Vatican Denies Rumours of Plot to Kill Pope

Toronto Star
February 10, 2012

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1129356--vatican-denies-rumours-of-plot-to-kill-pope

The Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano" with the headline: "Vatican, plot and villainy"; "Plot against the Pope. He will die in the next 12 months."

The Vatican is vehemently denying a newspaper report of a document spelling out a plot to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI by November.

The Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano on Friday published what it called a “top secret confidential” document written in German about a cardinal’s conversation in China that was delivered to Benedict by Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos last month.

The “death plot” document, the newspaper said, provides details of an alarming conversation Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo, had during a visit to Beijing.

Romeo told his hosts last November the Benedict would be dead by November 2012, the document alleged.

The Palermo archbishop also described bitter infighting around Benedict, the document alleged. In particular, the pontiff was supposedly upset with his secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone.

Il Fatto Quotidiano speculated the timing of the document’s release was to rip open the internal wounds inside the Vatican.

“These are clearly ravings, which are not at all taken seriously. I will not even consider it,” Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican Press Office, told the newspaper.

The document was written in German, the newspaper said, so it could be read by Benedict himself and as few people as possible inside the Vatican.

And it names his successor: Archbishop of Milan Angelo Scola.

Romeo, who in 1999 was the papal nuncio to Canada, told the Italian news agency ANSA: “It is so outside of reality that it should not be given any consideration.”