ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

Avvenire reports its editor's resignation today in an online bulletin:
Editor Boffo has resigned: 'A calm and lucid decision'
On the right, a page from the 9/3/09 issue with letters of support from readers.



ANSA's English service has a story that's supposed to wrap up the Boffo story, and I was hoping it would be better than the Anglophone services like AP and Reuters, because at least it would have the Italian perspective. But it makes a couple of factual errors that cannot be overlooked, coming from Italy's premier news agency, and overall, the article is almost as bad as the Anglophones.

The English wire agencies have been reporting sketchily this whole Berlusconi-Avvenire-Church-CEI-Boffo events, according to their prefabricated storyline, so they report only what fits that storyline. Whereas the Italian-based correspondents of the major British dailies have been focused on the sordid and salacious aspects of the case,

Perhaps that explains why after almost a full week of this landmark event in the current cultural wars (orthodox Catholics and their 'devoted atheist' allies vs secularists of all stripes) in Italy, not a single American blog or commentary has so much as referred to it, except to decry or shrug their shoulders over Mr. Berlusconi's peccadillos, which are not news at all since he has been this way for decades!

Anyway, here is the ANSA report:


Bishops daily's editor Boffo quits
after six days of 'scandal'



ROME, September 3 (ANSA) - The editor of a Catholic Church daily who criticised Silvio Berlusconi's private life quit Thursday after the Italian premier's family newspaper sought to expose him as a homosexual with a criminal record.

Dino Boffo, 57, tendered his resignation in a letter to Msgr Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian bishops conference which publishes the Avvenire daily, saying his family and professional life had been 'raped' by a 'barbaric' attack.

"I cannot accept a war of words continuing about me day after day, (a war) that is wrecking my family and leaving Italians more and more stunned," Boffo said in the letter.

He claimed a 'shady anti-clerical power bloc' was behind the campaign started by Il Giornale and taken up by other conservative dailies.

Bagnasco said he was accepting the resignation 'with regret' and voiced 'unchanged regard' for the former editor, whom he said had been the subject of 'an indescribable media attack'.

The guild of Catholic journalists voiced concern about freedom of speech, echoing the Italian journalists' guild which has organised a September 19 rally in defence of press freedom after Berlusconi sued left-leaning dailies La Repubblica and L'Unita.

Bagnasco and Pope Benedict XVI* had supported Boffo during a week-long campaign by Il Giornale, a daily owned by the brother of the conservative premier.

*[Now, that outright falsehood is unpardonable of ANSA - Fr. Lombaardi's statement about Cardinal Bertone's telephone call to Boffo made it clear Bertone had only expressed his own personal support for Boffo, not the Pope's.

And the CEI press release on the Pope's telephone call to Bagnasco said not a word about the Pope expressing his solidarity with Boffo, only that he wanted more 'information and assessment' of the situation]

Il Giornale [its editor, Vittorio Feltri, to be precise] alleged a week ago that Boffo had been fined several years ago for harassing the wife of a man with whom he was in a relationship.


Feltri, left, and Boffo. Finally, we have faces to go with the stories!.

After the attack, from which Berlusconi distanced himself, the premier called off a trip to a forgiveness Mass [another error by ANSA - the scheduled appointment was for dinner, not for the Mass]reportedly set up to mend fences with Catholics concerned about reports on the premier's alleged relationships with young women and a call girl who claimed she slept with him.

In an August 12 editorial in Avvenire, Boffo voiced 'malaise, mortification, and suffering' about the premier's 'arrogant departure from a sober lifestyle'.

Last Friday Il Giornale's editor Vittorio Feltri accused Boffo of being a 'supermoralist' who was not qualified to set himself up as a moral arbiter.

Feltri has refused to back down, claiming the facts of the case were clear and had not been denied. A court order on the fine Boffo paid has been released but judges have withheld details of the case, citing privacy.

[ANSA was duty-bound - but preferred to ignore that duty - to say that the facts of the case are by no means clear, precisely because the police and the courts have only released the bare facts, namely: Boffo paid a fine for some telephone molestations he claimed were made on his cellphone by someone else, but the judge did not believe this, so he imposed the fine. It was a procedure that did not require a trial. The court made it clear there were no sexual elements in the charge at all.


Boffo's two-page spread rebuttal of Feltri in the 9/3/09 issue of Avvenire.

ANSA also fails to mention that in today's issue (Sept. 3) of Avvenire (the issue was out online and in the streets before he submitted his resignation) Boffo answered Feltri's statements point by point.]

The Italian press says it has tracked down the woman who reportedly sued Boffo in the Umbrian town of Terni but she has refused to answer questions.

P.S. I checked out Boffo's resignation letter to see if it was worth translating - but with a shock, I find out it's rather lengthy, rather rambling, and not at all 'calm and lucid' as his newspaper headline claims his decision was.

Boffo is relentlessly defensive about himself and just as relentlessly angry about his attackers - his responses since the atack on him have been rather hysterical - and he has not really explained the circumstances behind the telephone calls for which he paid a fine.

I hate to beat on him since he has resigned, but he, more than anyone, should know that righteous indignation without a satisfactory explanation does not clear the air in any way.

That said, he has done a great service to the Church and to the Pope by minimizing the exploitation of his misdemeanor, however justified he may have been, to target the Church and the Pope.

I will post any farther developments in this case that do not directly involve the Church or the Pope in NOTABLES.