After Centuries of Secrecy, Vatican Vexed by Leaks
Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, set to become a cardinal Saturday, leaves the Synod hall after meeting with the pope on Friday. Assocaited Press
By STACY MEICHTRY FEBRUARY 18, 2012
VATICAN CITY—Can the Vatican still keep a secret?
Such a question was once unthinkable for an institution legendary for its ability to keep its lips sealed. In recent weeks, however, the Holy See has suffered an unusual hemorrhage of in-house leaks.
Vatican officials are struggling to figure out if the leaks are a string of coincidences or part of an internal campaign to undermine the Holy See's leadership by violating a tradition of confidentiality that has long held together church ranks, according to several officials.
In any case, the best-kept secret inside the Vatican these days may be who, exactly, is doing the leaking.
"We see these documents coming out of the Vatican, and we don't know how or why it's happening," said Bishop Sergio Pagano, head of the Vatican Secret Archives, as the papal archives are called.
In January, an Italian television program unveiled letters from an archbishop to the 84-year-old Pope Benedict XVI alleging Vatican corruption. That was followed by an internal memo casting doubt on the Vatican's commitment to cracking down on alleged money laundering by clients of the Vatican bank. Then came the most surreal leak: A memo delivered by a cardinal to the Vatican's No. 2 official speculating about a plot to kill the pontiff.
The timing of the leaks is particularly delicate for the Vatican, coming days before Pope Benedict on Saturday is due to elevate Catholic Church officials from around the world to the rank of cardinal.
Though he has confirmed the authenticity of the documents, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi has issued extensive rebuttals of their actual content.
One of the bishops slated to become a cardinal on Saturday, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, said some of the revelations contained in the leaks show a need for more accountability—not secrecy—at the Vatican. "I don't want to downplay it. This is the Holy Spirit calling the church to purification," he said in an interview.
For centuries, the Vatican has been a repository of state secrets, its own as well as those of foreign countries. The Third Secret of Fatima—a 1917 prophesy describing the assassination of a "bishop dressed in white"—was kept under wraps in Vatican's doctrinal office, in a separate archive to the Secret Archives, until 2000. It was then published by John Paul II, himself the target of a 1981 assassination attempt.
The Vatican Secret Archives holds documents that it says date back 12 centuries and take up 85 kilometers (more than 50 miles) of shelf space, partly housed in an underground bunker.
Documents surrounding historical events, from the conviction of Galileo Galilei for heresy to Henry VIII's break from the Catholic Church, can now be consulted by scholars. But the section of the archive dating from the papacy of Pius XII, the World War II-era pope, remains off-limits, Bishop Pagano said.
The Vatican's code of silence is often upheld to protect the confidences of churchmen around the world, especially in regions hostile to the Catholic Church.
In China, which doesn't have diplomatic ties with the Holy See or recognize the pope's authority over his flock, a large swath of the church's flock practices underground to avoid state persecution. At least one Chinese bishop was secretly appointed a cardinal in pectore, Latin for "in the breast" of the pope, and unknown to the outside world for many years.
"The church is different, because it's not a political structure like other states," Bishop Pagano said. "There are always situations that require prudence, and the church has always been hyper-prudent."
The past few weeks have revealed that, in a media age fueled by Internet gossip, not even the Holy See can keep a lid on its internal machinations.
Some Vatican officials see the leaks as a campaign to discredit the Vatican's current administration, which is overseen by of the Holy See's No. 2 official, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Unlike past secretaries of state, Cardinal Bertone doesn't hail from the Vatican's vaunted diplomatic ranks—men schooled in discretion and other arts of statecraft. He is instead a canon lawyer by training, who served as Pope Benedict's right-hand man when the pontiff was a cardinal in charge of the Holy See's doctrinal office.
Cardinal Bertone didn't respond to requests to comment.
"The American administration had WikiLeaks. Now the Vatican has its own leaks, the leaking of documents that tend to create confusion and astonishment and that cast the Vatican in an evil light," Rev. Lombardi said this week.
The onslaught began Jan. 25 when an Italian TV show "The Untouchables" publicized letters to Pope Benedict from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former top Vatican City administrator who was appointed the Holy See's ambassador to the U.S. after clashing with superiors.
In a letter dated April 4, 2011, the archbishop lamented "evident situations of corruption: Projects always assigned to the same companies at costs that are double what's charged outside the Vatican." One example, wrote Archbishop Viganò, was the construction of a nativity scene in St. Peter's Square at a cost of €550,000 ($722,350).
Archbishop Viganò didn't respond to requests to comment.
More leaks followed, including the publication of an internal Vatican memorandum on Feb. 10 on the front page of Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano. The memo—dated Dec. 30, 2011, and written in the pope's native language, German—details comments that Cardinal Paolo Romeo of Palermo allegedly made during a November trip to China.
Cardinal Romeo told his Chinese interlocutors that relations between the Pope and Cardinal Bertone had become "full of conflict" and that the pontiff was now getting his advice from a "troika" of other cardinals, according to the memo.
The document then closes with a showstopper: "During his conversations in China [Cardinal Romeo] prophesied the death of Pope Benedict XVI within the next 12 months. The cardinal's remarks, coming from a person probably informed of a serious criminal plot, were made with such sureness and certainty that his interlocutors in China thought with fear that an attack against the Holy Father was in the works."
A statement from Cardinal Romeo's office acknowledged his trip to China but dismissed the comments attributed to him in the memo as "groundless."
Father Lombardi said the document was based on "nonsense that should not be taken seriously in any way."
Pope Benedict has faced a spate of embarrassing leaks from within the Vatican
Elderly men dominate the College of Cardinals
By David Willey BBC News, Rome 19 February 2012 Last updated at 12:04 ET
Pope Benedict XVI's appointment of 22 new cardinals on Saturday took place amid an atmosphere of scandal-mongering, rumour and media leaks from inside the Vatican.
The leaks concern alleged internal divisions and even malpractice among the senior bishops and cardinals at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church.
Most of the new cardinals will have the right to take part in the election of Pope Benedict's successor.
It was the fourth Vatican Consistory since Benedict was elected Pope seven years ago, and was held to bring the College of Cardinals to its full electoral quorum of 120, after deaths and age disqualifications depleted its numbers.
It must be the world's oldest exclusively male club - the average age of members is 78.
The Italian contingent grew to almost a quarter of the total - more than that of any other country and making it more likely that the next pope will be Italian, after the choice of a Pole and Benedict - a German - in recent decades.
The Pope's Italian aide, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has been instrumental in pushing Italians for promotion.
Key appointments among the new cardinals are the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, and the Bishop of Hong Kong, John Tong Hon.
Pope Benedict also announced that in October he will canonise the first Native American saint, a Mohawk girl called Kateri Tekakwitha who lived in the 17th Century.
Corruption allegations
In the run-up to this Consistory it emerged that the Pope's current ambassador (nuncio) to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, had written to the Pope confidentially last March, alleging corruption, nepotism and cronyism inside the office where he worked.
Nepotism is a word charged with heavy meaning inside the Vatican. For centuries popes were accustomed to appoint their own nephews as cardinals, sometimes when they were only in their teens.
Archbishop Vigano's letter was leaked by an Italian investigative journalist during a TV transmission on the independent Italian Channel La Sette. The Vatican has not contested that the letter is genuine.
Another leak concerns attempts by the Holy See to combat suspicions of money-laundering by the Vatican Bank.
Published by the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, which has consistently reported on alleged suspicious transactions at the bank, the document bears the signature of Cardinal Attilio Nicora. He heads a new internal committee tasked by the Pope with helping the Holy See comply with international banking regulations, aimed at combating international financial crime.
The letter suggests serious divisions of opinion inside the Vatican over how best to prevent it becoming a fiscal paradise, a tax haven for dodgy commercial operations run by nominees who have no right to hold accounts at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR).
Whistleblowers criticised
During the 1980s the IOR - the formal name of the Vatican Bank - was at the centre of a major international financial scandal which resulted in a loss for the Vatican of $250m (£158m). Vatican Bank accounts are supposed to be held only by religious orders and members of the clergy.
The Vatican's own daily newspaper Osservatore Romano wrote in a recent editorial that officials who revealed sensitive internal documents were "wolves" and that Pope Benedict was ready to stand up to their "irresponsible and undignified behaviour".
The Pope's spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, compared the leaks to America's Wikileaks scandal and said they were intended to show the Vatican and its central government in a bad light.
The Pope himself appeared to refer to the poisonous atmosphere prevailing inside the frescoed halls of the Vatican this winter, when he told local Rome seminarians training to become priests: "There is a lot of talk about the Church, a lot of things being said. Let us hope there is also talk about our faith!"
Money clearly preoccupies the men currently running the Catholic Church.
A closed-door meeting of an internal Vatican watchdog finance committee this week formally expressed concern at the prevailing crisis, "which has not spared even the general economic system of the Vatican".
While promising to "improve the administration of the goods and resources of the Holy See" the committee called upon the world's 1.3 billion Catholic faithful to dig deeper into their pockets to continue funding the Vatican.
Vatican Inquiry Reflects Wider Focus on Legion of Christ
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO Published: May 11, 2012
VATICAN CITY — The Legionaries of Christ, a powerful but troubled worldwide religious order whose founder became enmeshed in a sex scandal years ago, said Friday that the Vatican was investigating seven Legion priests over allegations of sexual abuse of minors.
The investigation cast a new shadow upon an order already struggling to move beyond revelations that its charismatic founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04legion.html ], had fathered several children and molested under-age seminarians.
On Friday, the order said that after looking into “some allegations of gravely immoral acts and more serious offenses” committed by some Legionaries, internal preliminary investigations “concluded that seven had a semblance of truth.” Those cases were forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that handles investigations of sexual abuse, the Legionaries said in a statement.
The Vatican confirmed that the Congregation was investigating “cases of abuse” carried out by Legionaries but did not address the allegations. The inquiry was first reported by The Associated Press.
Officials at the order followed the existing canonical procedures and brought these cases, “which for the most part date back decades,” to the attention of Vatican authorities, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in a statement.
With nearly 900 priests and 70,000 lay members worldwide, the order was founded by Father Maciel in Mexico in 1941. Over the decades, the charismatic leader, who was a prodigious fund-raiser, built it up into a wealthy and politically influential group, and Pope John Paul II singled out Father Maciel as the model for dynamic priesthood.
But that legacy crumbled when revelations emerged that Father Maciel had fathered several children, abused seminarians and misappropriated funds. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI removed Father Maciel from priestly duties and restricted him to a life of prayer and penance. He died two years later [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/world/americas/01maciel.html ].
In 2010, the pope decided against dissolving the order and instead appointed his own delegate to oversee it [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/world/europe/02legion.html ] and make reforms. The Vatican said at the time that the majority of Legionaries had been unaware of Father Maciel’s double life, “a life devoid of scruple and of genuine religious sentiment.”
But many critics contend that the order’s leaders must have known of the wrongdoings of Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico and began his religious empire there [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/americas/13maciel.html ]. A request for an investigation brought to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1998 was quashed a year later by the current pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Congregation. He reopened the inquiry in 2004.
The Legionaries said Friday that the order examined all accusations — or well-founded suspicions — it received involving its members, even as it reached out to victims and sought to protect the rights of those involved. It also said that in some cases the police had carried out preliminary investigations.
Of the seven cases referred to the Congregation at the Vatican, all but one involved sexual abuse dating back decades. One case referred to more recent abuse, the Legionaries said.
The cases of two other priests accused of other crimes had also been referred to the Congregation.
The Legionaries also said that civil or canonical investigations had exonerated an unspecified number of priests accused of abuse, but did not elaborate.
In all cases, the priests accused of wrongdoing have been restricted in their ministries for the duration of the investigation, though this did not constitute an admission of guilt. “The protection of children and of communities is of the utmost importance for the Legion,” the statement said.
In Mexico, people who said they had been victimized by the order have sought to keep up pressure on the church. During the pope’s visit to Mexico in March, the victims demanded a meeting with the pontiff, and a book was released detailing multiple cases of abuse by Father Maciel.
“As with everything in the Vatican, it comes many years too late,” Roberto Blancarte, a professor and expert on the Mexican Catholic Church at Colegio de México, said of the latest inquiry.
Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting from Mexico City.
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