Most of you have at least read the headline that the pope’s butler was arrested on Friday for stealing confidential documents. And I think most Daily Kos readers had the same initial reaction: Yeah, the Vatican moves decisively to protect its incriminating secrets but not to protect children from being sexually tortured.
The butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested by Vatican gendarmes, accused of leaking hundreds of Vatican documents to the Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, and is being held in a Vatican prison never used for murderers, pedophiles, thieves and crooks of every description.
Nuzzi used the documents in his just released book, His Holiness, The Secret Files of Benedict XVI. Nuzzi quotes his “deepthroat” in the book:
The truth emerging in the newspapers and the official discourse within the Holy See was so different, the hypocrisy reigned supreme, and the scandals were multiplying. I’m not talking only about the pedophilia and murder cases like the killing of the Swiss Guard and the disappearance of [15-year-old] Emanuela Orlandi, but about money laundering, corruption, and threats.
Nuzzi was sought out by a mysterious source codenamed “Maria” because he had written the 2009 Italian bestseller,
Vatican SpA (Vatican Inc.), based on internal IOR (Vatican Bank) documents smuggled out by Msgr. Renato Dardozzi. That book disclosed “
huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes or to pay for masses for the souls of the dead being casually misappropriated by the bank's administrators” as well as a host of other sleazy practices.
Materials in [His Holiness] include confidential information about Vatican finances, reports from the Vatican security services (including a write-up of an incident in which a car belonging to the security service was riddled with bullets outside a Roman restaurant), memoranda documenting internal power struggles, correspondence from prominent Italian personalities requesting personal favors, even the notes of a private meeting between the pope and the Italian president.
Andrea Tornielli, a reporter for the Italian newspaper,
La Stampa, asks if Gabriele is “just a scapegoat to save the skin of someone higher up.” He describes him as "a
simple, good person who is devoted to the pope” while attributing the document leak to “
a refined mind who knows Church politics.” Many commentators have speculated that Gabriele “may have been a pawn in a larger, internal power struggle” with the words "
'plot’ and ‘conspiracy’ tripping off their tongues.”
The head of the IOR, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was fired on Thursday. Like Gabriele, Gotti Tedeschi is a layman taking the fall for the ruling prelates. In this case, the IOR president is being blamed for the financial “irregularities” for which the Vatican has become famous.
There is more than schadenfreude in reading about the continuing exposures of corruption in the Catholic Church. Vatican proxies (U.S. bishops) are actively engaged, and have been for over three decades, in putting this country under control of the plutocrats* with seemingly unlimited tax exempt funds to do so, including billions of direct taxpayer dollars.
No other lobby has been more effective this election year.
While the plutocrats’ donations maintain the infrastructure of the Church, it is the respect and recognition of governments, including our own, which supply the air the prelates breathe – heads of state stopping by to kiss the pope’s ring, governments welcoming the pontiff with grandiose pomp and ceremony, diplomatic delegations shuttling to and fro the Holy See for secret talks. Short of leading by the example of recalling our ambassador, only public opinion can make the pope persona-non-grata in the international community and stop this malevolent influence aimed at installing a worldwide corporatocracy.
*See my book, The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009)