The following article is taken from the New York Times (June 3) It would appear to give the fullest, most rounded and balanced account of the rumours we keep hearing about the Pope's butler revealing secrets to a journalist. Even so it really only takes the whole story just a little bit further. Following the NYT piece there is a piece from the Catholic Herald which you may think gives a better balance to everything.
- Depending on your view on these things you may think this blog should not be repeating it.
- On the other hand, you may believe that as a member of the Church, you have a right and a duty to be as fully informed as possible and in that way help to keep the "running" of the Church as healthy as possible.
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VF
VATICAN CITY — In an undisclosed location here, the Vatican authorities are busy questioning Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, and others in a widening leaks scandal that has made the seat of the Roman Catholic Church appear to be a hornet’s nest of back-stabbing and gossip.
Paolo Gabriele
Across town, in the lobby of a fancy hotel on the Via Veneto, Gianluigi Nuzzi, the investigative reporter whose new book based on some of the leaks has sent the Vatican into a tailspin, was holding court and looking rather pleased.
“I’m serene, I’m tranquil, convinced that I did my work in a correct way, without raising questions about the Holy Father,” Mr. Nuzzi said in an interview last week, during which he was twice interrupted by fans asking him to sign copies of his book, “Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI.”
With its glimpses of behind-the-scenes spats in the Apostolic Palace, where the pope lives, and high-stakes power struggles over the secretive — and lucrative — Vatican bank, the book has set Italy abuzz even during a week dominated by a deadly earthquake, dismal economic forecasts and a soccer match-fixing investigation that has shaken Italians’ faith in an institution almost as beloved as the papacy.
The product of multiple, interlocking controversies, “VatiLeaks” looks poised to become one of the most destructive, if one of the most hermetic, crises of Benedict’s troubled papacy.
Vatican experts say that Mr. Gabriele is most likely to be a fall guy, or at least a lower-level figure, in a scandal with at least three shadowy Vatican machinations that are revealed in the leaks: a campaign to undermine the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone; controversy over the management of the Vatican bank; and intense infighting between Italian cardinals vying for position in the Conclave that will one day elect Benedict’s successor.
Above all, “VatiLeaks” has once again revealed how the Vatican is not only a global force with one billion faithful worldwide, but also a deeply Italian institution where connections and loyalty often count more than merit and Machiavellian power plays are the rule more than the exception.
“This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t ‘Vaticangate.’ This is a small game of power plays in which the ecclesiastical right wants to put the Ratzinger papacy in crisis,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Center in Bologna, a liberal Catholic research institute, referring to Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
The battle lines are complex, but in Mr. Melloni’s view, the cardinals who want to undermine Cardinal Bertone and, by implication, the pope come from more traditionalist branches of the church. Others see the infighting as more about influence and money — in which powerful conservative Catholic groups like Opus Dei and Communion and Liberation may play a role — than about any larger ideology.
Critics inside and outside the church say that Cardinal Bertone, 77, has been a weak chief executive to a theologian pope with little interest in governing, and some of the documents seem to bear this out. In one, Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò, formerly the second-in-command at the organization that administers Vatican City State, complained of corruption and cronyism in the awarding of construction contracts and alleged that Cardinal Bertone had been influenced by outsiders in Italian political circles.
Other documents provide a window into power clashes over the Vatican bank’s troubled efforts to meet international transparency standards. In one letter that appeared this year, Cardinal Attilio Nicora, the head of an internal financial watchdog that the Vatican created in 2010, said that the Vatican bank had refused to provide details on suspicious bank activities before an anti-money-laundering law went into effect in 2011.
Mr. Nuzzi’s book also includes letters by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the Vatican bank president from 2009 until he was ousted by the board of directors on May 24, a day before Mr. Gabriele’s arrest was announced. Mr. Gotti Tedeschi has said in interviews that some in the Vatican were blocking his efforts to make the bank more transparent. Other Italian news media reports have suggested that Mr. Gotti Tedeschi, said to be a member of Opus Dei, was acting to protect that group’s financial interests.
Who exactly is behind the leaks is the subject of perhaps the most intense speculation. In Corriere della Sera, a well-respected judicial reporter, Fiorenza Sarzanini, wrote that Mr. Gabriele’s appointment to the papal household in 2006 had been sponsored by Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Eastern Churches and an Argentine with a power base inside the Vatican hierarchy. She noted that Mr. Gabriele was a member of Communion and Liberation, hinting that its interests may also be in play.
In a front-page editorial in La Repubblica on Friday, the editor in chief, Ezio Mauro, said the leaks were part of an orchestrated campaign by unnamed forces within the Vatican aimed at undermining Cardinal Bertone, so that they could have more influence in a future conclave to elect a new pope. “It is an operation both primitive and extremely modern in its elementary violence, made of ink and paper in the Internet era,” Mr. Mauro wrote.
The scandal has caused the Vatican to shift once again into crisis-management mode. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, held daily news briefings last week to deny press reports, including Ms. Sarzanini’s as well as several that reported a meeting between Cardinal Bertone and an Italian industrialist to discuss the Vatican’s buying an Italian bank so that it could meet international transparency norms without changing the secretive Vatican bank.
Father Lombardi has also discussed the state of the investigation into “Paolo,” as he familiarly refers to Mr. Gabriele, who was a trusted member of the papal household before his arrest last week by Vatican gendarmes on allegations of aggravated theft.
Mr. Gabriele, 46, who has not yet been formally charged, is so far the only person arrested in the leaks scandal, but Father Lombardi said others were being questioned. He did not say whether any were cardinals. He said the scandal had painted an “exaggeratedly negative” picture of the Vatican, which “doesn’t correspond to reality.”
In the book, Mr. Nuzzi calls his main source only “Maria,” but he conceded that the book was the product of “lots of sources.” As he sat in the hotel lobby, nattily dressed in a crisp blue suit with lavender pinstripes, the author refused to discuss Mr. Gabriele. “I hold sources sacred. If it’s not him, I can’t say anything. If it is, I can’t,” he said.
But he could not resist considering some hypotheses. “If it was him, why? He’s a Catholic, a Christian, a believer, one of the people closest to the pope,” Mr. Nuzzi said. “If he carried out the desires of someone else, then who is it?”
How Mr. Nuzzi, a longtime investigative reporter for publications like Panorama and Il Giornale, both owned by the family of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, came to be the go-to guy for Vatican documents is a mystery Mr. Nuzzi is loath to reveal.
Critics say Mr. Nuzzi was a convenient messenger. “He’s a printing press, not an investigative reporter,” Mr. Melloni said.
As the “VatiLeaks” scandal continues, the pope has appeared increasingly isolated, a lonely intellectual unable to rein in his infighting underlings. In his weekly address last Wednesday, Benedict spoke about the leaks scandal for the first time, implicitly defending Cardinal Bertone and Benedict’s personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, the recipient of many letters that also appear in Mr. Nuzzi’s book.
“I renew my faith and my encouragement to my closest collaborators and to all those who daily, with loyalty, a spirit of sacrifice and in silence, help me carry out my ministry,” Benedict said.
But not all are working in silence. Back in the hotel lobby, two men came in, one after the other, to ask Mr. Nuzzi to sign copies of his book. “They work for the Vatican,” the author said after the two had left. He pointed to another man who had been sitting on a sofa in the corner of the room, typing on a laptop and then dozing off. “Maybe that guy’s watching who’s been here to see me,” Mr. Nuzzi said mysteriously.
Intrigue filled the air. Mr. Nuzzi smiled. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.
FROM THE CATHOLIC HERALD
Benedict XVI deplored the turmoil
surrounding the recent publication of leaked Vatican documents today,
but thanked the vast majority of people who work at the Vatican for
their dedication and fidelity.
Speaking at the end of his weekly
general audience, the Pope said much of the media coverage of the leak
of private letters and of the arrest of his personal assistant has been
exaggerated and “completely gratuitous, and has gone far beyond the
facts, offering an image of the Holy See that does not correspond to
reality”.
Pope Benedict said that while the scandal has saddened
him “it has never weakened my firm certainty that, despite human
weakness, difficulties and trials, the Church is guided by the Holy
Spirit and will never be without the Lord’s help to support it in its
journey”. He offered “encouragement to my closest collaborators and all
those who, each day with fidelity and a spirit of sacrifice and in
silence, help me fulfill my ministry”.
The Pope also offered his
prayers for the people of Italy’s Emilia Romagna region after a second
earthquake in nine days caused at least 15 deaths and seriously damaged
many buildings, including several churches.
“With my prayers and
affection, I am close to the injured and those who are suffering
difficulties, and I express my deepest sympathy to the families of those
who lost their lives,” the Pope said.
The earthquake brought
death when roofs, walls and even church bell towers came crashing down.
Hundreds were sent to local hospitals and thousands were left homeless. A
quake on May 20 had left five people dead and has been blamed for
undermining the stability of many of the buildings that fell nine days
later.
After the first quake, Pope Benedict sent £80,000 to the region’s dioceses to help them assist victims.
During
his main talk during the audience in St Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict
continued his series of talks about prayer in the letters of St Paul.
With
the help of the Holy Spirit, prayer is a personal encounter with God,
the Pope said. It begins with God’s “yes” to the creatures he loves and
should end with the believer’s “Amen”, or yes, to God.
God’s love
consoles believers in times of tribulation and gives them the strength
to console others. Like St Paul, who was “afflicted with every type of
tribulation”, each Christian should know that there is never a moment
when God turns his back or moves away, the Pope said.
“Dear
brothers and sisters, our lives and our journeys often are marked by
difficulty, misunderstandings and suffering – we all know this – but
through a faithful relationship with God, through constant daily prayer,
we can concretely experience the consolation of God. This is a strength
of our faith,” he said.
Despite human failings and infidelity,
God is always faithful and continually reaches out to each person with
love and support, the Pope said. “God’s way of acting – far different
from our own – gives us consolation, strength and hope.”
“There is
no one who is not reached by God’s faithful love, which is able to
reach even those who continue to respond with a ‘no’” and try to turn
their backs on God, he said. “God is waiting for us, is always seeking
us out, wants to welcome us into communion, forgive us and give us all
fullness of life, hope and peace.”
The Gospels are as bursting with life as ever,
GLIMPSES OF THE TRINITY IN THE LIVES 
Jackson Pollock: Blue Poles