I was truly hoping not to have to post another item on any new round in the open war declared by the newspaper Il Fatto Quotdiano against the Vatican, but that newspaper did come out with more Vatileaks today in the form of letters that make it appear - and so the newspaper emblazons it - that the very man Pope Benedict XVI put in charge of a full-transparency campaign throughout every Vatican office appears to be opposing the adoption of any laws to prevent clients from laundering money through the Vatican financial institution IOR - and that his observations are actually proposals to circumvent any such laws!
John Allen has the patience I don't have for reading through these journalistic stink bombs, so here's his take... Of course, as a journalist seeking to reach the widest readership possible, he shares the obsession of MSM to spin out bad news as long and as negatively as they possibly can, so if you detect an underlying Schadenfreude in his stories, remember it's a basic component of the herd mentality of journalism today....
Yet more Vatican leaks
by John L Allen Jr
Feb. 15, 2012
ROME -- In what has become a near-daily occurrence, more confidential Vatican documents were leaked today, including a memo from the cardinal in charge of financial oversight warning that a new law against money-laundering could be seen as a “step back” from reform, potentially creating “alarm” in the international community and among regulatory agencies.
The memo was addressed to the President of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican Bank,” and to the Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. It was published along with another memo along the same lines, this one written by the president of a Vatican court.
[WAIT! Aren't we going to be told what the dates on these memoranda were? Dates are certainly important relative to a reference event, in this case, whenever the new laws were supposed to take effect in the Vatican!] You can see how easily a simple omission of basic facts can change the significance of a story - but MSM does it all the time, especially in reporting about the Church, and omission of facts can be just as malicious and harmful as outright distortion or misrepresentation.
In the inimitable style of the Italian press, the documents appeared under the headline, “The Papers that Nail the Vatican.”
[YEAH, RIGHT! As if the Anglophone press did not gleefuly brandish 'smoking gun' after 'smoking gun' when they were trying to crucify Joseph Ratzinger in the spring of 2010, each one blowing up in their faces!]
Speaking on background, Vatican officials today played down the significance of the documents, suggesting they amount to a snapshot of an internal debate that has already been resolved in favor of greater transparency and collaboration with external regulatory bodies.
One of the memos came from Italian Cardinal Attilio Nicora, who heads the Vatican’s new Financial Information Authority, created in 2010 with the power to inspect the books of other Vatican offices to guard against fraud. The other came from Giuseppe Dalla Torre, an Italian professor and head of a court for the Vatican city-state. [DATES PLEASE!]
Taken together, the two documents cast doubt on modifications to the anti-money laundering laws adopted in January, and suggest that it contains a massive loophole: Offenses committed prior to the law taking effect on April 1, 2011, would be exempt.
In his memo, Nicora suggested the revisions to the law could “create serious alarm in the international community, as well as among international anti-money laundering organizations.”
In an accompanying commentary, the Italian paper Il Fatto Quotidiano suggested that behind the scenes, Bertone overruled those objections and supported a restrictive reading of the new law, in order to hamstring Italian inquests into incidents before last April. [I don't want to have to read these tedious letters, but Allen is saying in effect that Nicora had some objections which Bertone overruled by putting in restrictions of his own with the same end, which is, to short-circuit Italian and/or international law from affecting Vatican operations. Is that it?]
However, officials involved in the drafting of the new law said that the Nicora memo reflected an early reading of a draft, and said its concerns have already been addressed.
Last Thursday, Feb. 9, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, specifically rejected the charge of a loophole in the law, responding in that instance to an earlier leak of another internal memo.
“According to Vatican norms in the area of anti-money laundering, the Vatican judicial authority does have the power to investigate suspect transactions in the period before April 1, 2011,” Lombardi said, “and that’s in the context of international cooperation with the judges of other states, including those of Italy.”
American lawyer Jeffrey Lena, who’s advising the Vatican on its financial overhaul, said today the new rules are not a step back.
“The modifications of the law were undertaken to bring the internal legal system more closely into compliance with the GAFI international standards,” Lena said.
Lena’s reference is to benchmarks established by a secular intergovernmental body known as the Financial Action Task Force, designed to prevent the financing of terrorism and money laundering.
[Does anyone in his right mind - and I doubt those at IFG are - really think that the Vatican would do anything that would undermine its own determined efforts to get on the 'white list' of financial institutions deemed by the EU to be in compliance with international norms? That's the lunatic view of anyone who is sickeningly obsessed with painting the Vatican in only one color - devil's black, the heart of darkness! Unfortunately, journalists know that yellow journalism outsells serious new any time, so they can and will be as unscrupulous as they wish in reporting about the Pope and the Church. knowing that most newspaper readers cannot and do not resist all that poison bait.]
At the moment, the Council of Cardinals for the Study of Organisational and Economic Questions is holding a regularly scheduled meeting. The Council is composed of 15 cardinals from around the world who advise the Vatican on economic matters.
Though the meeting is held behind closed doors, it's a reasonable assumption that the recent cycle of leaks and bad press, along with the questions they raise about overall fiscal policy, are likely to come up.
Two American cardinals, Francis George of Chicago and Roger Mahony [formerly] of Los Angeles, are members of the council.
And I don't want to translate a sketchy conjecture piece, either, in which Guido Horst, a veteran German-language Vaticanista, claims, in effect, that both the Vigano letters and the Castrillon-forwarded memorandum were leaked by the SecState's 'Second Division', namely, the department in charge of Vatican diplomacy. He even mentions the name of Mons. Dominique Mamberti, who heads the deparment, and is, in effect, the Vatican's 'foreign minister'. I am surprised VATICAN INSIDER ran the story at all, considering how really skimpy it is on fact, and that Mons. Mamberti is in town and he ought to have been given a chance to respond to the unattributed charges. (To have him even indirectly linked to Vatileaks was certainly not propitious on the day when he was the principal host for the visiting British delegation. I certainly hope Mamberti issues a statement on his own!)
See, this business of 'anonymous' sources has long been used by journalists - notably by the Vaticanistas - to advance their own hypotheses or that of the interests they protect without anyone taking responsibility for any harm that almost always results from these 'indiscrezioni', a favorite Italian term for gossip or personal opinion masquerading as factoid!] [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/02/2012 05:21]