ROME
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor December 30, 2014
ROME — For those in and around the Vatican, the most talked-about piece of rhetoric during the holiday season has been Pope Francis’s Dec. 22 blast at the Roman Curia. A close second, however, has been Vittorio Messori’s own Dec. 24 fusillade at the pope, published in the Italian paper of record, Corriere della Sera.
Under the headline, “Doubts about the turning point of Pope Francis,” Messori wrote that “my evaluation of this papacy oscillates continually between adhesion and perplexity,” and also asserted that Francis’ unpredictability has caused even “some of the cardinals who were among his electors to have second thoughts.”
Messori did not name any repentant cardinals, but his claim has been taken seriously because he is Italy’s most famous living Catholic writer, the man whose 1984 interview book with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report, made the future pope a star.
In other words, he’s the kind of person in a position to know what at least some segment of the College of Cardinals is thinking.
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