Ratzinger was afraid - Gianluigi Nuzzi - E-Book

Ratzinger was afraid E-Book

Gianluigi Nuzzi

0,0
4,99 €

oder
-100%
Sammeln Sie Punkte in unserem Gutscheinprogramm und kaufen Sie E-Books und Hörbücher mit bis zu 100% Rabatt.
Mehr erfahren.
Beschreibung

The news of Benedict XVI stepping down has come as a shock.Perhaps the world will never know the real reasons behind a choice that will forever remain indelibly written in the history of the Church.The Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, has decided to reveal the thorny issues within the Roman Curia and handed me dozens of documents that I have now published along with my research and investigations in this book.“Paolo, are you afraid?” – I asked him one day - “Yes, I am afraid – he answered – I am afraid that the Pope doesn’t have the strength to overcome this adversity, to cast the moneychangers from the temple”Shortly thereafter, the mayor of Milan, one of the most important cities of Italy, also met the Pope at a ceremony. Very concerned, he too revealed the detail of that encounter to me: “I am struck by that look, Benedict XVI is afraid,…”. “Afraid of what?..” I asked him.“I was very ill at ease, here was Ratzinger talking to me like a frightened man. You know, we had set out some chairs in the sacristy of the Duomo, one for him, one for Cardinal Scola and another one for me. Shortly before the ceremony the Vatican informed us that another Cardinal would also be present..”The book that will change the history of the Church.

Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:

EPUB
Bewertungen
0,0
0
0
0
0
0
Mehr Informationen
Mehr Informationen
Legimi prüft nicht, ob Rezensionen von Nutzern stammen, die den betreffenden Titel tatsächlich gekauft oder gelesen/gehört haben. Wir entfernen aber gefälschte Rezensionen.



Ratzinger was afraid

The secret documents the money and the scandals that overwhelmed the Pope

Gianluigi Nuzzi

All Rights Reserved for Digital English Version ©2013 Casaleggio AssociatiCover: Patrizia BroggiTranslator a.k.a.: Paolo AlvisiE-book editor: Luigi BrunoFollow us on:www.adagioebook.it

Index

Ratzinger was afraid

Introduction

1. This book

The secret visit - Benedict XVI’s desk

2. Code name: Source Mary

Inside Benedict XVI’s chambers - The opening of the Vatican doors - Meeting the source - Dramatic consequences

3. The Dino Boffo case

Get Boffo, a Vatican smear campaign - Boffo tells the Pope: “Holy Father, Here are the culprits” - The gay slurs against Boffo - The pope wants to know - Boffo tells Bagnasco: “It’s a huge scam”

4. Corruption in the Sacred Palaces

Bertone dismisses the Vatican’s clean-up man - 500,000 euros for a nativity scene - The plot against reform - Simeon the conspirer: The protégé of Bertone, Geronzi and Bisignani - Last appeal to Ratzinger - Cardinals and the pope’s housekeeper come to Viganò defence - The Vatican’s stonewall response - US dioceses are bankrupt

5. The church offerings machine

Payments crisis at the Holy See - The man from RAI offers 10,000 euros and asks for an audience - A truffle donation - The pope’s bank account - The IOR’s disgrace

6. The Vatican’s reach on Italian affairs

Tremonti, Bertone, and the real estate tax - The Ruby affair and the Pope - The secret dinner with the Italian President - Berlusconi’s man tries to put in a good word, Popemobiles and spooks

7. Vatican spooks

Following people around Rome - Benedict XVI gets advice on the Orlandi case - .22 bore bullets - Napoleon in the Vatican - The Secretariat of State gets snubbed - Vatican infighting over a flag

8. Tarcisio Bertone: Ambition at play

“Holy Father, confusion reigns in the heart of the Church” - There’s an encyclical to write but Bertone is distracted - “Bertone must go” - The battle to control the Cattolica’s finances - A papal hospital? - Corrado Passera gets involved in the San Raffaele affair - Father Georg gets a secret dossier - Jesuits, the Black Pope and the power of money

9. Communion and Liberation, the Legionaries of Christ, and the Lefebvrists

Communion and Liberation acts against the leftist Curia in Milan - The Pope at the Meeting of Communion and Liberation for the first time in 30 years - Scola was known to be close to CL, so Carrón wanted to dismiss the impression that by recommending him he was trying to score points for his movement. So he concluded his letter with a qualification that seemed perhaps superfluous: - The secrets of the founder of the Legion of Christ - The secret report to Benedict XVI on the Legionaries - Excommunication lifted on the Lefebvre bishops - Benedict XVI at odds with Merkel - Germany mon amour - Female priesthood

10. Benedict XVI’s geopolitics

Money flows to the non-Catholic East - “Italy risks default, Ratzinger should intervene” - “China is at war with us” - No Catholic breakthrough in Japan

11. Vatican diplomacy

ETA terrorists ask for the Vatican’s help - Murder in an Ecuadorean monastery - The mysterious dismissal of the Syrian Monsignor - Bertone and the Swedish journalists - “Poland is worse than Cuba and Sudan” - No prize for the pro-gay marriage US governor - The Iranian Ayatollah wants a Papal audience

Benedict XVI’s secret papers

Acknowledgements

(To Emiliana and Raffaele, my parents)

Introduction

Benedict XVI’s renunciation has been a shock. It will take weeks or months to understand the motivations behind a decision that will leave an indelible mark on the history of the Church and will influence it at key junctures, starting from the next conclave. Over the last year, the unthinkable has happened to two figures united by a common destiny. The Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, decided to air the dirty linen of the Roman Curia, handing me dozens of documents published in this book. He did this “for the good of the Church”, convinced it was the only way to “help the Pope”, even if it was a breach of his confidence. Gabriele, a pious Catholic so devoted to the Pontiff that he saw him as his own father, resorted to an extreme gesture to help the Church, to let everybody see the problems that were paralysing the Curia. A few months later, another destabilizing choice left the world even more bewildered – not just Catholics, but believers and non-believers alike. It was another step “for the good of the Church”. When I was meeting with Gabriele, over weeks and months, I always felt his anxiety, his deep sense of dismay and impotence before events happening in the Roman Curia, which he saw as grave injustices. One day I asked him: “Are you afraid, Paolo?” He replied: “Yes, I am afraid that the Pope does not have the strength to overcome these adversities, to expel the money changers from the Temple”. We were reading documents together, misty-eyed, as Gabriele feared that scandals could have overwhelmed his beloved Pope. Looking at the dossiers, I sensed and shared his feelings, concluding that he had made his choice out of love. I never thought that they would have arrested him, or that Benedict XVI would have resigned.

Today, I am forced to reconsider and reinterpret everything. There’s one episode in the back of my mind that haunts me. It was in early June, a few days after Benedict XVI visited Milan, my home city, for the World Meeting of Families. I sought an interview with Mayor Giuliano Pisapia, a left-wing lawyer, an atheist, someone known for his integrity, who had had a private audience with the Pontiff. I met him a day later, and he was upset, dismayed. He told me he saw love in the Pope’s eyes, but also added: “I was struck by his gaze. Benedict XVI was afraid”. What of, I asked: “I felt deeply uneasy, Ratzinger was talking to me as if he was scared. Outside the Duomo, seats had been prepared for him, Cardinal Scola and me. Only at the last minute the Vatican warned us that Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone would also be present. The protocol office had little time to adapt to this change of plans”. At first I thought that emotions had got the better of Pisapia, but then I dismissed the idea. He is a rational, pragmatic person who knowns what fear is, having seen it in the eyes his clients in courtrooms, everywhere. He is one of Italy’s top lawyers, and after decades in that field you learn to recognize who is saying the truth, who is lying, and who is scared. What was the Pope afraid of? Maybe the “individualism” and the “divisions” that left the face the Church “sometimes disfigured”, as he said in his last Ash Wednesday homily.

My mind turns to other memories. I think of what Gabriele used to tell me: “Benedict XVI is not always kept informed of what happens in the Curia. Sometimes he criticizes Bertone, but he has no intention of changing his Secretary of State. Also because this would cast a shadow on his pontificate and force him to find a substitute. I don’t think he has the strength”. Cardinal De Paolis said to me: “Getting rid of my friend Bertone is unthinkable. Certain people cannot be replaced”. The move would backfire, he explained: “It would be like placing the seal of truth on all the accusations that have been laid at his door”.

Here’s a first explanation then. Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other. So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope, who could have taken on the vested interests and overcome the conflicts. Gabriele’s fear, on the other hand, was more deep-rooted. He once told me that the Vatican was “a State where you could commit slaughter and come out clean”. He was referring to the mysterious killing of Swiss Guards in 1998.

What’s next? On his desk, in the papal apartments on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, Benedict XVI left all the unfinished dossiers to the Camerlengo, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. It will be up to him to run the Vatican’s day-to-day operations until the end of the conclave. We need to start from Benedict XVI’s desk, from his simple and well laid-out study to understand his actions. If those four walls could talk, we would know exactly what happened; but we will have to rely on the documents to get a sense of this complex and hard-to-read affair.

One of the last dossiers Benedict XVI cleared from his desk before leaving office concerned the appointment of a new IOR president. The position had been left vacant from months, after the dismissal of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. Days after announcing his resignation, Ratzinger settled on a German lawyer as the new president. Why didn’t he leave the matter to his successor, after having waited for so many months? He left another delicate file: the reform of the accounts of charitable institutions, which is linked to the greater challenge of solving two urgent problems. Firstly, the decline in offerings to the Church, which limit its room for manoeuvre; second, the financial overhaul of the Church’s many institutions and entities around around the world. People have been saying for years that there needs to be uniform accounting standards to prevent waste, more than just graft. The fear, however, is that periphery will fight back against what will be perceived as an intrusion from the centre. The outgoing Pope did keep an eye on operational issues of this kind, he was not just interested in theology. He followed matters as long as he was informed about them, and was often witness to struggles between entrenched powers which stymied his reform efforts.

It was the case with Monsignor Viganò, the number two at the Governorate, the body which oversees Vatican spending, as well as procurements and services. He spoke out against corruption, overspending, suspicious contracts, and became convinced of having fallen victim to a conspiracy inspired by Cardinal Bertone, no less. He informed the Pope about everything, in very compromising letters evoking dark scenarios. Ratzinger gave an audience to Viganò, and after one of their meetings he was so troubled by what he heard that that he postponed other engagements and sought refuge in his his private chapel. For sure, he turned to prayers not out of fear, but to seek comfort, advice and guidance.

Money has been the sore point for a theocracy like the Vatican. In 2009, Ratzinger and Bertone tasked Gotti Tedeschi with cleaning up the IOR and bringing it in line with international rules against money laundering. Four years have passed and the bank still has too many skeletons in its cupboard, with priests and nuns abetting corruption, embezzlement, fraud and other financial crimes. Powerful forces have resisted attempts to introduce transparency, as demanded by international watchdogs. Why don’t they open the bank’s accounts to outside scrutiny, and assist international probes on the IOR’s activities? And how many conniving priests have helped shady characters hide their dodgy riches in the bank’s vaults?

These two cases – the IOR and Viganò - have left their mark on the Roman Curia and have kept the outgoing Pope busy. It is not a coincidence that one of the last meetings he had before he announced his resignation was on economic and financial matters. He met the people who dealt with these issues, like Cardinal Attilio Nicora – one of the reformers who fought a lonely battle for transparency – and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran. In my mind, these affairs have contributed to the Pope’s humble decision.

There may have been other factors, of course: physical fatigue, perhaps even an illness, according to some sources, and the report of the cardinals on the VatiLeaks documents published in this book and elsewhere. I won’t dwell on the first two points, since they have been written about at length on the international press. It may be useful to stop and consider the report – whose content is known only to the Pope and to its authors. It depicts a scenario far from the usual rosy-tinted representation of the Roman Curia, and highlights the need for the intervention of a strong reforming hand. But, as Gabriele was telling me over a year ago, “the Holy Father is tired of what he sees and does not have the strength to introduce certain changes. It must be so, because otherwise it would be incomprehensible why he does not react to what is happening”.

By curious coincidence, Gabriele has started working again recently, after serving time in prison and under house arrest with his family for having passed on to me photocopies of documents. Obviously, he no longer works in the papal apartments, but at the Bambino Gesù hospital in Rome, which is owned by the Vatican. I have not been in contact with Paolo since this story began. They tell me he is painting a lot, going back to what he used to do at art school: still lifes, figurative art. I was tempted, sometimes, to call him or meet him, but it not the right moment yet. More time needs to pass to let everything that has happened over the past year – good and bad – sink in. There is still a pending Vatican investigation on Gabriele, and I do not want to embarrass him. But it saddens me that the story of who Paolo Gabriele really is – a simple but sincere man – was never told properly. He has an older brother and a younger sister, and a life similar to many others. In his youth he was a bit rebellious, he used to wear his hair long and fight about it with his father, a senior government official. Sometimes he would run away from home, sleep over at his friends’, one of whom was the son of a famous film-maker. He met his wife Manuela at school, and they have been in love ever since, married happily for 18 years. He started working as a janitor in the church of the Poles in Rome, which was so beloved to Wojtyla. The story goes that a senior prelate once used the toilets there and was so impressed that he wanted to meet the man who kept them so clean. That’s how Gabriele got his break in the Vatican. In the mid 1990s, he was hired to replace a member of the pontifical family who had retired, after passing a screening and an interview with the now Cardinal of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz. I have read all sorts of things about Gabriele, because it was easy to dismiss him as a petty theft, as if people could believe that any old passer-by could be entrusted with looking after the Holy Father. In fact, everybody loved “Paoletto” – the nickname he had. Wojtyla was fond of him, used to call him “Paulus” and would tell him that he had been sent by the merciful heart of Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Polish nun whom John Paul II canonized in 2000. Gabriele was a devoted servant to Wojtyla, and a friend of the butler whose job he inherited under Ratzinger. In the last years many people turned to him to report a disservice, a problem, something that was wrong. All those who used to walk around the Vatican with him tell me that people would stop him to share reports, behind-the-scenes information, in the hope that he would pass them on to Benedict XVI. He wasn’t just a valet: he had his own smart desk, and was also trusted to handle some correspondence or bank deposits at the IOR on Father Georg’s behalf. Several years ago, when he confessed to not being very good with computers and said he was afraid of not being up to the job, the Pope reassured him: “We have chosen you not because of what you can do, but because of who you are”.

Light must reflect on you when you are close to the Holy Father. Every time I met Paolo, I saw light in his eyes. I was asked a thousand times by journalists why he had decided to leak the documents I published in this book. I always gave the only answer I think is right: because he loved the Church and the Holy Father. People always reacted in disbelief: how can someone who loves the Pope betray his confidence and give copies of his papers to a journalist? It just didn’t fit. But strange things have been happening in the Church for days, weeks, months. Events that are hard to read but are making a lasting impression. Ratzinger, who is humbly bowing out for the good of the Church, has stunned people. And that someone could photocopy papal documents for years without anyone noticing seemed impossible until Paolo Gabriele. Can you believe it? When my book came out, I was attacked for having done my job, which may be controversial sometimes, but ultimately boils down to informing people about what is happening.

People are now combing through this book to find out what devastating piece of news may have pushed Benedict XVI to make his surprise move. But when it came out, the media was more interested in uncovering by source than in what the book was saying. The same happened when ran an anonymous TV interview with Gabriele in my TV programme on the La7 channel. We had met casually, and we were eating pizza in the kitchen of my apartment in Rome, when I told him that there was a TV crew in the living room. I did not warn him in advance because I did not want to scare him away. “We need to explain what is happening”, I told him, and he accepted to go on air. We were both tense. I believed that his revelations would have pushed people to find out all the truth, like it had happened in 2009, when my Vaticano S.p.A. book on the IOR’s huge money laundering activities led the Vatican to dismiss the man who had led the bank for 20 years, Angelo Caloia. It was because of that book that Gabriele decided to get in touch with me. But when the interview was aired on TV, with Gabriele’s face covered up and his voice digitally altered, all people wanted to know was his identity. If people had known that our cooperation started almost by chance, that there had been none of the conspiracies that some were speculating over to pull wool over people’s eyes, things would have turned out differently. Perhaps. Equally, when IOR President Gotti Tedeschi was kicked out, people started spinning malicious rumours that he was planning to have the Vatican bank placed under the administration of the Bank of Italy, as part of yet another plot against the Pope and the Church. To back up that conspiracy theory, people pointed to to Gotti Tedeschi’s links to the Opus Dei; but it was all a distraction from the real problem with IOR. The conclave is now upon us and the only hope we have is that whoever will be elected pope will have the same strength and courage displayed by Benedict XVI, who now wants to “remain hidden from the world”. For the good of the Church. With nothing left to be afraid of. But first of all, we must take a step back to my first contacts with Paolo Gabriele, the “Source Mary” of this book.

1. This book

The secret visit

Benedict XVI left the Apostolic Palace in an unmarked car with tinted windows, with no escort and without telling the Vaticans security services. It was early January 2012, and it was an afternoon unlike any other. The Pope had not realized it, but he was being followed. On the route from St Peters Square to Via Aurelia Antica, a few steps away from the Villa Pamphilj Park, a Vatican employee, a trusted aide to several important Cardinals, had not lost sight of the car, keeping about 100 metres behind. Both men albeit with very different roles, temperaments and cultures had to make choices that were key to the future of the Church.

Joseph Ratzinger was saddened by the divisions that were playing out in the Roman Curia, a community that had torn itself more and more apart since the last consistories. But he knew that calling into question, even as a hypothesis, his fragile alliance with the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, would have been a point of no-return.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!