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…