UNITED STATES
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor November 15, 2015
This week I was in New York, and was, among other things, interviewed for a Discovery Channel documentary on the Vatican. It shapes up as a “greatest hits” collection of Vatican conspiracy theories, from alleged Nazi ratlines after World War II to whether Pope John Paul I was assassinated and the 1998 Swiss Guard murders.
They’re revisiting this well-worn ground in part because of fresh Vatican scandals that have broken out lately, featuring leaks of secret financial information that appear to expose all sorts of alleged shenanigans, from shadowy VIPs using Vatican accounts to hide money to cronyism in the management of Vatican real estate.
I tried to peel back the onion for them, arguing that reality is usually more prosaic than sensational hints of plots and occult forces. The problem with conspiracy theories, I suggested, is that they act as smokescreens obscuring the real breakdowns that need to be fixed.
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