Cross Purposes

By Maureen Callahan
New York Post
June 3, 2012

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/cross_purposes_6IB2p2qopsad7pBjvDjSVI

“It’s like a punchline,” says Matthew Bunson, editor of Catholic Answer magazine. “You wind up with the headline, ‘The Butler Did It.’ ”

Among those who pay close attention to this stuff, none believe that the butler did it.

“The evidence stacked up against him is almost too good,” says Michael James, fellow at the Roche Center for Catholic Education at Boston College. “There’s been [an internal] investigation going on for a year about missing documents. The theory is that he’s being set up.”

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. For many Americans, the question remains: What, exactly, is the butler supposed to have done? And does it really matter?

Depends whom you ask. According to senior church official Archbishop Angelo Becciu, the leaks are “an immoral act of unprecedented gravity . . . a despicable abuse of the relationship of trust that exists between [Pope] Benedict XVI and those who turn to him.”

Others are less worked up.

“The Vatican’s been leaking stuff for centuries,” says Lawrence Cunningham, professor emeritus of Catholic theology at Notre Dame. “This is a power struggle. People are leaking information to the press to discredit one person or another.”

In the so-called “Vatileaks” scandal, the documents and the details within aren’t the thing. It’s the in-house creation of the crisis — and whom those involved are really after, and why — that matters.

A little over a week ago, “His Holiness,” a non-fiction work by journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, was published in Italy. It is the country’s top-selling book.

The claims within range from speculation that 85-year-old Pope Benedict will die within the year, to details of his secretary of state’s ill-advised alliance with disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, plus a little on the Church’s pedophilia crises to money-laundering to diplomatic fumbles and tax issues — gossipy, scandalous stuff, to be sure, but nothing that threatens the future of the Vatican.

“This will be smoothed out,” says James. The question of how long an institution can survive with continued assaults to its integrity, after all, “has been around for 2,000 years.”

In his promotional interviews, Nuzzi seems to acknowledge the informational aridity, preferring to speak, at length, about the procurement of the documents.