VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Jan. 4, 2013
All Things Catholic
Now that the dust has settled on the New Year’s holiday, it’s time for my annual run-down of the most under-covered Vatican stories. By that, I mean those stories that fell through the cracks in the last year or that didn’t quite generate the buzz they really deserved.
To be clear, this is not a countdown of the most important Vatican storylines. That list would certainly include the arrest, trial, conviction and eventual pardon of papal butler Paolo Gabriele and the crackdown by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Both stories, however, were abundantly covered throughout the year. In a similar fashion, the Synod of Bishops on new evangelization and the Year of Faith didn’t get a lot of traction in the secular press, but the Vatican’s communications channels routinely beat the drum on them during 2012.
Instead, this is a run-down of five stories that made a brief appearance on the radar at some point but, for a variety of reasons, faded before their real importance could be adequately appreciated.
Here, then, are the top five Vatican storylines from 2012 that deserve another moment in the sun.
5. The sex abuse summit
In early February, Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University staged a major international summit on the sex abuse crisis, titled “Toward Healing and Renewal,” in tandem with several Vatican departments. It brought together roughly 100 bishops and religious superiors from around the world ahead of a May deadline from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for bishops’ conferences to submit their anti-abuse policies.
The big picture was that the old debates in the Vatican regarding the crisis are finished and the reformers have won.
When the scandals in the United States broke a decade ago, reaction in the Vatican was clearly divided between what one might loosely call the “reformers” and the “deniers.” The fault lines broke down in terms of these sorts of debates:
• Is the crisis largely a media- and lawyer-driven frenzy, or is it a real cancer?
• Should the church cooperate fully with civil authorities, or is that surrendering the autonomy the church has fought titanic battles over the centuries to defend?
• Should the church embrace the use of psychology in screening candidates for the priesthood, or is that smuggling in a secular mentality in place of traditional spiritual principles of formation?
• Should the church support aggressive programs of abuse prevention and detection, or does that risk “sexualizing” children along the lines of secular sex education?
• Is the crisis truly a global phenomenon, or is it the fruit of a “moral panic” largely restricted to the West?
• Should the Vatican sign off on “zero-tolerance” policies, or does that rupture the paternal relationship that’s supposed to exist between a bishop and his priests? …
2. The ‘what’ of Vatileaks…
Other documents, however, were far more serious and revealed some things well worth knowing.
For instance, we now know that Fr. Rafael Moreno, private secretary to the late Mexican Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, tried to inform Pope John Paul in 2003 about charges against Maciel, but the pope “didn’t want to hear them, didn’t believe.” (Maciel was eventually sentenced in 2006 to a life of prayer and penance over acts of sexual and financial misconduct.)
We also know that a high-profile Italian journalist directly accused both the Cardinal Secretary of State and the editor of the Vatican newspaper of orchestrating a plot against him, which, he alleged, included falsifying a legal document. We know, too, that the leader of the Communion and Liberation movement wrote personally to the pope in March 2011 to accuse the two previous Archbishops of Milan, Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini and Dionigi Tettamanzi, of promoting a “rupture” in the faith and “a sort of ‘alternative magisterium’ to Rome and the Holy Father.”
Perhaps most importantly, we learned that deep concerns circulated in the Vatican about financial mismanagement and corruption. The leaked documents include a lengthy memo from an unnamed official, presumably at the Prefecture for Economic Affairs, written in spring 2011. It ticks off a series of alleged problems, including ignoring the Vatican’s own internal checks and balances, “demoralization” of personnel, and the appointment of people “who lack the adequate competence.”
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