VATICAN CITY
Irish Independent
Tuesday October 09 2012
WITH the Pope’s butler now convicted of theft and under Vatican house arrest awaiting a probable pardon from Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican will be hoping that the Vatileaks scandal can be put behind it. Yet it is not clear that it can.
Even the most conservative of Catholics living here in Rome yearn for transparency and real reform, their initial scepticism of corruption in the Vatican beaten down by years of evidence to the contrary.
The Pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, believes that the media goes too far and presents the normal human frailties in the Vatican’s government as fights, divisions and interest group struggles, which he says goes well beyond reality.
Yet it is precisely the efforts at transparency that seem to cause the Vatican to shoot itself in the foot on a regular basis. …
Transparency around the long-awaited clean-up of how the Vatican dealt with child abuse came in the form of Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who for over a decade took a tough line on abusive priests, many of whom were Irish. Msgnr Scicluna once criticised the “deadly culture of silence” or “omerta” in the church which, he said, “is in itself wrong and unjust”.
Yet now Msgnr Scicluna is being sent back to Malta and no successor has been named.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.