VATICAN CITY
The Economist
Mar 10th 2012 | ROME
On March 7th, Anonymous, a hackers’ network, took credit for temporarily bringing down the Vatican’s website, calling the Catholic church “corrupt” and “retrograde”. But the more dangerous attacks come from within the Holy See. Its police force, the Gendarmerie, is hunting for the source of an unprecedented string of leaks, most of them apparently intended to get Pope Benedict XVI to dismiss Tarcisio Bertone, who as secretary of state is the Vatican’s most senior official. The stakes are high. The pope will be 85 next month. And whoever is secretary of state when Benedict dies will play an important, perhaps decisive, role in choosing his successor.
Cardinal Bertone, who rose in the Vatican’s hierarchy as a close ally of Benedict’s, has many enemies within the high walls of the world’s tiniest independent state. His appointment in 2006 to head a department staffed by trained diplomats upset many who had come to expect they would be led by one of their own. But nobody, it is said, resented his promotion more than the man he replaced, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, some of whose former aides hold influential posts in the hierarchy.
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