John Thavis - The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church

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First published in 2013 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright John Thavis, 2013

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Thavis, John.

The Vatican diaries : a behind-the-scenes look at the power, personalities and politics at the heart of the Catholic Church / John Thavis.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60630-8

1. PapacyHistory. 2. Vatican CityHistory. 3. Catholic ChurchGovernment. 4. Benedict XVI Pope, 1927 I. Title.

BX955.3.T65 2013

262.136dc23

2012037047

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

To Laurie

CONTENTS

This is the very perfection of man, to find out his own imperfections.

Saint Augustine

INTRODUCTION

T O JUDGE BY THE HEADLINES , the Vatican seemed to be unraveling. In the middle of 2012, a series of leaked documents prompted Pope Benedict to launch an internal investigation. The documents were embarrassing, if not exactly incriminating; many dealt with the murky world of Vatican finances, while others revealed details of security operations, notes from private papal meetings and letters from high-profile Italian personalities seeking papal audiencessome with an enclosed check. In the eyes of top Vatican officials, the most scandalous aspect of what the press dubbed Vatileaks was not the content of the leaked material, but the fact that classified documents were being circulated at all.

As someone who has covered the Vatican for thirty years, I know that Vatican secrecy is largely a myth. More than three thousand people work in the Vaticans administrative machine, and many of them will share information if given the opportunity. But such information is typically passed on through casual conversation, not purloined documents. It was that detail that made this scandal so unusual, and that led a triumvirate of investigating cardinals to aggressively pursue the culprits. The paper trail led rather easily to Paolo Gabriele, who as the popes valet was one of the few people with access to the daily flow of documents in and out of the papal apartment. The father of three children, a devout Catholic who had worked since 1998 in the service of two popes, Gabriele seemed an unlikely Vatican mole. The universal assumption was that he was being manipulated by higher-ups. All of which, as explained more fully in this books final chapter, pointed to an increasingly open power struggle inside the Roman Curia.

The news of Paolo Gabrieles arrest generated curiosity and a degree of derision in the news media. The butler did it became the punch line to a bad joke, and the joke was on the Vatican. To make matters worse, the aging Pope Benedict seemed painfully unaware of what was going on around him.

Meanwhile, another drama was unfolding: The president of the Vatican bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, once touted as Pope Benedicts financial reformer, was summarily and very publicly fired. Among the reasons listed in a harshly worded memo were Gotti Tedeschis progressively erratic personal behavior and his failure to explain the dissemination of documents last known to be in the presidents possession.

To most outsiders, this was a new Vatican, a Vatican that had gone off the rails. I viewed the events a bit differently. To me, they were the public eruption of a private culture that has long reigned inside the Vatican wallsa culture of miscommunication and miscues, of good intentions and flawed execution, of conflicting agendas and shifting alliances. It is a culture in which clerical careerism often overshadows quiet dedication to the work of the church. It is a culture founded on hierarchical order, but swamped in organizational confusion. It is a culture in which the pope is considered immune from criticism, yet often is kept uninformed about the details of important decisions. It is, in theory, a culture of confidentialityyet it leaks like a two-thousand-year-old boat.

When I began covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service, or CNS, in the early 1980s, I was stunned by the lack of coordination among Roman Curia offices and the haphazard way information was made publicmore often via a maze of rumor and innuendo rather than through official channels. Eventually I came to appreciate the opportunities afforded by such ambiguity. Because the atmosphere within the Vatican is more medieval village than corporate headquarters, I found myself working most effectively through informal encounters and backdoor conversations. My sources ran the gamut from top Vatican diplomats to the ushers in Saint Peters Basilicaand once they came to know and trust you, they all talked. I soon learned that the restricted communication flow at the Vatican worked in my favor: Given the isolation of many Roman Curia offices, a reporter was often viewed as a necessary pollinating agent, bringing grains of gossip and traces of intelligence from one department to another. Unwittingly, we were part of the Vatican grapevine.

I discovered that, despite its institutional facade, the Vatican remains predominantly a world of individuals, most of whom have a surprising amount of freedom to operateand, therefore, to make mistakes. Its not only that many cardinals and department heads behave like feudal lords; theres also a significant population of minor officials, consultants, adjuncts and experts who see themselves as protagonists in their own right, bit players who from time to time wander onto center stage.

As endearing as I find this lack of micromanagement, it has undoubtedly brought headaches and embarrassment to the Vatican in recent years. A core element of the Catholic Churchs mission, after all, is to convince others of the truth of its faith. Evangelizing is effective communicationyet the Vatican has become a kind of showcase for missteps, distractions and mixed messages, a place where the pope is upstaged by his own gaffes or those of his top aides.