VATICAN CITY
Irish Independent
22 February 2013
ITALIAN journalists often make Dan Brown look like an amateur when it comes to writing about the Vatican. One has only to read some of the stories they are writing about the Pope’s resignation and about the power struggle to elect the next Pope to see that.
A story published yesterday in a leading Italian daily claimed that a confidential report by three cardinals, detailing the existence of blackmail and a gay lobby in the Vatican, was a major factor in Pope Benedict’s decision to resign.
The conclave, of course, has long lent itself to creative writing because it involves drama, history, power struggles (spiritual and less spiritual ones), perhaps blackmail, as well as the spiritual realities.
At the highest level, the election of a Pope is a deeply spiritual event, a faith experience, not only for the 116 cardinals that will soon cast their votes, but also for the one-in-six of the world’s population that are following it with varying degrees of interest.
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