in charge of the powerful Congregation of Bishops which vets appointments to the Catholic hierarchy all over the world.

Cardinal Ouellet is known for his rigorous line on abortion, insisting that the procedure is wrong even in cases of rape. He has urged the Canadian government to set aside funds to make it easier for pregnant women to keep their babies, and welcomed the government's declared reluctance to fund abortion in other countries.

Meanwhile a hierarch associated with fractionally more liberal positions on abortion was moved sideways. The change involves Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who had argued for greater compassion in the case of a nine-year-old Brazilian victim of sexual abuse at the hand of a family member, whose mother and doctor were declared to be “excommunicated” after she underwent a termination. The archbishop was moved away from his current job, which includes oversight over questions of bio-ethics, and put in charge of a new agency with responsibility for “evangelization”: reinvigorating the faith in places like Europe where it has grown weak.

It was the second time in a week the Pope has sent a signal that on balance gives comfort to the most conservative elements in the church. On June 28th, Benedict appeared to rebuke his ex-pupil and protégé, Cardinal Christoph Schonborm of Vienna, for criticising a veteran Vatican conservative. The Austrian had taken to task Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican Secretary of State who remains a powerful figure in church circles. In particular, the Viennese prelate had accused Cardinal Sodano of showing a lack of compassion towards sex-abuse victims. After a meeting between the Pope and Cardinal Schonborm, a Vatican statement tartly noted that only the Pope himself had the right to level accusations against a cardinal.

As Austrians and Germans leave the church in ever-greater numbers, and with the Belgian Catholic church reeling from a police raid on its headquarters (as a well as a search of two cardinals' tombs), the politics of the Vatican's upper echelons look more and more out of touch with rank-and-file Catholics—let alone the rest of the world.

Correction: What Brazil's Cardinal Sobrinho said about the nine-year-old girl was that all those involved in the abortion were ipso facto excommunicated; he later clarified that by virtue of her age, this did not include the girl herself.