UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler Nov 09, 2015

Vatican journalist Andrea Gagliarducci has the best insights that I’ve seen to date on the new eruption of leaks from the Vatican. As you might have suspected, the story involves a power struggle within the Vatican bureaucracy.

For years, powerful men inside the Vatican exchanged small favors with their Italian secular counterparts. Some of those favors involved financial transactions—the use of the Vatican bank for personal accounts, perhaps, or real-estate transfers on friendly terms. Most of these little deals were harmless, but some were not technically legal, and some may have involved shady characters.

For Italian financiers, unsupervised transactions through the Vatican became more attractive after 9/11, when European banking authorities began imposing strict new regulations on Italy’s banks, to counteract money-laundering and the financing of terrorism. Some Vatican officials—Gagliarducci refers to them as the “men of compromise”—remained willing…