“Might we see the Italian state
denounce the Lateran treaty of 1929 that made the Vatican a foreign
state, thus creating the lawless, corrupt playground that it has
become?’’
The answer to that question, posed in a
book released this week, The Dictator Pope, is almost certainly
no — after all, Italy is no paragon of propriety itself.
The blunt “lawless, corrupt
playground’’ epithet, however, is apt judging by recent events.
The book’s website says its author,
writing under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna (a Vatican admiral in
the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Turks in 1571) is an
Oxford-educated historian living in Rome.
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The book is purportedly
“the fruit of close contacts with many of those working in the
Vatican, including the leading Cardinals and other figures mentioned
in the narrative’’.
It shows — especially in the accounts
of Pope Francis’s close relationships with four Vatican cardinals
and their underlings who have stymied sweeping financial reforms
enacted mainly by Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, who uncovered
1.4 billion euros in various Vatican departments not previously
entered in the balance sheets.
The man described as “the most
scandalous’’ of the four, gun enthusiast Cardinal Domenico
Calcagno, president of APSA, the body that manages Vatican assets,
dines with Francis most nights. Calcagno is under investigation for
real estate dealings in his previous Italian diocese.
Financial corruption has dogged the
church for half a century, since Pope Paul VI called in a US
archbishop, Paul Marcinkus from Chicago in the 1960s.
Far from
improving efficiency, Marcinkus engaged freemason Mafia bankers
Roberto Calvi (known as “God’s banker”, who was found hung
under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982) and Michele Sindona (who
died from cyanide in his coffee in an Italian jail in 1986).
The current reform effort, designed to
improve transparency and accountability, took a major blow in June
when Vatican auditor Libero Milone, a former chairman and chief
executive of Deloitte in Italy, was sacked after an extraordinary
raid on his office by Vatican police and firemen.
Despite the office
being on Italian, not Vatican territory, the Vatican officials burst
in unexpectedly, confiscating electronic equipment and forcing open
the safe with axes and crowbars. Milone’s offence, it appears, was
doing his job properly.
The Vatican’s notorious homosexual
lobby also remains a problem. One of its players Monsignor Luigi
Capozzi, emerged from the shadows in June. Capozzi, secretary to
Vatican Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio — described as “the
foremost of Pope Francis’s yes-men’’ – was caught running a
drugs party in his Vatican flat. Cardinal Coccopalmerio had
reportedly proposed his underling for a bishopric.
Despite the crime and color, Dictator
Pope does not belong to the “Vatican potboiler’’ genre. It
is sober, blunt and forensic. Four days after its release in English
on Monday, Amazon listed it as an e-book bestseller.
The world it describes is a hothouse,
in which gossip, secrecy, personal hostilities and the craving for
power thrive. Free speech is barely tolerated.
The head of the Roman Rota (the Vatican
court), for example, Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto — whose name appeared
on a notorious list of alleged Vatican Freemasons decades ago —
suggested last year that four cardinals who criticized a
controversial papal document on marriage, Amoris Laetitia, were
guilty of “grave scandal’’ for doing so and deserved to be
stripped of their cardinals’ hats.
As the book’s name suggests, it is
primarily about Francis, emphasizing the adroit political skills he
employed in Argentina and Rome to win the papacy and build his image.
His much lauded humility — traveling on the Buenos Aires rail
underground and paying his hotel bill in Rome after being elected
Pope, for example — has been conveniently captured on camera and
disseminated by press secretaries. Such savvy media management, the
author suggests, begs the question “to what extent the smell of
sheep was applied aroma and how much the mysticism was part of the
manifesto’’.
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Original review on: http://www.theaustralian.com.au
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