UNITED STATES
Esquire
By Charles P. Pierce
at 3:40PM
Now it gets interesting.
According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising “two volumes of almost 300 pages – bound in red” had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope’s successor upon his election. The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were “united by sexual orientation”. In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to “external influence” from laymen with whom they had links of a “worldly nature”. The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail. It quoted a source “very close to those who wrote [the cardinal’s report]” as saying: “Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments.”
There are a number of things to keep in mind here. The Vatican has been riven by factions for as long as there as been a Vatican. The Church has been riven by factions for as long as there has been a Church. (It started with Judas Iscariot, if you want to be literal.) As Garry Wills pointed out a few years ago, James Madison formulated his theory of why factions are dangerous to democratic self-government at least in part by his deep reading into the institutional history of Christianity, and thus are the old princely popes at least partly responsible for the argument famously made by Jemmy in Federalist 10.
Also, La Repubblica is not a scandal sheet, regardless of what you’re likely to be hearing from members of the Clan Of The Red Beanie over the next few days. The Italian press is famous for journalistic, ah, entrepreneurship, but this newspaper notably has not been a big part of that culture. And, even if it were, the material apparently was shopped around elsewhere in the respectable Italian media as well.
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