VATICAN CITY
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
The murky saga of the leaked Vatican documents has damaged the worldwide image of the Catholic Church, just as it was trying to recover from the paedophile priest scandals, writes Nick Squires.
By Nick Squires, Vatican City
7:00AM BST 03 Jun 2012
Its massive walls, topped by stone eagles and statues of saints, dwarf the crowds of tourists queuing to see the treasures inside its museums.
The Vatican may look like a medieval fortress, but the apparent impregnability of its bastions, buttresses and revetments is illusory.
Not even the Swiss Guards in their flamboyant harlequin uniforms managed to prevent the worst security breach in the Holy See’s recent history – the theft of hundreds of confidential documents, some of them stolen from the desk of Pope Benedict himself.
Smuggled out of the secretive city state, they were handed to an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who dropped a metaphorical bomb on the Holy See by publishing them as a book: His Holiness – The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI.
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