Other than the Vatileaks dossier,
Benedict XVI reportedly left another 300 pages
of his own notes for the next Pope
by Msrco Tosatti
Translated from the Italian service of
March 22, 2012
Pope Francis has much to read these days. Not so much the report of the three cardinals on Vatileaks, as a personal memorandum written for his successor by Benedict XVI about practical matters that have to do with the exercise of the Pontificate.
This was indicated to
Avvenire by Archbishop Loris Capovilla, who was John XXIII's personal secretary, whose 98 years have not taken a toll 0n (and have even sharpened) his lucidity.
He said, "In any case - and I am not referring here to the Vatileaks dossier - what I am told in Rome is that Benedict XVI had left something like 300 pages of a memorandum he wrote expressly for the attention of the new Pope". In other words, like a good captain, Benedict XVI turned over the tiller properly to the new man in charge of Peter's bark with a set of notes intended to help the latter.
It is therefore likely that Pope Francis may pay more attention to these notes than the Vatileaks dossier, about which there seems to be growing criticism and perplexity, even as it has become clear how the three=man cardinals' inquiry commission worked.
[It must be said that everything written in the media about the Vatileaks report has been purely speculative. Even Ignacio Ingrao of Panorama, who had speculated about a gay lobby blackmailing some in the Vatican (the main thing that MSM picked up from his story and the wild extrapolations made from it by La Repubblica), has repeatedly told other journalists who asked him directly about his story, that he never saw the report or spoke to anyone who had seen the report, but that he sought to reconstruct the information that the cardinals could have gathered by talking to the persons he knew they had interviewed. The following too should be considered speculative, not necessarily fact.]
They were said to have based their inquiries only on the 'denunciations' made by Mons. Carlo Maria Vigano in his 2011 letters to Cardinal Bertone and the Pope, mostly recording accusatory testimony without, in many cases, hearing the other side, but simply limiting themselves to recording such testimony. [It does not make sense that the cardinals limited themselves mostly to Vigano's accusations because the Vatileaks issue went beyond those specific allegations - we were made to understand that Benedict XVI asked the cardinals to look into the structure and mechanisms of the various Curial offices (including the Secretariat of State) in order to analyze the environment which made Vatileaks (not just Gabriele's thievery but the general morale and attitudes of those who work in the Vatican. It's also hard to believe that the three cardinals would not have sought out witnesses who could shed more light on accusations made! Even a veteran reporter like Tosatti falls prey to writing from a certain bias and failing to ask the commmon-sense questions raised by presenting such bias a-critically!]
One of the more controversial parts is the so-called 'inquiry' organized at the Vatican Goivernatorate by Mons. Vigano when he was the #2 man there, regarding Mons. Paolo Nicolini [financial administrator of the Vatican Museums], a man greatly respected by Cardinal Camillo Ruini but also by Vigano himself, who had often consulted him on technical and admini9strative questions.
But informed sources say Nicolini was also a consltant to Cardinal Bertone, to whom he provided information about the Governatorate, including, it was presumed, on Vigano himself. Which led the latter to suspect Nicolini of playing a two-faced game. So when Bertone informed Vigano that he would be assigned as Nuncio to the United States, not succeed automatically to become President of the Governatorate upon the retirement of Cardinal Lajolo, Vigano exploded.
Because of the specific accusations made by Vigano in his letters to the Pope and Bertone, a commission to investigate these accuaations was appointed in 2011, headed by a close friend of Vigano, Mons. Egidio Turnaturi, a former judge of the Roman Rota. The inquiry, as Vatican Insider reported in March last year, found that "the accusations against Mons. Nicolini were unfounded, although the commission confirmed some observations about his character and admonished him about this".
Equally important was the letter written in response to Vigano's accusations by Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, his predecessor at the
Governatorate, who dotted many i's and crossed off t's in Vigano's letter, to show that the Governatorate had worked with transparency regarding its financial affairs.
But the [alleged] imbalance in the cardinals' report on Vatileaks by focusing on Vigano's accusations, along with other elements, has influenced negatively on the credibility of the whole report. Especially because of discrepancies, not of minor significance, that have been found in the allegations of the 'great accuser'.
Moreover, it is said that Vigano, who left for the United States in October 2011, has so far refused to make his private apartment at the Governatorate available for the use of others, and it remains locked, with all his furniture. Cardinal Bertone is said to have written a letter asking him to return the keys to the Vatican, but for some reason (Vigano has friends in the Secretariat?), the letter was not sent until much later. [But has Vigano responded? Has he returned the keys? This is all reminiscent of Cardinal Sodano not vacating the private apartment of the Secretary of State for quite a few months after he was no longer SecState, while Cardinal Bertone had to bide his time in temporary lodgings at the Torre San Giovanni inside the Vatican.]
On top of that, there was the recent news that Mons. Vigano had told the Pope a major lie in his letter complaint.
[It's not recent - if only the other Italian media had deigned to check the facts reported in February 2012 by Il Giornale, based on court documents it claimed to have seen, and which are substantially in agreement, albeit with more detail, with the statements recently attributed directly to Mons. Vigano's older brother, Lorenzo, a Jesuit Biblicist.]
Fr. Vigano said in an interview that his brother "lied to Ratzinger when he claimed he needed to stay in Rome in order to take care of me since I was very ill". Vigano, in his letter to the Pope, said he could not leave Rome because of the 'necessary, dutiful and direct assistance' that he was committed to give his older brother.
Fr. Lorenzo has lived in Chicago since the 1980s, and although he suffered a stroke in 1996 and is half-paralyzed, he is well enough to have returned to his job afterwards as a Biblical researcher in the University of Chicago. He also said he and Carlo had broken off relations two years ago because of "tensions regarding our family inheritance".
"It is most serious," he said, "that Carlo Maria wrote a lie to the Pope, instrumentalizing me for his personal ends".
Unfortunately, it seems that Cardinals Herranz, Tomo and De Giorgi gave too much attention to Vigano's accusations, perhaps out of a desire to set things straight for the sake of the Church.
Among those they interviewed, just as they did the others accused by Vigano, was Cardinal Bertone himself, the principal target of Vigano's accusations.
{So how can Tosatti say that the cardinals only heard one side, when it seems like they did interrogate those who had been accused - it would seem normal to first confront the accused with the accusations, hear what they have to say, and then seek out other witnesses who can either corroborate or contradict what the accused has said in his defense. Surely no one had to tell that to the three cardinals, led by one of the best canon lawyers in the Church.]
It's a line that, in the light of what has been emerging, casts a shadow on the reliability of the cardinals' report.
What's the game plan here? To discredit the Vatileaks dossier all of a sudden, when for months, it was being hailed in the Italian media as a definitive account of what is wrong in the Curia and how such faults contributed to the atmosphere that created Vatileaks????
Caveat emptor! None of the Vatican experts and pundits even considered the possibility that Jorge Bergoglio, runner-up in the 2005 Conclave, was a serious contender in 2013, let alone that he would be elected Pope. So much for 'expert speculation'! Can we please just get facts?