VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
John L. Allen Jr. | Sep. 28, 2013 NCR Today
Rome – Steamy magazine exposés are rarely good news for the people or institutions featured in them. That’s probably especially true for the troubled Vatican bank, which over the years has been the church’s premier magnet for conspiracy theories and scandals of every imaginable sort.
On Friday, however, the bank finally caught a break.
There was yet another gossipy piece in an Italian newsmagazine, in this case l’Espresso, featuring ominous storm cloud art, which was full of unnamed sources describing an “earthquake” related to the bank. (The place is technically the “Institute for the Works of Religion,” often referred to by the Italian acronym IOR.)
Immediately after it appeared, the piece had phone lines buzzing inside the Vatican, in part because after last summer’s leaks scandal, the perception that insiders are spilling the beans to reporters usually means going to Defcon 1.
Yet despite the melodramatic flourishes in the piece, its overall effect is probably to burnish, rather than erode, the bank’s new image.
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