Wednesday, May 22, 2013, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
ST. RITA DA CASCIA (Italy, 1391-1457), Mother, Widow, Augustinian nun, Mystic
Born near Perugia, Margherita Lotti always wanted to be a nun, but at 12, her family married her off to a powerful local politician who turned out to be abusive. She bore him twin sons. After 18 years of marriage, her husband was murdered. Not long after, both sons died of natural causes, and at age 36, after several attempts, she was finally accepted at the Augustinian convent in Cascia, where she would remain until she died. She lived a life of penance and prayer and was particularly devoted to the Passion of Christ. In 1451, she received a stigma on the forehead resembling those made by the crown of thorns, a wound that bled and caused her pain for the rest of her life. Because of her reputation, many came to seek her spiritual counsel. She spent the last four years of her life bedridden - it is said, sustained only the Eucharist. One day, she asked a cousin to bring her a rose from her old home. Though it was wintertime, the cousin found a single rose blooming. This became a symbol for the belief in Rita's grace to obtain the impossible. With St. Jude Thaddeus, she is considered the saint of impossible and desperate causes. After her death, many miracles were attributed to her, and her body remained incorruptible. She was beatified in 1606 but was not canonized till 1900. Her remains are venerated in the Basilica of Santa Rita in Cascia.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052213.cfm
AT THE VATICAN TODAY
General Audience - Continuing his catecheses on the articles of faith in the Apostles' Creed, Pope Francis reflected
on 'the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church', which he said was inseparably linked to the Holy Spirit who guides
the Church and every member of the Church to carry out Christ's mandate to carry his message to all peoples.
Vatican Radio's English translation of the catechesis:
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/22/audience:_the_holy_spirit,_unity_and_communion_%5Bfull_text%5D/en1-694369
After the GA, he met with H.E. Thomas Boni Yayi, President of the Republic of Benin, in the small reception hall
of the Aula Paolo VI.
One year ago...
There were no official events for Benedict XVI. But a news conference was held at the Vatican to present the program for the VII World Encounter of Families which was to take place in Milan from May 29-June on the theme "The Family: Work and Celebration", with the presence of the Holy Father in its concluding two days.
However, media interest this time last year was focused on the just-released book by Gianluigi Nuzzi in which he published the rather random assortment of correspondence and documents that - we would learn within a week - were pilfered from Benedict XVI's desk (or that of his secretary, at any rate) by the traitorous valet Paolo Gabriele.
The most interesting first rejoinder to the book was from Andrea Tornielli, who had reported for Il Giornale most of the 'major' episodes dredged up in the book that had to do with Cardinal Bertone's attempts to consolidate power in his hands - all fortunately vetoed by Benedict xVI. It is instructive to look at Tornielli's piece, because it illustrates some of my earlier reservations about the tenor of commentary in the Italian media, even by someone like Tornielli, whose judgments and opinions I have generally found congenial. But this time, I find even the premise of his title almost outrageous!
The Vatican's irritation
over Vatileaks and Nuzzi's book
Translated from
May 20, 2012
Dear friends, I have just finished reading the book by Gianluigi Nuzzi that contains all the Vatileaks - letters and documents coming from someone (or more than one) from the Vatican who turned them over to the journalist.
As you know, on Monday, the Holy See reacted with extreme severity, defining the entire operation as 'a criminal act' and that "it will take the necessary measures" including a request for international collaboration
[namely, Italy's - since the documents taken unlawfully from Vatican files were given to an Italian citizen who published them in Italy].
[2013 P.S. And is anything still being done about that? Or has it become academic and therefore no longer to be pursued since the principal victim of the crime is no longer Pope?
The great irritation at the Vatican is evident and even understandable ['Irritation' is hardly the word to use in this case: the outrage and the criminal acts are not just like an attack of prickly heat; they are heat-seeking missiles hoping to be destructive!] to see notes, memoranda and letters disclosed in public barely a few months, in some cases, a few weeks after they were written.
I do not know what legal bases there may be to take recourse against the book's publication, but it is obvious to me that the Holy See has a serious problem of internal security, and that the 'criminal act' was committed by someone (or some people) who work in the Apostolic Palace
[which houses the papal apartment, the various papal reception halls and offices, and the Secretariat of State] and have access to the archives - being able to intercept documents coming from the Pope's desk, from his secretary and from the Secretary of State.
Committed by someone who is apparently following a precise plan whose contours are still unclear. But the problem seems to be worsening, and it is about these moles in the Vatican.
[I'm sorry but I find it outrageous that even someone like Tornielli makes the this security problem the paramount concern, without even touching on the violation of the Pope's personal right to privacy and to privileged communication "as an individual, as the Supreme Head of the Church, and as sovereign of Vatican City State", in the words of the Vatican statement.
I have now found the provision in the Italian Constitution which is applicable, in its listing of fundamental personal rights: "Art. 15 - The freedom and the secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are inviolable". It's like the postman or your neighbor opening your mail - that action is criminal in any civilized country. Why should stealing the Pope's private files be any less criminal, considering he is also a Head of State? So I do not understand why the Italian journalists commenting on the matter can simply shrug it off!]]
As far as I can see, the internal investigation to discover the responsible parties (leakers) is still scrabbling around in the dark.
The three aged cardinals in charge of the investigation (Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi) have received the report of the inquiries made by the Vatican Gendarmerie, but it seems that they contain no precise elements attributable to anyone in particular, despite the fact that persons who could have access to the confidential files in question are certainly not too many.
[That was always a basic assumption made by interested 'onlookers' like me...It's irrelevant for Tornielli to refer to the investigating cardinals as 'aged' - no one has accused them of being less than sharp at their age, much less senile, and they are all younger than the Pope, whose faculties have not been questioned.]
From this angle, the appointment of the investigating committee, which began work on April 25, as well as the Vatican statement on Monday, would seem to be deterrent measures to avoid that further leaks should occur. But
four months since the first leaked documents were published, no one seems to have learned anything!
One must not fail to point out, too, that the harsh Vatican statement was virtually an involuntary gift to Nuzzi
[ie, it helps raise interest in the book and therefore its sales]. Obviously, this was not the intention at all, but rather to send a precise signal.
As for the book itself, it certainly has some documentary interest because of the letters - already partly disclosed last January-February in Nuzzi's TV program and in the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.
They serve to confirm the general context of reports that even without having seen those documents, in some cases, even I, in my little way and from fragments gleaned here and there, was able to report.
Take the private meal of the Pope with President Napolitano on January 19, 2009. I reported about that lunch (not dinner as reported) in Il Giornale four days after it took place.
[What the book publishes are notes prepared by Mons. Dominique Mamberti, Deputy Secretary for Relations with States, of the talking points for the discussion. So, big deal already!]
Also interesting was a note on the episode of a car with a Vatican license plate which on the evening of December 10, 2009, was riddled by bullets while its passengers were having dinner in a Roman restaurant. This, too, confirmed a reconstruction of that event provided in Il Giornale a few weeks after it happened. I wrote about it in connection with the Christmas Eve episode in St. Peter's Basilica when a mentally troubled young woman lunged at the Pope.
Same thing with the paragraphs dedicated to the Williamson case and the lifting of the excommunication from the four Lefebvrian bishops. Nuzzi recycles the substance of the meeting held at the Secretariat of State that we
[Tornielli and co-author Paolo Rodari] made public in the book
Attacco a Ratzinger published in August 2010.
Same thing with the reconstruction of Cardinal Bertone's attempt to gain control of the Toniolo Institute (which manages the Sacro Cuore University and its affiliates like the Gemelli Hospital) by naming his own man, Giovanni Maria Flick, in place of Cardinal Tettamanzi as chairrman of the board=
[and how the Pope overruled Bertone after Tettamanzi came to see the Pope privately. After all, and Bertone should have known this, the incoming Archbishop of Milan would take over as soon as Tettamanzi retired.].
Same thing with the internal debates generated in the Apostolic Palace by Bertone's plan to acquire the financially-troubled San Raffaele health-and-education empire with IOR funds [also vetoed by the Pope].
New details are provided only in the Boffo case, by disclosing Boffo's letters to Mons, Gaenswein; as well as previously unpublished communications regarding the appointment of Cardinal Angelo Scola to be Archbishop of Milan.
In subsequent posts, I will write about some other documents that serve to illustrate internal dynamics within the Apostolic Palace.
But I disagree on one point that Nuzzi writes in his Introduction and which some authoritative book reviewers agreed with. And that is when they say that it is immaterial to ask who could have lifted so many and so varied an assortment of documents, but that one must concentrate on
what the documents contain. Which, as I said above, simply serve to contribute more details to episodes that had already been reported in the media.
But I think that to ask questions about what happened and what possible disputes are going on in the Vatican, about who carried out such a massive and unprecedented document leak and why, are just as important as simply examining the documents to decipher the dynamic of relationships in the Apostolic Palace.
[More important, I would say, since, in effect, what do the documents show but the normal differences of opinion and yes, even factional wrangling, that happens in any major executive office?]
And Nuzzi will excuse me if I find his explanation hard to believe that the source(s) he codenames 'Maria' who fenced all the stolen documents to him did so only because he/they want 'transparency' at the Vatican.
Especially since they've only made 'transparent' what was already known - it's like switching on floodlights in an already quite visible show window. It makes us perhaps notice dust and cobwebs we might not otherwise have seen, but little else that is informative or useful... Also, Tornielli leaves out Nuzzi's other attribution to his source/sources - that they wanted to do this "for the good of the Church and the Holy Father".]
Elsewhere on the page
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=85272...
I translate the chapter descriptions in Nuzzi's book, as well as his Introduction to the book, from which the following seemed to me to be the most significant, but which, to my knowledge, was simply ignored by the media who preferred to concentrate on the hardly-salacious and truth to say, quite boring minutiae of the pilfered documents.
Another truth emerges that cracks open a rather widespread commonplace about this Pope: the common impression of Benedict XVI as a dogmatic theologian who is remote from the problems of the Roman Curia and of the Church in general, does not correspond to the truth. The image of a Pontiff dedicated only to studying sacred texts and doctrinal questions is false. [Tell that to Marco Politi, will you?]
Of course, Joseph Ratzinger remains a very cultured and highly refined scholar, but he is also a pastor who attentively follows in detail the critical situations of daily life, and seeks to impose changes that are often hindered - on thorny topical issues, scandals that must be set right and quieted down, the persecutions that continue to be perpetrated against Christians in many parts of the world.
He is a Pope who is alert and dynamic, who desires light and truth, but inevitably, in the opinion of this writer, the victim of compromises and of 'reasons of state' that manage to hamper any change. [Easy to say, but Nuzzi offers no scintilla of evidence in the book of any 'change' Benedict XVI wished to make which was hindered in any way!*
He always asks to be kept up to date on the most serious troubles that the Church faces. And he even proposes radical measures while seeking to mediate among the various elements that make up the Church.
He is engaged in intense activity which makes the papal apartment the physical seat of a rule that embraces the whole world.
A simple office, a modest library stuffed with books, low armchairs, a wooden desk, and two landline telephones, no cellulars. That is the office of Joseph Ratzinger, 265th Pontiff in the history of Roman Catholicism,
And yet this office is one of the centers of world power. The pulsing heart of the Church, yet inaccessible to the more than a billion Catholics who inhabit the planet. Here the Pope advises his secretaries as they filter through the most sensitive documents. Here he makes his most difficult decisions. [Probably not. In his chapel, more likely!]
Translated from the Introduction
to SUA SANTITA
by Gianluigi Nuzzi
2013 P.S. How does Nuzzi square all that praise of Benedict XVI a very much 'hands=on' Pope, with his source's [in a week's time we were to learn it was Paolo Gabriele, when he was arrested by the Vatican police] brazen statements at his trial that from the questions the Pope asked at mealtime, he concluded that Benedict XVI was clueless and uninforrmed about what was happening in the Vatican and the Church? (i.e., he never read nay of those documents that were pilfered! What chutzpah this treacherous valet had!) And the media simply let him get away with that absurd statement without even challenging it?
Even worse are Gabriele's sanctimonious pretensions, as it is played up on the dust jacket of the book?
"My courage is to make known the most troubling events in the life of the Church, make public certain secrets, small and big stories, that have not gone beyond the Bronze Door. Only this way can I feel free, liberated from the unbearable complicity of someone who, while knowing things, must keep silent" - Statement to the author by 'Maria', codename for the principal, anonymous and secret source within the Vatican who furnished the hundreds of documents on which this book is based.
Once again, it must be pointed out that the vaunted documents revealed nothing earth-shaking, or even 'major' in terms of substantial content, no scandal involving money, nothing criminal, and nothing that reflected badly in any way on Benedict XVI himself - and yet, the way MSM played up Vatileaks, one would think it was the Banco Ambrosiano-IOR scandal a hundred times worse! Considering the odd assortment that was published, they seemed to have been pilfered catch-as-catch-can (now we know it is Gabriele and his modus operandi, he copied what he could when he could, which obviously did not leave him much choice).
The final word on Vatileaks has not been said because the coverage and commentary on it were so skewed and focused on the wrong things, missing the forest for the trees. I doubt that anyone among the Italian Vaticanistas will ever be able to write a definitive account of it because they are all wearing identical blinders. But since 'Vatileaks' has come to be the demeaning and disparaging shortcut universally used to connote all the problems attributed to the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, clearing the episode up, objectively and fairly, once and for all, is important for the correct 'public perception' of his Pontificate.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/05/2013 04:22]