"Monsignors' mutiny" revealed by Vatican leaks
Philip Pullella | Reuters – 22 hours ago

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Call it Conspiracy City. Call it Scandal City. Call it
Leak City. These days the holy city has been in the news for anything but holy
reasons.

"It is a total mess," said one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke, like all
others, on the condition of anonymity.

The Machiavellian maneuvering and machinations that have come to light in the
Vatican recently are worthy of a novel about a sinister power struggle at a
medieval court.

Senior church officials interviewed this month said almost daily embarrassments
that have put the Vatican on the defensive could force Pope Benedict to act to
clean up the image of its administration - at a time when the church faces a
deeper crisis of authority and relevance in the wider world.

Some of those sources said the outcome of a power struggle inside the Holy See
may even have a longer-term effect, on the choice of the man to succeed Benedict
when he dies.

From leaked letters by an archbishop who was transferred after he blew the
whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, to a leaked poison
pen memo which puts a number of cardinals in a bad light, to new suspicions
about its bank, Vatican spokesmen have had their work cut out responding.

The flurry of leaks has come at an embarrassing time - just before a usually
joyful ceremony this week known as a consistory, when Benedict will admit more
prelates into the College of Cardinals, the exclusive men's club that will one
day pick the next Roman Catholic leader from among their own ranks.

"This consistory will be taking place in an atmosphere that is certainly not
very glorious or exalting," said one bishop with direct knowledge of Vatican
affairs.

The sources agreed that the leaks were part of an internal campaign - a sort of
"mutiny of the monsignors" - against the pope's right-hand man, Secretary of
State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

Bertone, 77, has a reputation as a heavy-handed administrator and power-broker
whose style has alienated many in the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the
central administration of the 1.3 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church.

He came to the job, traditionally occupied by a career diplomat, in 2006 with no
experience of working in the church's diplomatic corps, which manages its
international relations. Benedict chose him, rather, because he had worked under
the future pontiff, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in the Vatican's powerful
doctrinal office.

"It's all aimed at Bertone," said a monsignor in a key Vatican department who
sympathizes with the secretary of state and who sees the leakers as determined
to oust him. "It's very clear that they want to get rid of Bertone."

Vatican sources say the rebels have the tacit backing of a former secretary of
state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, an influential power-broker in his own right and
a veteran diplomat who served under the late Pope John Paul II for 15 years.

"The diplomatic wing feels that they are the rightful owners of the Vatican,"
the monsignor who favors Bertone said.

Sodano and Bertone are not mutual admirers, to put it mildly. Neither has
commented publicly on the reports.

WHISTLE-BLOWING ARCHBISHOP

The Vatican has been no stranger to controversy in recent years, when uproar
over its handling of child sex abuse charges has hampered the church's efforts
to stem the erosion of congregations and priestly recruitment in the developed
world.

But the latest image crisis could not be closer to home.

It began last month when an Italian television investigative show broadcast
private letters to Bertone and the pope from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the
former deputy governor of the Vatican City and currently the Vatican ambassador
in Washington.

The letters, which the Vatican has confirmed are authentic, showed that Vigano
was transferred after he exposed what he argued was a web of corruption,
nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to contractors at
inflated prices.

As deputy governor of the Vatican City for two years from 2009 to 2011, Vigano
was the number two official in a department responsible for maintaining the tiny
city-state's gardens, buildings, streets, museums and other infrastructure,
which are managed separately from the Italian capital which surrounds it.

In one letter, Vigano writes of a smear campaign against him by other Vatican
officials who were upset that he had taken drastic steps to clean up the
purchasing procedures and begged to stay in the job to finish what he had
started.

Bertone responded by removing Vigano from his position three years before the
end of his tenure and sending him to the United States, despite his strong
resistance.

Other leaks center on the Vatican bank, just as it is trying to put behind it
past scandals - including the collapse 30 years ago of Banco Ambrosiano, which
entangled it in lurid allegations about money-laundering, freemasons, mafiosi
and the mysterious death of Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi - "God's banker."

Today, the Vatican bank, formally known at the Institute for Works of Religion
(IOR), is aiming to comply fully with international norms and has applied for
the Vatican's inclusion on the European Commission's approved "white list" of
states that meet EU standards for total financial transparency.

Bertone was instrumental in putting the bank's current executives in place and
any lingering suspicion about it reflects badly on him. The Commission will
decide in June and failure to make the list would be an embarrassment for
Bertone.

ITALIAN POPE?

Last week, an Italian newspaper that has published some of the leaks ran a
bizarre internal Vatican memo that involved one cardinal complaining about
another cardinal who spoke about a possible assassination attempt against the
pope within 12 months and openly speculated on who the next pope should be.

Bertone's detractors say he has packed the Curia with Italian friends. Some see
an attempt to influence the election of the next pope and increase the chances
that the papacy returns to Italy after two successive non-Italian popes who have
broken what had been an Italian monopoly for over 450 years.

Seven of the 18 new "cardinal electors" -- those aged under 80 eligible to elect
a pope -- at this Saturday's consistory are Italian. Six of those work for
Bertone in the Curia.

Bertone, as chief administrator, had a key role in advising the pope on the
appointments, which raised eyebrows because of the high number of Italian
bureaucrats among them.

"There is widespread malaise and delusion about Bertone inside the Curia. It is
full of complaints," said the bishop who has close knowledge of Vatican affairs.

"Bertone has had a very brash method of running the Vatican and putting his
friends in high places. People could not take it any more and said 'enough' and
that is why I think these leaks are coming out now to make him look bad," he
said.

POPE "ISOLATED"

Leaked confidential cables sent to the State Department by the U.S. embassy to
the Vatican depicted him as a "yes man" with no diplomatic experience or
linguistic skills and the 2009 cable suggests that the pope is protected from
bad news.

"There is also the question of who, if anyone, brings dissenting views to the
pope's attention," read the cable, published by WikiLeaks.

The Vatican sources said some cardinals asked the pope to replace Bertone
because of administrative lapses, including the failure to warn the pope that a
renegade bishop re-admitted to the Church in 2009 was a well-known Holocaust
denier.

But they said the pope, at 84 and increasingly showing the signs of his age, is
not eager to break in a new right-hand man.

"It's so complicated and the pope is so helpless," said the monsignor.

The bishop said: "The pope is very isolated. He lives in his own world and some
say the information he receives is filtered. He is interested in his books and
his sermons but he is not very interested in government."

(Editing by Jon Boyle and Alastair Macdonald)

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