So I was not at all over-reacting in my outrage at Repubblica's tabloid trash, because the back story to it - quickly revealed - shows how Repubblica also used an equally despicable journalistic trick to launch the offensive, namely, virtual plagiarism of someone else's enterprising work and embroidering on it to suit their malevolent aims. (Sorry for the delayed post, but yesterday was Friday, my enforced 'away day' from the Forum).
You don't have to know Italian to get the sense of the headline:
ATTACK AGAINST THE POPE:
'My scoop was distorted
by Repubblica to strike
at Benedict'
Interview with Ignazio Ingrao
By Pietro Vernizzi
February 22, 2013
A 'scoop' was instrumentalized to hit at Benedict XVI. The article in La Repubblica published on February 21 with the title "Sex and careerism, the blackmails at the Vatican behind the resignation of Benedict XVI" was
not based on an original investigative work as the item implies, but was a rehash of ample excerpts from an article in Panorama (Italian newsweekly) which went on sale yesterday but which had been provided to the media earlier. [News media publicize themselves to other media from time to time to call attention to a particular issue or initiative... But I must note first that the word 'scoop' is used here improperly. A scoop is an exclusive news story acquired by a journalist alone. This one is not a scoop but an 'enterprise story', developed by a specific journalist following a specific line of inquiry that has not been used by his colleagues.]
Speaking out is Panorama's Vaticanista, Ignazio Ingrao, who says "it certainly cannot be said that the report on the Curia [by the three cardinals] was the only reason for the resignation of Benedict XVI... who has a vast knowledge of the realities of the Church in all the five continents".
Up to what point would you say the Repubblica article is faithful to reality?
It is an article that picks up generously from the article published in Panorama on the same day, and which we had provided to the news agencies the day before. The Repubblica article, signed by Concita De Gregorio, was therefore inspired by us, although it goes beyond the work that I did. De Gregorio reused much of what we had provided to the agencies but added stuff of her own.
The Panorama article is more balanced compared to hers, because I gave a less factious reading of things.
[He uses the word 'realta' which is a rather ample Italian generic term for unspecified 'things'.]
What I did was to seek to reconstruct the method followed by Cardinals Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi, who carried out their task very meticulously, inquiring into the overall situation of the Curia and interviewing numerous persons for this purpose.
Benedict XVI resigned because of the contents of their report, or for a number of reasons all together? [Why the interviewer should even frame the question this way is beyond me. I realize he's trying to put questions that the ordinary person might ask, but 1) why ask Ingrao, who is just another newsman and who surely cannot speak for Benedict, any more than you and I! And 2) Worse, it reflects the general non-acceptance and skepticism in more circles than one had expected of the Pope's one and only reason for resigning - that the afflictions of age no longer allow him to serve the Church as well as he would want to and as she needs to be.]
We cannot say that Benedict XVI has resigned only because of this. He did it because it was a decision that had matured over time in his own thinking for a variety of reasons.
[NOT A VARIETY! Only his failing physical abilities - because certainly, an 86-year-old who can deliver the 45-minute off-the-cuff but print-ready lecture on Vatican II to the clergy of Rome last week cannot be said to have failing mental or psychological qualities in any way!]
Of course, governance through the Curia in the current situation is an important element
[The situation is no worse than it has been for the past 50 years!] because the governance of the Church depends on the Curia. But it is true that in the overall concerns of the College of Cardinals and the Pope, this is just a piece of the problem.
In what way?
Benedict XVI has a far wider view of the problems of the Church, of the challenges and difficulties she faces in the world, in all the continents, from the Americas to Europe and Italy itself.
Joseph Ratzinger is aware of the internal difficulties of managing the Vatican 'machinery', but more than that, of the urgency that there is one person who can take charge with all his energies of the great problems that the Church has in the world.
So I would not wish anyone to think that everything about the Church revolves around the Curia. It is an important element but not the only one. Joseph Ratzinger himself had been in the Curia since 1982. long before he became Pope.
Do you think that the cardinals' report contained anything that he did not already know?
He would certainly have known of some episodes. In the past eight years, he has continually reiterated, asked and called on everyone in the Church to overcome careerism, divisions and fighting for power. He had expected his calls to be heard.
On the other hand, even when he was in the Curia, Joseph Ratzinger was always outside the mainstream, outside relationships of alignment, outside certain circles.
[He chose to be, and rightly so.]
Vatileaks offered him the pretext to order an inquiry into the Curia, which was much more wide-ranging than just examining how and why there have been so many leaks from the Vatican - the cardinals appear to have looked at all aspects of the Curial machinery. And they seem to have found out that even in the circle of the Pope's closest collaborators, his appeals had not been heard enough.
[Since that circle is fairly small - his secretaries, Cardinal Bertone and his top aides at the Secretariat of State - the statement casts aspersion over all of them, such as Mons. Balestrero being all but identified directly as one of the possible targets of blackmail by the 'gay lobby'.]
But Benedict XVI, with his waning strength, has been unable to effect the necessary changes in the Curia and has to entrust it now to his successor.
What will be the effect of the cardinals' report on the coming Conclave?
It will be the 'stone guest' at the Conclave.
[The reference is to the statue of a murdered commandant who haunts the final hours of Don Giovanni in the opera by Mozart.]
The three cardinals who carried out this very meticulous investigation will not be part of the Conclave (they are all over 80), but the conclusions they draw in their report will weigh on the cardinals. In the course of their investigation, they uncovered a series of connections, relationships and situations, and all the electors will know that the next Pope will have to take this report in hand and make decisions accordingly.
So the influence of this report will be silent, but it has to influence how the Conclave goes. The three cardinals may not be able to tell the electors before the Conclave exactly what they wrote but they can certainly orient their colleagues what to look after, given the situation and relationships they describe.
[So, all the better if Benedict XVI does decide to provide the report to the cardinals. And if they blab about it, then fine - let the world know.]
I chose to translate this interview with Ingrao rather than his Panorama article - which I have not yet seen - because he himself has not been above the journalism of innuendo and far-fetched conclusions that MSM loves to indulge in, and I suspect his Panorama article could be just as underhanded in its presentation as Repubblica's... In any case, I am grateful that he has publicly called the Repubblica article 'a distortion to strike at the Pope', but the damage has been done. Of course, the same 'distortion' might have resulted even if Repubblica had never come out with a rival article and the news media had reported only on Ingrao's article. As it is, I doubt anyone in MSM will bother to report now what Ingrao wrote.]
The first idea I had that Ingrao had anything to do with the Repubblica article at all came from a PewSitter headline that reads "Second Source Backs La Repubblica Report on Homosexual Alliance and Blackmail", which linked to a Catholid World News report on Fr. Lombardi's announcement that the Vatican will not comment in any way on any statements made regarding the content of the cardinals' report to the Pope.
But the last paragraph of the item reads, "Ignazio Ingrao, who covers the Vatican for Panorama magazine, backed the report by La Repubblica. He said that the cardinals’ commission disclosed 'a network of alliances and acts of blackmail of homosexual nature in several areas of the Curia'." Already, Ingrao's role itself in this story has been distorted in this report, as if he were saying "Me, too", instead of having originated the hypothesis that has now been instantly raised to the level of secular Scripture cast in stone on the Sinai of the media god Untruth.]
Even worse, the PewSitter headline assumes the Repubblica 'report' to be genuine news, rather than the illwill-driven interpretation by a Vatican-hating newspaper of Ingrao's conjectures about the cardinals' report, not based on any knowledge of the report at all, as he admits, but on his 'reconstructing' the method of inquiry followed by the cardinals, having some idea of the persons they interrogated and drawing his own conclusions therefrom.
So we also have a hitherto respectable blog like Rorate caeli irresponsibly, almost gleefully, touting the poisonous Di Gregorio article as "La Repubblica's summary of the Herranz-Tomko-DiGiorgi report" and "the Guardian's reasonable summary of the report". So, they have elevated Repubblica's tabloid trash into a summary of the cardinals' report, which from all accounts, only they (and presumably at least one secretary who would have typed up their report) and the Pope himself know about.
Repubblica has now totally succeeded in sliming the last days of this Pontificate with a disgusting deluge of odious speculation. I can already see the MSM newsweeklies summing it up as "Benedict exits dogged by salacious speculation of gay blackmail" (Except, of course they would not call it speculation but 'reports').
The unabashed malice and deliberate dishonesty in the MSM treatment of Benedict XVI are just too relentless to dismiss with the Christian "Forgive them for they know what they do" - MSM know exactly what they are doing but they also have the sociopath mentality of not caring about the consequences of their actions as long as they achieve their aim.
P.S. And I haven't even referred to a lengthy Reuters 'analysis' yesterday that reverts to Benedict-hating mode by portraying him as 'isolated' and quoting any number of naturally unnamed 'Vatican officials' to give some credence to the 'isolation' hypothesis, like someone saying "He really has no friends at all" as if that were the literal truth...
Or an editorial in Le Figaro by Jean Guenois that the OR even reproduces, which I had thought promising, because it starts out by saying that Benedict XVI's best encyclical may be something he has not written by pen but by his life - an encyclical on humility.
But I gave up translating after the first paragraph because it quickly devolved into an unfavorable comparison with John Paul II and a litany of all of Benedict's so-called 'blunders and gaffes' which Guenois presents as though that were all his Pontificate consisted of. And yet, from Regensburg to Vatileaks, none of these too-often cited criticism has any intrinsic merit at all as the 'fault' of Joseph Ratzinger - each was imposed on him as a burden of blame and disproportionate censure by others through the proactive agency of the MSM.
Or the nauseating over-the-top melodramatic account by "Dr" Robert Moynihan in his "Moynihan Letters" about how he learned of the Repubblica story which he instantly considers gospel truth for all its lack of that indispensable essential of journalistic reporting - facts, not conjecture. He breathlessly chronicles how the writer for the Irish Times, surely not the most objective chronicler of this Papacy, pounded away at his account for Irish readers of what Repubblica says. And worse...
From someone who has often professed - a profession well illustrated by articles in his magazine, Inside the Vatican - to be an admirer of Benedict XI, this absolutely indiscriminate and a-critical acceptance of unfounded reporting and unsubstantiated allegations (and the alacrity with which Moynihan swears by it) is just appalling, to say the least (as I am incapable of finding a word strong enough to describe such lack of judgment). Is that the behavior of a friend, 'Dr. Moynihan'? {I always thought his use of the title 'Dr' - for PhD - in his bylines was a pompous affectation, but there you are!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/02/2013 17:13]