Tuesday, August 13, 2013 ,19th Week in Ordinary Time
SAINTS PONTIANUS, Pope, & HIPPOLYTUS, Priest and Theologian (d Sardinia 235), Martyrs
The Church commemorates a Pope and the man who considered himself the anti-Pope to him on the same day, because they both died as martyrs in the mines of Sardinia, to which they had been exiled with other Church leaders by the Emperor Maximiminus Thrax. Their bodies were brought back to Rome by Pope Fabian, to be buried in the Catacombs of St. Callistus. Pontianus was Pope from 230-235 and presided at a Council that confirmed the excommunication of Origen of Alexandria. Much more is known about Hippolytus, a priest who considered himself holier than the three Popes in his lifetime and was, in effect, in schism with the Church. In fact, he had himself elected Pope by his followers to protest the election of Pontianus. He believed that the Church must be uncompromisngly separate from the world, and therefore condemned the Popes as too 'lenient' and thereby heretical. Apparently, he reconciled himself to the Church and to Pontian while in exile. He is highly revered in the Orthodox world for his writings, which are considered the fullest source of current knowledge about Roman liturgy and the structure of the Church in the second and third centuries. A famous 13th century altarpiece depicts a legend claiming that Hippolytus died by having his limbs tied to horses, tearing him apart as they ran.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/081313.cfm
AT THE VATICAN TODAY
No events announced for the Holy Father.
One year ago...
No events for Benedict XVI either. But the Vatican did release, as scheduled, the Vatican prosecutor's summation of the investigation of the Pope's ex-valet Paolo Gabriele for his role in Vatileaks, and a Vatican magistrate has ruled he will stand trial for aggravated theft, along with an IT specialist in the Secretariat of State, accused of 'aiding and abetting' Gabriele after the fact.
P.S. 2013 Gabriele and Vatileaks kept the media's Vatican pot boiling through the dog days of summer last year but this was the first significant 'development' in what was then an ongoing investigation... I have chosen to re-post here Andrea Tornielli's extensive commentary on the Vatican report - which I subsequently translated in full - because it recalls the highlights thus far at the time of this most lamentable episode...
The first 'truths'
known about Vatileaks
Translated from
August 13, 2012
At noon today, the Holy See Press Office published the entire text of the case summation and judicial decision to try Paolo Gabriele, 46, for aggravated theft in the Vatileaks case.
Gabriele confessed that he copied confidential documents from the Pope's private study and having personally delivered them in the course of several meetings to Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who first used some of the documents on two broadcasts of his weekly TV program "The Untocuhables' on the private TV channel La7, and then more than 200 documents in a book entitled
Sua Santita: Le carte segrete di Beneditto XVI (Private papers of Benedict XVI).
The first news was the existence of a second accused person - a copmputer specialist at the Secretariat of State, Claudio Sciarpelletti, who is accused only of 'aiding and abetting' Gabriele He was arrested and detained only for a day on May 25, after Vatican police found in his office desk an envelop addressed to Gabriele, containing documents regarding investigations conducted by the Vatican police (which documents were in Nuzzi's book), and for having given contradictory versions about his relationship with Gabriele.
Another revelation has to do with someone Gabriele calls his 'spiritual father', referred to only by the initial B in today's reports, to whom the ex-valet provided a boxful of documents that were presumably duplicates of those Gabriele provided to Nuzzi. However, the priest told investigators that he eventually decided to destroy all the documents because of the gravity of the situation and the 'sensitive nature' of the material.
At the same time, however, Gabriele claims that the priest advised him initially to deny any responsibility for the leaks unless it was the Holy Father himself who asked him directly.
Equally interesting is what the reports say about Gabriele's account of the motivations that led him to reach out to Nuzzi. He claimed he was greatly impressed by Nuzzi's book on the IOR,
Vaticano s.p.a.,
(which was based on a private archive of IOR documents kept by a Mons. Dardozzi working within IOR, and discloses the activities of IOR in the past 30 years including the infamous Banco Ambrosiano collapse that cost the Vatican $250 million in restitution to affected clents.)
He thereafter found out through the Internet that Nuzzi would be hosting a program to be called 'The Untouchables'. He found the address of the place where the program was being produced, and got in touch with Nuzzi. There followed a series of meetings between them in an apartment at Nuzzi's disposition on via Angelica near the Vatican. The eventual interview on 'The Untouchables' with the 'disguised' self-confessed 'mole' with tech-altered voice - Gabriele himself - was also filmed in that apartment.
The Vatican investigation has ended only insofar as the decision to try Gabriele for aggravated theft and Sciarpelletti for aiding and abetting, but will continue in terms of more serious crimes (crimes against the State, crimes against the authorities of the State, calmuny; defamation; conspiracy to commit crime; violation of sccrecy)against persons variously involved in Vatileaks.
Another surprising revelation is that in the search of Gabriele's apartment on May 23, Vatican police found not just copies of the private documents he had 'pilfered' but also a check for 100,000 euros made out to Benedict XVI representing a donation to the Pope's charities by the Catholic University of San Antonio di Guadalupe, dated March 26, 2012.
Also found were a gold nugget also presented to the Pope as a gift, and a 1591 translation of the Aeneid by Annibal Caro, printed in Venice in 1581.
Also revealed by the Vatican reports today was that Gabriele was examined by two psychiatric experts, who although they reached different conclusions as to Gabriele's awareness of and responsibiloity for his crime, provide a disturbing psytchological profile of the ex-valet, marked by his 'extreme suggestability'. The investigating magistrate decided that despite the psychological problems, Gabriele was prosecutable.
It was also interesting how various witnesses - among them, Mons. Georg Gaenswein - spoke about the good reputation of Gabriele, particularly his religiosity, which made his crime that much more surprising.
But the ex-valet insisted that his only intention was to help the Pope, whom he believed "was not fully informed of what was happening in the Vatican".
[Strange that a simple-minded man could think that about a Pope as aware and well-informed as Joseph Ratzinger has always kept himself. But then supposedly 'intelligent' men like Marco Politi continually underrate and denigrate Benedict XVI for the same reason!... And yet again, one must point out that the most 'incriminating' (the Bertone 'power grab' letters) of the documents Gabriele laid his hands on, over a period of two years, were not news at all, but had already been reported widely. Everything else is either trivial, petty or marginal curia. What did he think he was revealing that the Pope - and anyone who follows the Vaticanistas' reporting - did not already know? Nuzzi must have done such a great 'kiss-up' job on Gabriele every time they met to keep him motivated to provide more documents. Gabriele explains the apparent 'randomness' of the dpcuments he copied, saying that he never rummaged inside the desks in the Pope's study, only took hold of whatever was lying in front of him.]
It is clear from the references in today's reports to persons identified only by capital letters that there are other persons variously involved in Vatileaks. But nothing emerges in today's reports that hints at the possibility of any moral masterminds who might have influenced in some way the actions of Gabriele.
Ongoing investigations will likely focus on this aspect, while the report of the three-man cardinals' commission could shed light on the Vatican environment in which Vatileaks became possible.
Another observation, from the media standpoint: In the trial instruction and in the excerpts released from the interrogation of Gabriele, the references made to the media outlets for Vatileaks are always and only about Nuzzi, his broadcatss on La7, and his book, without any refernce at al to the newspaper
Il Fatto Quotidiano, which first published the Vigano letters, and other subsequent letters that were then part of Nuzzi's book.
I've finally read through the prosecutor's case summation and the investigating magistrate's exposition leading up to his decision to send Paolo Gabriele to trial for aggravated theft in the Vatileaks case, and though not being generally patient with legal documents, I must say I was happily surprised by the compelling presentations which not only present the facts that the investigation of Gabriele uncovered, but also the steps and reasons thereof that were meticulously followed in the investigation, and the applicable Vatican law at each step. [The process and argumentation alone of determining the psychological state of Gabriele is most instructive and quite fascinating!] No one could ever call this kind of work 'whitewash' of any kind. And frankly, it's much more interesting reading than the pedestrian documents that Gabriele managed to get out to Nuzzi for publication!
And while I share the widespread disappointment that the investigations carried out so far have not gone beyond Gabriele, the judicial inquiry is far from over and may yet bring to light new names. I had assumed that 60 days would have been more than enough time to get to the ground-zero-rock-bottom of this entire tawdry episode but the meticulousness - Fr. Lombardi was right to use the word - of the investigators demands they take the time they need to prove potential accusations of crimes far more serious than just 'aggravated theft'...
John Allen's 'instanalysis' on the Vatican statements
ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/qa-vatican%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98butler-did-it%E2%80...
offers nothing new by way of information nor anything but the predictable in terms of pedestrian analysis, especially the line that any way you look at it, this is all bad for the Vatican, and the perennial suspicion that the Vatican will always do what it can to exclude the involvement of any senior prelates or even, God forbid, cardinals. How about giving the Vatican under Benedict XVI, at the very least, the benefit of the doubt in this case, especially since it has been made clear the investigation is far from over?
And if I may be forgiven for pointing it out, Allen mistakenly translates a statement by Paolo Gabriele as:
"Moreover, I always felt a certain intelligence acting in my interest", when clearly what Gabriele said, using the English word 'intelligence' (as in secret service work) itself, according to the Vatican transcript, was textually: "Oltre agli interessi personali, fra i quali quello per l’intelligence, ritenevo che il Sommo Pontefice non fosse correttamente informato" (Besides my personal interests [in Vatican affairs], among them that for 'intelligence', I thought that the Supreme Pontiff was not correctly informed".
It is here Gabriele goes on to say: "Seeing evil and corruption everywhere in the Church,... I was sure that a shock, even one in the media, would serve to bring back the Church on the right track... In some way, I thought that in the Church this was the role of the Holy Spirit, by whom I felt in some way infiltrated". [DELUSIONAL, DELUSIONAL, DELUSIONAL!]
I think one of the psychiatric experts who evaluated him said it best: "The cognitive elements emerging from (Gabriele's) clinical testing and interrogation delineate a personality organization characterized by an incomplete and unstable identity, suggestibility, sentiments of grandiosity, a rigid and altered moral ideal according to his own personal idea of justice, as well as a pervasive need to be appreciated and esteemed".
How tragic that a major scandal - in the eyes of the public, at least, and the Vaticanistas who frame the public narrative, and one that is oh-so-gratuitous because it really revealed nothing new, or particularly scandalous, for that matter - developed from the grandiloquent delusional actions of a simple-minded man!
PPS - This may seem like a quibble, but i dislike inaccuracies, especially if they are repeatedly used, as in the description of Paolo Gabriele as 'the Pope's butler', or in the Italian media. his 'maggiordomo'. Although Gabriele served meals in the papal household, he was never properly a butler or a majordomo, which would imply he had seniority or supervision over the Pope's Memores Domini housekeepers, which he did not. So I now draw some satisfaction from the fact that the Vatican judicial reports yesterday describe Gabriele only as 'aiutante di camera'('chamber aide', literally, or valet, to be more idiomatic), never as 'maggiordomo'. But still theEnglish headlines read 'butler' or 'majordomo', without even qualifying the description with 'EX-'. Surely, he ceased to occupy his position the moment he was arrested for a crime that meant a personal betrayal of the man he was sworn to serve (in a required Vatican oath of office)!
