ITALY
Vatican Insider
Michele Brambilla
Lonato (Brescia)
“I’ve spent my life studying the history of the Church and attending Church, though more sparingly. I’m hardly going to be shocked.” Vittorio Messori is in the abbey of Maguzzano, a wonder nestled between the Moraine hills and Garda Lake, a place that the history of the Church has crisscrossed for 15 centuries, from St. Benedict to St John Calabria. Here, Messori has set up a study where he can take refuge when he is under pressure: like now, when he has only a few weeks before he has to deliver a book on Lourdes to Italian publisher Mondadori, a project that is very dear to his heart. Its title is Bernadette did not deceive us.
Is someone in the Vatican deceiving us instead? I ask Messori what a practicing Catholic may feel when hearing of how cardinals fight each other tooth and nail, when hearing of files slipped to journalists, of letters stolen from the Pope, of bank intrigues, murderers buried with state honours. “The Roman Curia,” he answers, “has always been a viper’s nest. However, in the past at least, it was the most efficient state organisation in the world. It ran an empire the sun never set on and it had an unparalleled diplomatic corps. What is left of that today?”
Strolling along the cloisters and then among the olive trees, this is how Messori describes the decadence: “The priests in the Roman Curia used to enlist the best people from all the dioceses in the world. Bishops had plenty of clergy around them and had no problem letting them go. Today seminaries have either closed or they’re half empty. So if a bishop has a good priest to hand, he keeps hold of him. And the Pope is like Charles V, who had to run a vast empire and cried out in a depopulated Spain: ‘Give me men’.” But in Africa, I try to object… “The boom in vocations? I’m not kidding myself. In Africa men enter the seminary for the same reasons they did here when we were dying of hunger. It’s a way of making a living. And apart from that, celibacy is incomprehensible for African culture so the Church – let’s put it this way – turns a blind eye. Many priests have wives and children. What are you going to do, send them to Rome? To be bishops?”
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