Your Daily Pope

By Charles P. Pierce
The Esquire
February 22, 2013

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/daily-pope-la-repubblica-022213

According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising "two volumes of almost 300 pages - bound in red" had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope's successor upon his election. The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation". In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail. It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

There are a number of things to keep in mind here. The Vatican has been riven by factions for as long as there as been a Vatican. The Church has been riven by factions for as long as there has been a Church. (It started with Judas Iscariot, if you want to be literal.) As Garry Wills pointed out a few years ago, James Madison formulated his theory of why factions are dangerous to democratic self-government at least in part by his deep reading into the institutional history of Christianity, and thus are the old princely popes at least partly responsible for the argument famously made by Jemmy in Federalist 10.

Also, La Repubblica is not a scandal sheet, regardless of what you're likely to be hearing from members of the Clan Of The Red Beanie over the next few days. The Italian press is famous for journalistic, ah, entrepreneurship, but this newspaper notably has not been a big part of that culture. And, even if it were, the material apparently was shopped around elsewhere in the respectable Italian media as well.

Another Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, alluded to the dossier soon after the pope announced his resignation on 11 February, describing its contents as "disturbing."

What gives me a little pause is that the "secret gay cabal" theory is an old favorite among those curial powerbrokers for whom Machiavelli was something of a wimp. It also has been a regular trope of conservative Catholics seeking to defend the institutional Church's inexcusable behavior in the face of the sexual abuse scandal, largely through the rancid technique of implying that being gay and being a pedophile are so closely allied that the former have a reason for covering up for the latter. (The linked piece from the Telegraph makes it clear that "the other side" that so exercised Dreher was not a "Lavender Mafia," but the usual cast of institutional authoritarians up to and including John Paul II) It also is an old-line reactionary conspiracy theory beloved of, among other people, the late crackpot Malachi Martin.

The report under discussion comes from within the highest levels of the Vatican bureaucracy, from the clerics charged with investigating the "VatiLeaks" scandal wherein the pope's butler. There's a helluva lot more in the VatiLeaks documents than sins of the flesh. There's a whole rat's nest of bribery, nepotism, influence peddling and many other things not unfamiliar to those of us who have covered the state government here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). However, I think having someone take a bribe so that a Mafia chief can be buried next to a pope is a whole new level of grifting, at least in my experience. What better way to distract the world's attention from the fact that the entire Vatican bureaucracy is corrupt and should be broken into tiny pieces and tossed into the Tiber than to leak a report about a gay cabal, especially given that a good piece of your Catholic laity is predisposed to believe it anyway? Again, not saying the leak isn't true, it's just that, in the Vatican, there are always wheels within wheels.

While you ponder all that, why not hang out for a while with Boniface VIII, who rmerely was an avaricious power-monger, and who once allegedly remarked that people had no more chance of a life after death than did the goose Boniface was being served for dinner. However, Boniface made the mistake of pissing off Dante. Now that's a way to become immortal.