MALTA
Malta Today

Matthew Vella

There’s fire in the portly Charles Scicluna, the auxiliary bishop whose diminutive stature belies not just his independence of mind, but the fact that he had been the Vatican’s chief prosecutor on the sexual abuse cases that rocked the Catholic Church ever since 2002. For years he stood by the side of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, when the latter headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the successor to the Roman and Universal Inquisition – and in its modern incarnation, Scicluna served as a latter-day Bernardo Gui, an enforcer for the Roman pontiff and a hunter of sinners.

When Benedict XVI announced Scicluna’s appointment to auxiliary bishop, it was believed that a man who had done his job well on the Vatican’s hard-line stance against sex abuse was being punished through a “face-saving promote and remove” tactic. But…