ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

I was hoping I might be able to post John Allen's article on the Boffo case without having to interject too much, but it was not to be.

For a first presentation to Anglophone readers of the events of the past week affecting the Church in Italy, it has a number of basic factual errors, unfortunately. And naturally, he puts his own spin on the events.

What he means by his headline is that Catholic bishops are losing their influence on their flocks.


Church's 'power distance index' in decline

Sep. 04, 2009


Given all the recent American Catholic ferment -- the Kennedy funeral, the surprise resignation of Scranton's Bishop Joseph Martino, debates over health care reform, etc. -- it's been understandably tough for Catholic news from anywhere else in the world to register. Yet there's a bizarre story out of Italy this week that deserves its moment in the sun.

It's a soap opera, really, as tawdry and tragic as these bits of voyeurism usually are, yet it also suggests two points with potentially broad implications:

•The political and cultural ties in the West that in recent decades have bound the Church to the political right may be unraveling.
•The "Power Distance Index" in Catholicism, meaning the willingness of ordinary people to accept the authority of the bishops to manage the internal affairs of the church, is declining rapidly, and not just in countries scarred by the sexual abuse crisis.

I'll sketch the details in a moment, but first, here's a thought exercise for American readers to capture the drama of what's happened.

Imagine that while President George Bush was still in office, he had been engulfed by something like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and that the Catholic News Service, the official news agency of the U.S. bishops, had carried strong editorials insisting that Bush must explain his behavior.

Next, imagine that the editor-in-chief of CNS was accused on the front page of The Wall Street Journal of being a homosexual who had harassed a woman because he had an affair with her husband.

Imagine further that The Wall Street Journal was owned by Bush's brother, so that many suspected political payback. Next, imagine that in protest of the accusation, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cancelled a one-on-one dinner with Bush, while conservative politicians split between defenders of the church and defenders of The Wall Street Journal.

{To use the WSJ as an analog for Il Giornale - a rather pedestrian daily newspaper, except for its outstanding Vaticanista, Andrea Tornielli - is unfair to the WSJ. Allen might have used, for instance, USA Today, one of the few American dailies that are 'national' in scope as opposed to the city-based major media.]

Finally, imagine that the CNS editor resigned, with many American Catholics regarding him as a martyr to a vicious political attack.

If any of those things were true, we'd be talking about the deepest church-state crisis in recent American history, one with profound implications for the perceived alliance between the Catholic hierarchy and the Republican Party.

For the record, of course, none of the above is even remotely true, but it comes awfully close to capturing what's unfolded in Italy over the last couple of weeks.

In recent months, conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a 72-year-old media and real estate tycoon who's also known as something of a lothario, has been plagued by one personal scandal after another.

Allegations include that women were paid to attend parties at his Sardinian villa, while a high-class prostitute said she spent a night with him at his Rome residence. His second wife, a former actress, has filed for divorce on the basis of his alleged "infatuation" with young women.

The Vatican has not had much publicly to say, but not so L'Avvenire [when will Allen stop calling Avvenire L'Avvenire erroneously? Doesn't he look at the newspaper at all? I will use the right form for the rest of his article], the official newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference.

Edited by Catholic layman Dino Boffo, Avvenire has published essays suggesting that Berlusconi has set a poor moral tone and needs to make full disclosure. Boffo is a well-known figure, among other things credited with engineering a spike in both Avvenire's circulation and its relevance.

Last Friday, all hell broke loose around Boffo.

The secular daily Il Giornale, which is owned by Berlusconi's brother and edited by a legendary conservative journalist named Vittorio Feltri, published a front-page "scoop" claiming that in 2004, Boffo was charged in an Italian court for harassment on the basis of a series of phone calls made during late 2001 and early 2002 to a woman in the city of Terni. (Under Italian law, the case remained confidential.)

Il Giornale produced an alleged court document suggesting that Boffo, who is unmarried, is a "well-known homosexual" who made the calls because he had had an affair with the woman's husband. The document, it turns out, had been mailed anonymously to all the bishops in Italy three months [even much earlier, a number of times, since the 2004 fine] before the Il Giornale report.

[Allen inexplicably has it all wrong here. There wasn't one 'document': Il Giornale published two texts - one, a photocopy of the court decree acknowledging that Boffo paid a fine of 516 euros for 'telephone molestations' - which provided absolutely no details of the case; and 2) the text of an anonymous, coarsely produced anti-Boffo flyer familiar to Italian media for years, which Feltri inexcusably presented as an 'informativo' from the Italian police. I can't believe Allen can get this fact wrong.


Clearly, the document on the right cannot be considered by anyone in his right mind to be a police bulletin!

The latter is not strictly a 'document' since it was not any official text at all, but something Italian media itself has known about for some time and ignored, necause the anonymous flyer has been sent from time to time to dozens of Italian bishops since 2004, - and according to the CEI always timed when the anti-Church elements in Italy want to 'damage' the Church.]

Boffo immediately claimed that the document was fake, and he may well be right. [He didn't say it was fake. He acknowledged the court decree readily. But referring to the anonymous text, he said in effect that it was recycled trash previously known to the CEI and dismissed because it was 1) anonymous and 2) baseless. Especially since the day after the Giornale 'expose', the Interior Minister, which is in charge of the police prefectures of Italy, called him to say the police had not released any information, much less that there had been repeated complaints against him for homosexual offenses, as the flyer claims.]

Italian magistrates have said there's nothing in their files about Boffo's sexual orientation, and that several other details in the document [tne anonymous letter] are obviously wrong. (For example, it asserts that Boffo's phone was wiretapped, which magistrates say didn't happen.) Thus there is real doubt about the document's authenticity. [That is an understatement! Allen also does not take into account that the anonymous flyer was common knowledge to the Italian media and many Italian bishops, but rightly ignored as 'news', though I believe, wrongly under-estimated by Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco as to its potential to damage the Church by exposing one of the most prominent influential laymen in the Italian Church to insinuations and possible blackmail.]

On the other hand, magistrates have also confirmed that there was indeed a process against Boffo for making harassing phone calls, that those phone calls included references to sexual relations between the unnamed woman and another man, and that Boffo paid a fine of roughly $800.

Boffo has claimed that he paid the fine because he considered it an administrative technicality, not an admission of guilt. Moreover, he asserted that someone else made the calls using his cell phone, although magistrates say they looked into that possibility at the time and judged it "not credible." [That is why they fined him. The Italian judicial process is different from what we may be used to. There was no trial in this case - a charge was made against Boffo, which was subject to a penalty by fine, snd from all accounts, he did not even bother to go to Terni; he just sent a lawyer to represent him and pay the fine.

As for the cell phone from which the calls were made, it turns out it was not Boffo's personal phone but one of several assigned to him for use by his staff.]

In typical Italian fashion, in other words, the truth remains somewhat obscure. To date, judges have refused to release the complete file on Boffo, citing privacy concerns.

In one sense, however, the truth almost doesn't matter. Psychologically, Italians have long adhered to an inverted form of Occam's Razor: the most complex possible explanation of any set of facts is likely to be correct.

In this case, Italians almost unanimously agree that whatever the reality behind the charges, news value wasn't why Il Giornale published them. Instead, it's because Berlusconi's brother owns Il Giornale, because Avvenire and the Italian bishops have been critical of Berlusconi, and this was a way of punching the Church in the nose. (For the record, Feltri has denied coordinating publication with Berlusconi or anyone in his government.)

The leadership ranks of both the Italian Church and the Vatican have circled the wagons around Boffo. Last Friday, the president of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genova, called the charges against Boffo "disgusting." The Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, cancelled a dinner with Berlusconi last Friday night in protest. [Not sure if there was really this cause-and-effect in that cancellation. It wasn't seen so at the time - rather it was interpreted then as avoiding the presence of Berlusconi, a 'sinner', at the observance of the Celestinian Indulgence, of all things, which was the reason Bertone would be in L'Aquila, where Berlusconi has been visiting periodically to follow up rehabilitation work following the March earthquake.]

Pope Benedict XVI telephoned Bagnasco early this week to express full support, and the Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, has alluded to "the suspicion that someone wants to foment confusion by spreading false accusations." [This comment followed Feltri's fresh and illogical accusation the day after the Pope's telephone call to Bagnasco, claiming that the anonymous flyer had been produced by the 'Vatican secret services'. Fr. Lombardi promptly said 1) there is no 'Vatican secret service", and 2) the wild accusation was intended to foment more chaos in the Church by implying that the Vatican has been plotting to undermine the Italian bishops!

And how, Mr. Feltri, would attributing the scurrilous flyer to the Vatican fit with your opening 'scoop' that it was an 'informativo' from the Italian police?

Despite that show of support, Boffo resigned on Thursday. In a three-page letter to Bagnasco, he asserted that he was the victim of a "colossal set-up" which was "fictional and diabolically executed."

Nonetheless, Boffo wrote, "I cannot accept that my name will continue to be the focus of a daily war of words, upsetting my family and leaving Italians ever more dismayed."

For his part, Feltri remains defiant, writing: "Bagnasco judges our 'attack' to be disgusting, but doesn't find the episode that generated it, the protagonist of which was Dino Boffo, disgusting? What kind of morality is that? Since when is reporting a crime worse than committing it?"

On Tuesday, Il Giornale splashed a banner headline across its front page asserting, "The bishops knew everything for a long time," while the subhead accused them of "pretending to know nothing."

[They never pretended not to know anything. CEI sources said from the beginning that both Cardinal Ruini and Cardinal Bagnasco were told by Boffo about the Terni case and that they were satisfied with his explanation.

Their confidence in Boffo is admirable, but their naivete as to thinking that the case would never be made public is astounding - especially since they were also well aware of the flyer that was sent out periodically to many Italian bishops after that!]

God alone knows how the story might develop from here -- whether we'll ever know what, if anything, really transpired between Boffo and the woman in Terni, or who might have concocted the "secret memo." (It's probably a fair question whether any of us actually need to know, especially on the first point.) In the meantime, two broader observations suggest themselves.

First, the Boffo affair seems likely to nudge the Church into a more non-partisan stance, loosening its ties to the political right. Much like in the United States, in Italy in recent years the hierarchy has been driven into a marriage of convenience with conservative political forces, mostly due to hot-button moral issues such as gay unions, euthanasia, and artificial reproduction.

In fact, the Italian Church is counting on its alliance with the center-right this fall in a parliamentary debate over a restrictive new law on euthanasia.

While Boffo's travails are thus unlikely to make either the Vatican or the Italian bishops more favorably inclined to the left, the case may at least render Church officials wary of uncritical alliances with any political formation.

This is an especially plausible trajectory, given that a growing number of conservative European politicians seem to want to put some distance between themselves and the church.

In Italy, the heir-apparent to Berlusconi as the leader of the center-right, Gianfranco Fini, has warned against moving toward an "ethical state" rather than a "secular state" -- the former widely understood to mean a state dominated by Catholic moral precepts.

[OOPS!!! And a big one here. Surely Allen is aware that Fini is a controversial politician because until 1995 at least, he was the leader of Italy's neo-Fascist party, making statements like "We are fascists, the heirs of fascism, the fascism of the third millennium", or "After almost half a century, fascism is ideally alive", or "Mussolini was the greatest Italian statesman of the twentieth century (and) Fascism has a tradition of honesty, correctness and good government".

I normally would not know a whit about Fini except that he made statements revisiting his neo-Fascist past last autumn, and as he is a minister in Berlusconi's coalition government, I had to look him up. Would the Church associate politically with some like him?]

Lest one think that any such development will be confined to Italy, it's important to recall that Rome is where a broad cross-section of the church's leadership class congregates.

Catholic bishops from around the world spend considerable chunks of time in Italy -- they may have studied in Rome as seminarians or young priests, some of them have had assignments in the Vatican, and many take both working trips and vacations to Italy.

For many bishops, Italian is the language they know best after their own, and Italian culture is where they feel most comfortable away from home. As a result, Italian developments wield a disproportionate influence in shaping the imagination of the policy-setting class in the Church.

If Catholic institutions in Italy, especially the Vatican and the Italian bishops, reconfigure their political allegiances, it may set a tone elsewhere.

[Allen's simplistic interpretation of the relations between the Church in Italy adn the Italian government is very misleading. If anything, Cardinal Ruini is considered by many, friends and foe alike, to have wielded the successful strategy that enabled the Church to influence public policy on social issues important to the Church, after the 1990s collapse of the Christian Demodrats, who had been the Church's 'house party' following World War II. The strategy was hardly based on obilgatory alliance with the right, but very much on Realpolitik.

Ruini and Bagnasco managed to defeat the leftist Prodi government's attempt to legislate gay marriages in 2007 not by relying on the Italian political right but by mobilizing lay Catholics as in the Family Day rally.]

Second, the Boffo affair offers another reminder that the era in which most people, most of the time, were willing to trust bishops to manage the internal affairs of the Church is long dead. [That's a sweeping statement to make, and is not nevecessarily true everywhere. Certainly not in dioceses where orthodox Catholics still outnumber their cafeteria cousins.]

Back in the 1960s and '70s, Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede, then working for IBM, famously developed what's called the "Power Distance Index." It measures how much a particular culture values and respects authority.

Highly traditional Malaysia consistently scores at the top, followed by several Latin American and Arab nations. At the bottom are keenly egalitarian societies such as New Zealand, Denmark and Austria.
[There you go! It proves my point. Liberal Catholics don't 'trust' their bishops only if the bishop insists on orthodox, i.e., traditional, Catholicism, but if he happens to share their 'progressivism', they are fine with them.]

Applied to Catholicism, one might say the Boffo affair illustrates that while the Church may once have been Malaysia, today it's more like New Zealand. [Once again, a sweeping conclusion. The fact is that the Church has its Malaysias and it has its New Zealands. What is Benedict XVI about but to try and minimize/reduce the New Zealands in favor of teh Malaysias?]

Once upon a time, had a journalist such as Feltri stumbled across a scandal involving a prominent ecclesiastical personality, he would have privately passed the information along to the bishops and let them make the call. (Although Feltri is a non-believer, that's simply how things worked in ultra-Catholic Italy.)

Today, the tendency is to try to publicly shame the bishops into action. That's no novelty in the United States, of course, after the sexual abuse crisis, but the Boffo saga illustrates that it's happening across the board.

In that light, an essay on Wednesday by famed Italian Catholic writer Vittorio Messori is particularly revealing. To be clear, Messori is no dissident. He's the only journalist to have collaborated on books with two different popes: The Ratzinger Report with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1984, and Crossing the Threshold of Hope with John Paul II in 1994.

Yet there Messori was in Corriere della Sera, scolding the Italian bishops for failing to move Boffo to a less "exposed" position back in 2004. [He didn't scold, he reproached - and properly so. Refer to the translation of Messori's article I posted earlier on this page.]

They should have known, Messori argued, that even the whiff of scandal around Boffo would do damage to the Church. In an earlier age, someone like Messori would have made that argument behind the scenes, if at all; today, he's got no qualms about needling bishops in public for, in his eyes, failing to do their job.

[There are Vaticanistas, however, who interpreted Messori's article as the early signal from the Vatican, before the Pope's telephone call to Bagnasco, that preceded the eventual resignation of Boffo. I think Messori writes autonomously. It doesn't take the Vatican to point out the poor judgment of Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco in not seeing that the Church, more than Caesar's wife, should be above suspicion.

I don't know if coming out in public preemptively with the facts of the case, at the time Boffo informed them of the fine he paid, would have helped prevent a contingency such as the Feltri expose, but they should have considered it then, if they thought Boffo was too 'indispensable' in his job to move out of the way for prudence!]

Whether this decline in the Catholic "Power Distance Index" is good or bad -- and, undoubtedly, it's some of each -- is beside the point. It's a reality, even in Italy. That's precisely the burden of being a Catholic bishop these days: leading a high-PDI institution in a low-PDI age. [Ugh! I detest these facile 'technical' formulations! It is never easy to be a bishop, period. They deserve all the prayers we can give them.]


Conspicuously missing from Allen's article is the role Benedict XVI played in clearing the bottleneck of Cardinal Bagnasco's unwavering trust in Boffo and Boffo's own righteous obstinacy - the Pope's telephone call was obviously crucial in leading to Boffo's resignation!

I'm not backing any particular horse in this issue - except that the Pope and the Church as an institution should not be tainted, even indirectly, by scandals like these.

In this case, it was entirely preventable - and could have been prevented with more candor and less naivete on the part of the CEI leadership, and more humility and realism by Boffo about the potential of his personal vulnerabilities, real or not, to damage the Church which he has served so well.

The other Italian media have been generally opportunistic - like the 'tabloid'-minded Rome correspondents of the British papers - using the occasion to hit at the Church as well as at Berlusconi.

The Italian Prime Minister apart from his prompt denial that he had anything to do with the Giornale expose - maybe not, but it is not plausible to the public since his brother owns Il Giornale - has not said anything lately.

But in general, although he has a record for questionable and even crude jokes, breaches of protocol even among his fellow heads of government, and arrogance towards media who are not employed by him, he does not have a record of belligerence or disrespect towards the Church itself (other than his libertinism!].

As far as I have been able to find out, he has always known to step back, keep his head down and his mouth shut in matters regarding the Church. He supports the 'conservative' social legislation that he does because of his own personal beliefs, not because it is what the Church wants, so he is not likely to suddenly change his mind about them because of this contretemps.

Feltri needs a serious examination of conscience; Dino Boffo needs a good spiritual retreat; Berlusconi should be more discreet (if not disciplined) about his self-indulgences and stop 'doing as he pleases' just because he is Italy's richest man or whatever; and for the good of the Church, Cardinals Bertone and Bagnasco should learn to get along without openly jockeying for power, which makes them fodder for the media.