ROME
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor December 23, 2015
ROME — In a Christmas audience with Vatican employees and their families on Monday, Pope Francis issued an unusually blunt mea culpa: “I want to apologize for the scandals that there were in the Vatican,” he said, referring to 2015.
He didn’t say which scandals he meant, and people from the United States or other parts of the world might wonder, since there have been more than a few: A former Vatican official who came out as openly gay, a former papal envoy accused of sex abuse who died under what some see as mysterious circumstances before he could be put on trial, and so on.
In Italy, however, no one is asking that question, because virtually everyone here assumes they know exactly what Francis had in mind: “Vatileaks 2.0.”
The term refers to the sensation that broke out in early November when two Italian journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, simultaneously published books exposing various financial meltdowns, based in part on leaked documents from a study commission set up by Pope Francis shortly after his election to prepare the basis for reform.
In short order, three former Vatican insiders were charged with crimes under Vatican law for leaking those documents, and the two journalists were charged for pressuring them to do so.
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