ITALY
The Local
After a choppy few weeks for Pope Francis, a strongly denied report that he has a brain tumour has sent Vatican and Italian conspiracy theorists into overdrive.
“The timing chosen reveals the manipulative intention of throwing up a cloud of dust,” the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano claimed in its first edition after another newspaper, Quotidiano Nazionale, published its “scoop” about the pontiff’s health.
Italian media on Thursday largely concurred with the Vatican’s description of the story as baseless and commentators were quick to air their suspicions of a plot to undermine Francis’s authority in the run-up to this weekend’s conclusion of a synod on family that has divided the Church along progressive/conservative lines.
Massimo Franco, an editorialist for Corriere della Sera, said the episode should be seen in the context of a number of embarrassing, controversial or scandalous incidents Francis and his staff have had to react to recently.
Rather than a conspiracy orchestrated by one person or group, the sequence of events realed “a more heterogenous and diffuse malaise,” Franco wrote.
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