Vatileaks and the Vatican’s Irritation

By Andrea Tornielli
Vatican Insider
May 25, 2012

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/blog-sacri-palazzi-en/detail/articolo/vatileaks-15305/

Dear friends,

I have just finished reading “His Holiness, the secret files of Benedict XVI” which contains the ‘Vatileaks’, the documents and letters that an internal Vatican source gave to journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. As you know, yesterday the Holy See reacted harshly to this, defining the operation “a criminal act” and declaring its will to “take the necessary steps” with the help of the international community.

It is obvious and also understandable that the Vatican feels exasperated at the publication of messages, notes, memos, remarks and letters that had been written only a few months or in some cases a few weeks before. I am not sure what legal action can be taken against publication, but it seems obvious to me that the Holy See has an internal security problem and that the “criminal act” was carried out by someone working inside the Vatican, who may have access to the archives and who manages to intercept papers coming from the Pope, his secretary and the Secretary of State. This person has a precise objective, the details of which are still somewhat hazy. But the source of the problem is the mole’s identity.

From what I know the internal investigation into who was responsible for the leaks has not yet been successful. The three old cardinals in charge of the investigation (Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi) have received the results of the work carried out by the Vatican Gendarmerie, but it seems that there are no specific leads, despite the fact that only a few people have had access to the documents going in and out of the Pope’s office and that of his secretary. As such, the creation of the committee, which was announced a month in advance by the Substitute to the Secretary of State, Becciu, and which was established on the 25 April, as well as yesterday’s statement seem to have the intent of discouraging further instances of this kind rather than investigating the current ones. But for the time being (more than three months since the first leaks came out) a solution seems to lie beyond the Vatican’s reach.

Moreover one cannot help notice how yesterday’s harsh statement by the Vatican unintentionally ended up doing the book’s author a favour. Obviously, whoever prepared the statement did not mean to do this, but rather felt the need to send out a precise message.

Now, let’s talk about the book: it certainly has a documentary value because of the papers it presents, which in part had already been published by Il Fatto Quotidiano daily newspaper. I noticed that it defines the same situation that I, without any documents at my disposal, had in some cases described, in a more fragmented way. An example would be the meeting between the pope and president Giorgio Napolitano on the 19th of January 2009. Il Giornale newspaper talked about that lunch (not dinner) at length four days after the event.

It was also interesting to read about the evening of the 10th of December 2009 when a car belonging to the Vatican Gendarmerie, with the licence plate SCV, was riddled with bullets while the drivers were at dinner in a restaurant in Rome, an act that was objectively disturbing. In this case too, the reconstruction provided by Il Giornale a few weeks after the event proved correct, as shown by this article written days after the incident in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve that year, when the Pope was pushed over by a young mentally ill Swiss woman.

The same can be said for the columns dedicated to the Williamson case and the revocation of the excommunication of the Lefebvrian bishops. In the book Nuzzi presents the minutes of the meeting that took place in the Secretariat of State, which were made public in August 2010 in the book “Attack on Ratzinger” (pp.110-116). The same can also be said for the reconstruction of the conflict for the control of the Toniolo institute and for the debate and internal tensions linked to the acquisition of San Raffaele (Saint Raphael) with money coming also from the IOR.

On the other hand, the letters sent by the former editor in chief of Avvenire newspaper, Dino Boffo, to the Pope’s secretary offer details that help put together the last pieces of a puzzle that was only half finished; while the messages regarding the nomination of Cardinal Angelo Scola in Milan and other documents that I will mention in greater depth in the next few days offer brand new insights into the internal workings of the Vatican.

I disagree however on one point. Nuzzi and some influential critics said that it is not useful to ponder on who might be responsible for leaking such a hefty and varied load of documents, but rather one ought to analyse the content of said documents. It is obvious that these papers, which, as I said before, help piece together known facts in greater detail, must be examined. But I believe that in order to understand the workings of the Vatican it is also necessary to ask ourselves what happened, what conflict might be taking place in the Holy See, who might be behind these unprecedented leaks and why would anyone orchestrate them. I hope Nuzzi will forgive me, but I struggle to believe the story that his source, Maria as she is called, repeatedly leaked bundles of documents simply in the name of ‘transparency’.