VATICAN CITY
National Post (Canada)
In this occasional feature, the National Post tells you everything you need to know about a complicated issue. Today: Corruption, cronyism, mismanagement and high-level power plays are exposed at the Vatican. A banker has been ousted and the Pope’s butler arrested.
Q: How did this all start?
A: The Vatileaks scandal broke in January when Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi broadcast letters from the former No. 2 Vatican administrator to the Pope in which he begged not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euros in higher contract prices. But the whistleblower, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, was moved and is now the Vatican’s ambassador in Washington.
Q: But it didn’t end there?
A: No. At the weekend, Mr. Nuzzi published a book, Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, in which he released dozens of private letters to Pope Benedict, and other confidential Vatican correspondence and reports, including encrypted cables from Vatican embassies around the world.
Q: And what do they show?
A: A host of things. Some documents showed Vatican officials discussing one of the great unsolved mysteries in Italy, the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee. That led to the reopening of a criminal investigation. The book also provides a window into the nexus between Italian banking, media power and the Vatican. In a letter last Christmas, Bruno Vespa, Italy’s most well-known television host, enclosed a cheque for $12,500 to the Pope’s private secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, describing it as “a small sum at the disposal of the pope’s charity,” and asking for a private audience. The director of Italy’s Intesa San Paolo bank, Giovanni Bazoli, sent a $32,000 cheque, “with my most deferential salutations.” Other letters are written in obsequious baroque language, in which everyone — from Jesuits to government officials and Mercedes-Benz directors — seeks favours, recommendations and, most of all, the Pope’s ear.
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