VATICAN CITY
Crux
[Il lato oscuro del Cardinale]
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor September 27, 2014
In bureaucracies everywhere, when someone’s interests are threatened by a cycle of reform, one time-honored resistance strategy is to dig up dirt on the reformers. For maximum effectiveness, the dirt should be related to a brewing crisis in which people are tempted to shoot first and ask questions later.
Whatever its supernatural claims may be, the Vatican is hardly exempt from this very natural law of the jungle.
We’ve already seen it under Pope Francis with regard to Monsignor Battista Ricca, a 58-year-old Italian cleric tapped by the pontiff in June, 2013 as his delegate to the Vatican bank, monitoring a clean-up operation intended to spare the bank future scandals.
In mid-July, 2013, the respected Vatican writer Sandro Magister published charges in the Italian news magazine l’Espresso that Ricca had been involved in homosexual affairs while serving as a papal diplomat in Uruguay a decade before.
While there was no suggestion of sexual abuse or criminal conduct, the revelations were still embarrassing, especially at a time when rumors of a shadowy “gay lobby” that allegedly played a part in the notorious Vatican leaks affair of 2011 and 2012 were in the air.
Now a bigger target seems to be in l’Espresso’s sights, in the form of Australian Cardinal George Pell, the secretary for the economy under Francis and effectively the pope’s finance czar.
On Friday, l’Espresso ran a sensational expose, though not by Magister this time, headlined “The dark side of the Cardinal,” focused on Pell’s record on the sexual abuse crisis facing the Catholic Church in Australia.
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