VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Feb. 22, 2013
I’ve received numerous requests to comment on the sensational story in an Italian newspaper Thursday suggesting the existence of a shadowy “gay lobby” in the Vatican, linking it to the prospect of blackmail and suggesting that such dark forces may have factored into Benedict XVI’s decision to resign.
For what it’s worth, I’ll lay out my initial reaction here.
First of all, the paper that carried the story, La Repubblica, is not a scandal sheet. It’s the largest circulation daily in the country, with a center-left editorial stance. It’s sometimes critical of the church, but it’s not the National Enquirer.
What makes the piece slightly hard to evaluate is that it was written by a journalist named Concita De Gregorio, who’s not among La Repubblica’s usual stable of Vatican writers. (Sometimes Italian papers will let somebody else author stories likely to ruffle feathers in the Vatican so their regular beat reporters don’t have to face the fallout.)
As a rule of thumb, one should usually take unsourced speculation with a grain of salt, especially in the Italian papers. As I’m fond of saying, God love ’em, Italians have never seen a conspiracy theory they’re not prepared to believe.
In terms of the story’s specifics, I don’t know whether it’s accurate that a commission of three cardinals created by Benedict XVI to investigate the Vatican leaks affair, composed of Cardinals Julian Herranz Casado, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi, actually considered possible networks inside the Vatican based on sexual preference, but frankly, it would be a little surprising if they hadn’t.
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