VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
The Vatican says the leaked memos weren’t just an act against the Pope—but an act against God. Barbie Latza Nadeau on how Paolo Gabriele, once the pontiff’s confidante, has been silenced.
The Vatican is in full damage control mode one week after the pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested for stealing the pope’s personal papers and leaking them to an Italian journalist. Tales of finger-pointing cardinals lobbing wild accusations against each other have made the hallowed Holy See look more like a nest of vipers. If you read the Italian press, one can’t help but visualize angry prelates in billowing cassocks shaking their fists as they accuse each other of being the “mastermind” behind the butler’s thievery. One Italian paper even suggested that an unnamed laywoman had secretly ordered the butler to do it. But the Vatican, of course, denies it all.
Father Federeico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, has insisted that “no woman” and “no cardinals” are under investigation. The butler is accused alone, he says, and he alone will face the Vatican’s secretive tribunal. Each missive from the Holy See is scripted, right down to today’s editorial in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. In a less-than-spontaneous interview with Archbishop Angelo Becciu, the Vatican undersecretary of State, the newspaper addressed the scandal for the first time with an article called, simply, “The Papers Stolen from the Pope.”
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