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	Jeffrey Lena: the Man Who Provides Counsel to the Pope and Vatican By Jason Horowitz Washington Post April 18, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/18/AR2010041801523.html This is a bad time for Jeffrey Lena to have quit caffeine. In Kentucky, the 51-year-old attorney is defending Pope Benedict XVI from a deposition motion in a case involving child abuse by clergy. In a suit pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Lena argues that the court has no jurisdiction to try the Vatican for transferring a predatory priest from Ireland to Oregon. In Mississippi, he is defending the Vatican against accusations that it participated in a money laundering scheme. In New York, Lena is defending the Holy See in a commercial licensing dispute about the use of images belonging to the Vatican Museums. Wherever in the United States the Vatican stands accused, Lena is there to protect it. "I am counsel for the Holy See," said Lena. As an international clerical sex abuse scandal has rocked the Roman Catholic Church and raised profound questions about the meaning of sin and crime, penance and punishment, church and state, Lena, a sole practitioner who works out of a small office in Northern California where his wife has kept the books, has taken the lead in defending the Vatican in the courts of law and public opinion. That means the mild-mannered and exceedingly reclusive comparative law specialist is swamped. And he looks it. Puffy bags hung under Lena's brown eyes on Wednesday morning as he ordered an herbal pomegranate tea at a Washington coffee shop. With waves of salt-and-pepper hair, a workman build, unclipped fingernails and an outfit of plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans and black shoes, Lena doesn't look the part of advocate for the supreme pontiff of the universal church, prince of the apostles, and vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth. The genesis of Lena's employment with the Vatican is an enduring church mystery upon which he refuses to shed any light. "I've never wished to be in the public eye," said Lena, who once spent three hours hiding out in an empty Austin courtroom to avoid photographers. "And this is like suddenly crossing a divide from a private to public figure and I wish to retain my privacy." Some of Lena's former opponents say he is in way over his head and does not possess the legal heft to command such complex and historic cases. Victims groups say Lena's deft navigation of legal loopholes is anathema to an institution built on the revelation of truth. But Vatican supporters say he is effective , and that his immunity defense has broader applications for international law beyond the current scandal. What is clear is that through his newly voluble response to media inquiries about the Vatican's actions, the down-to-earth lawyer has emerged as the pope's de facto spokesman. Lena lives with his wife and son in a Berkeley Hills home that had no television until last Christmas. His family has owned the property since the 1960s. His grandfather, Lino Lena, emigrated from Italy, and his father, Leland, a public-school teacher participated in the invasion of the Philippines as a Coast Guardsman. Raised Catholic, he and his two younger siblings accompanied his parents to Sunday mass and hunted for Easter eggs. Lena was a shy, "cerebral" and "athletic" young man, according to his brother, Justin Lena, now living in South Dakota. He lettered in tennis and took Latin lessons. As the Lenas raised their family in Berkeley in the 1960s, John XXIII, affectionately known as the "Good Pope," issued a 1962 policy focused on the high church crime of solicitation of indecent acts during confession and the "foulest crime," concerning clerics who have acted obscenely towards other men, children or "brute animals." A central concern in the Catholic Church has long been to protect priest from the whims of powerful bishops who could punish them for expressing opposing viewpoints. The policy emphasized secrecy, but also from civil authorities for whom the severe church punishment of defrocking a priest is a veritable slap on the wrist. Questions about the relative powers of canon and civil law couldn't have been farther from Lena's mind growing up in Northern California. He got good grades in high school, but he cared more about sports. After graduation, he worked in construction and helped his cousin build a house in the Oakland Hills. He became more intellectually curious at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which he graduated in 1982, and earned his M.A. in history from University of California at Berkeley in 1986, specializing in the roles different religious traditions played in shaping American history. According to the University's alumni association, the lone activity listed under his name at Berkeley was "reading/study." In 1988, he married Adele D'Alessando, of Milan, and became a candidate for a PhD in history, did all the course work and oral exams but never delivered his thesis. Instead he started teaching history at the University of Maryland and UC-Berkeley. In 1993, Lena enrolled in Hastings College of the Law, where he became friends with Ugo Mattei, a renowned Italian legal scholar who Lena calls a "master" of comparative law.
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