Month: June 2012

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Vatican’s term ‘radical feminist’ says more about cardinals than nuns they rebuke

COMMENTARY

It surprises me a little that the men who run things at the Vatican did not use their most favorite recent pejorative – “feminist” — when they rapped the knuckles of Margaret Farley, a nun who has long been a professor at Yale, for having written a book about sex and love that condones masturbation (and as of Thursday morning was in Amazon’s top 20). In a million other ways, it doesn’t uphold their view of Christian sexual morality.

Because unlike the other nuns the Vatican has been reprimanding recently, Sister Farley is, in fact, a feminist. An ethicist who has worked on the problem of HIV/AIDS, Farley was commended in 2005 by her Yale colleagues for her contributions to feminist theory.

A nun looks on as Pope Benedict XVI leads a ceremony commemorating Christ’s gesture of humility toward his apostles on the night before he died at the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome April 5, 2012. Pope Benedict recently re-stated the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings.

Members of the Vatican hierarchy are using the word “feminist” and even “radical feminist” the way third-graders use the word “cooties.” In April, the Vatican accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 57,000 nuns nationwide, of allowing “radical feminist” ideas to flow, unchecked, in their communities. In 2008, after he launched an investigation against American nuns (the results of which have not yet been released), Cardinal Franc Rode told a radio interviewer that the nuns are suspected of “certain irregularities,” a “secular mentality,” and “perhaps also a certain feminist spirit.”

The authors of these rebukes never define “feminism” or “radicalism.” In their hands, these words, which can carry legitimate intellectual meanings, appear to signify something like: “Yucky women who fail to heed our instructions and, anyway, don’t meet our standards of womanhood.” In other words, the sisters aren’t behaving as girls should.

Their casual use of these terms convinces me that the cardinals, in their vast experience, have never actually met a radical feminist theologian. Such creatures do exist, although American religious orders are hardly their breeding ground. What the Vatican hierarchy sees as a “radical feminist” is a woman who dares to believe that she’s equal to a man.

“Even large sectors of the church itself have legitimate concern and want to continue to talk about the place of women in the church, and rightful equality between men and women,” Sister Pat Farrell, a member of the LCWR, told the New York Times last week. “So if that is called radical feminism, then a lot of men and women in the church, far beyond us, are guilty of that.”

Lisa Isherwood is a real-life radical feminist theologian. She is editor of the journal Feminist Theology and a professor at Winchester University in England. She believes that the men at the Vatican are using the term “radical feminist” as a right-wing scare tactic, for it evokes other enemies far more dangerous than nuns. Their thinking goes like this, she says: “We hear the word radical Islam, and everyone panics, so let’s chuck that at them.”

The mother of radical feminist theology was the late Mary Daly, who started life as a committed Roman Catholic and spent most of her career teaching at Boston College, a Catholic institution.

She was driven to critique her beloved church after she sat in on sessions of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and felt that women had no meaningful part in the proceedings.She was, she wrote later, appalled by “the contrast between the arrogant bearing and colorful attire of the ‘princes of the church,’ ” she wrote later, “and the humble, self-deprecating manner and somber clothing of the very few women. … Watching the veiled nuns shuffle to the altar rail to receive Holy Communion from the hands of a priest was like observing a string of lowly ants at some bizarre picnic.”

In her breakthrough 1974 book, “Beyond God the Father,” Daly wrote, “If God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long a he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.” Now that’s a radical feminist for you. Daly’s work gave voice to generations of feminist scholars.

Isherwood, for one, wears the labels “feminist” and “radical” with pride. She is a Catholic — “in as far as anyone’s trying to hang in there” – she says.

She deeply loves her church and believes that at its core, Roman Catholicism has a radical feminist message. “The church should be radical. It should be saying, ‘More inclusion, more equality.’ An abundance of life is a fundamental Catholic value. The idea of ordination of women and so on is just one very small, very significant point. Radical feminism would want the church to be more proactive in terms of working for a life of abundance for the marginalized.”

Now that’s a threatening idea.

Complete Article HERE!

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10 years after Catholic sex abuse reforms, what’s changed?

When the nation’s Catholic bishops gather in Atlanta next week (June 13-15) for their annual spring meeting, a top agenda item will be assessing the reforms they adopted 10 years ago as revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children by priests consumed the church.

The policy package they approved at that 2002 meeting in Dallas was known as the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, or the Dallas charter, for short. With it, the bishops vowed to finally put an end to the abuse and secrecy. They also pledged to help raise awareness about the plague of child abuse in society.

But is anything different — in the church or in the country — 10 years later? Here’s a look at what has changed, and what has not:

One, law enforcement is more assertive

The chief criticism of the 2002 reforms was that they did not include any means of disciplining bishops who fail to follow the charter. Each bishop still answers only to the pope — and Benedict XVI has so far declined to penalize any of them.

But that hasn’t stopped law enforcement officials from pursuing churchmen when the church will not — a marked change from the deference that police and district attorneys once showed the hierarchy.

Witness the ongoing trial of Monsignor William Lynn, the longtime head of priest personnel for the Philadelphia archdiocese and the first cleric ever to face trial for covering up for abusers. The headline-making story was in many ways a trial in absentia of former Philadelphia Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who died shortly before the trial started, and Cardinal Justin Rigali, who retired under a cloud last year after a grand jury indicted Lynn and others.

Similarly, in Missouri, Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph is facing trial in September on charges that he failed to report credible allegations that one of his priests had a trove of child pornography and a suspicious interest in young children. The priest was arrested and charged, and Finn could become the first bishop ever convicted of a crime in connection with the scandal.

Two, progress in other countries is halting

While the U.S. bishops have made important strides in addressing the plague of clergy abuse, the Vatican and church leaders in other countries have been reluctant to push for similar steps elsewhere.

Only last year, in the wake of abuse revelations in Italy, did the Vatican give the bishops in every country a year to draw up their own guidelines. In May, the Italian bishops’ conference became the last national hierarchy in Western Europe to publish abuse policies, but they made it clear that the bishops have no legal obligation to report suspected cases to police.

Three, the Catholic Church may be the safest place for children

Whatever its past record, the Catholic Church in the U.S. has made unparalleled strides in educating their flock about child sexual abuse and ensuring that children are safe in Catholic environments.

Over the past 10 years, Catholic parishes have trained more than 2.1 million clergy, employees, and volunteers about how to create safe environments and prevent child sexual abuse. More than 5.2 million children have also been taught to protect themselves, and churches have run criminal background checks on more than 2 million volunteers, employees, educators, clerics and seminarians.

Allegations of new abuse cases continue to decline, as they have since 1980, and appear to reflect the effectiveness of some of the charter’s policies as well as ongoing efforts to increase screening of seminarians and to deal with suspected abusers before they claim multiple victims.

Four, other denominations are starting to face the issue

What for years was seen as a “Catholic” problem is increasingly being recognized as a blight for all religious communities to one degree or another.

After a series of sexual abuse incidents in recent months, Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine, called for action in an editorial declaring that “all faith-based institutions can no longer afford to assume that predators are somewhere’out there,’ over the clean Christian rainbow. They are not just in college locker rooms and Catholic rectories either. They are on our evangelical faculty and work in our community nonprofits…”

Orthodox Judaism has also been struggling with the issue, after revelations that some communities are thwarting efforts to address the problem or report allegations and suspects to police.

Court rulings may add impetus to reform efforts. Last May, a jury in Florida found that the Florida Baptist Convention was liable for failing to adequately check out a pastor and church planter who was later convicted of abusing a 13-year-old boy.

Five, Americans are realizing it’s not just a problem for religion

Former Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is set to go on trial on Monday (June 11) for sexually abusing boys under his charge, a scandal that rocked an iconic college program and brought down legendary head coach Joe Paterno, who died earlier this year.

The story was so shocking that it has reverberated beyond Penn State and focused attention on child abuse in all sports.

In addition, the sexual abuse of students by teachers has made headlines as it rarely did before, and a 2010 jury verdict holding the Boy Scouts of America liable for abuse that was detailed in secret files for decades alerted people to the dangers lurking in that venerable organization.

Whether further changes are in the offing for the Catholic Church or U.S. society is unclear, and may well depend on whether there are further scandals to keep public attention, and pressure, focused.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican Denounces Nun Over Book on Sexuality

The Vatican’s doctrinal office on Monday denounced an American nun who taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School for a book that attempted to present a theological rationale for same-sex relationships, masturbation and remarriage after divorce.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that the book, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by Sister Margaret A. Farley, was “not consistent with authentic Catholic theology,” and should not be used by Roman Catholics.

Sister Farley, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar, responded in a statement: “I can only clarify that the book was not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching. It is of a different genre altogether.”

The book, she said, offers “contemporary interpretations” of justice and fairness in human sexual relations, moving away from a “taboo morality” and drawing on “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources.”

The formal censure comes only weeks after the same Vatican office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a stinging reprimand of the main coordinating organization of American nuns, prompting many Catholics across the country to turn out in defense of the nuns with protests, petitions and vigils.

The nuns’ organization, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, said on Friday that its board had declared that the Vatican’s accusations were “unsubstantiated,” and that it was sending its leaders to Rome to make its case. Three bishops have been appointed by the Vatican to supervise a total overhaul of the nuns’ organization.

The censure of Sister Farley, who belongs to the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, is the second time recently that a book by an American nun has been denounced by the church’s hierarchy. In 2011, the doctrine committee of U.S. bishops condemned “Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God,” by Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a professor of theology at Fordham University in New York.

The Vatican’s doctrinal office, led by an American, Cardinal William J. Levada, has spent more than two years reviewing Sister Farley’s book, which was published in 2006. The office first notified Sister Farley’s superior of its concerns in March 2010, and said it had opened a further investigation because a response she had sent to the Vatican in October 2010 hadn’t been “satisfactory.” It said her book had “been a cause of confusion among the faithful.”

The dean of Yale Divinity School, Harold W. Attridge, a Catholic layman, and the president of the Sisters of Mercy, Sister Patricia McDermott, issued statements in support of Sister Farley. So did 15 fellow scholars who, in a document released by the divinity school, testified to Sister Farley’s Catholic credentials and the influence she has had in the field of moral theology.

Cardinal Levada’s statement about the book, dated March 30 but released on Monday, said, “Among the many errors and ambiguities of this book are its positions on masturbation, homosexual acts, homosexual unions, the indissolubility of marriage and the problem of divorce and remarriage.”

He said that the book “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling and formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.” The statement said Pope Benedict XVI had approved its contents and ordered its publication. It comes as the Vatican struggles to contain a controversy over leaked documents that have shown infighting and mismanagement in the papacy of Benedict XVI, who on Sunday concluded a three-day meeting in Milan to promote family values.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the Vatican had not called for any sanctions against Sister Farley and was not expected to do so because she has retired from teaching. He added that it was “quite normal” that documents signed by Vatican offices are published much later than when they were signed, according to “internal bureaucratic and organizational needs.”

Sister Farley’s book finds moral and theological justifications for same-sex marriage, which aside from abortion, has become the major galvanizing political and moral issue for American bishops. The statement took Sister Farley to task for writing that same-sex marriage “can also be important in transforming the hatred, rejection, and stigmatization of gays and lesbians.” She wrote that “same-sex relationships and activities can be justified according to the same sexual ethic as heterosexual relationships and activities.”

“This opinion is not acceptable,” the Vatican statement said. It said that the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity” that are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” It said that Sister Farley’s assertion that sometimes divorce is a reasonable option for couples who have grown apart contradicted church teaching on the “indissolubility of marriage.”

The statement quoted liberally from some of the racier passages in “Just Love,” including ones in which Sister Farley writes that female masturbation “usually does not raise any moral questions at all.” She adds that “many women” have found “great good in self-pleasuring – perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure – something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers.”

The Vatican said that this assessment contradicts church teaching that “the deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.

Complete Article HERE!

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Butler’s journey from trusted servant to accused Judas

Just after dawn on Wednesday, May 23, Paolo Gabriele said goodbye to his wife, passed by the bedrooms of his three children and left to start another day in the service of the man Roman Catholics believe is the vicar of Christ on Earth.

By the end of the day, Pope Benedict’s butler would be branded a traitor and some, including an Italian cardinal, would compare him to the most famous betrayer in history – Judas Iscariot, the man who turned Jesus over to the Romans.

Dark haired and handsome, Gabriele, 46, left his simple home on the third floor of a 1930s Vatican apartment block named after the 7th century monk Saint Egidio.

With the St Ann’s Gate entrance, guarded by Swiss Guard in blue berets, to his back, he passed the Holy See’s central post office on Via Del Belvedere, turned left to climb a stone stairway named after Pope Pius X, and walked up a flight of covered steps to enter the small Renaissance-era Courtyard of Sixtus V.

Here he used a key held by fewer than 10 people to enter an elevator that leads directly to the pope’s private apartment on the third and top floor of the Apostolic Palace in the world’s smallest state. Even cardinals can’t use it.

Gabriele, said by those who know him to be a timid, reserved and shy man, is now at the centre of the worst crisis in Pope Benedict’s pontificate.

His face has appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, accused of being the source of leaked documents alleging serious Vatican corruption and cronyism in a scandal that has shaken the very centre of the Church.

To some – even if he is found guilty – he is an idealist who wanted to root out corruption in the Vatican and was helped by outside accomplices. To others, he is merely a pawn in a much bigger power struggle among cardinals inside the Vatican walls.

“I know Paolo and I don’t think he is capable of doing something like this by himself,” a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Reuters.

“It is clearly a betrayal of the pope’s trust but I don’t think he could have acted alone,” that person said.

That Wednesday morning when Gabriele, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, entered the private papal apartment, he walked down a corridor past the pope’s modern private chapel, with its stained glass ceiling and white leather kneelers.

Even as he was serving the pope his breakfast, after the pontiff had said mass with other members of the “papal family” that morning, Gabriele knew he was a suspect in an investigation into leaks that had begun in January.

“He was questioned earlier but the decisive elements that permitted the arrest surfaced later,” a Vatican official said, adding that one of the pope’s two private secretaries, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, had confronted Gabriele with his suspicions.

LAST RIDE IN THE POPEMOBILE

At precisely 10:30 that sunny Wednesday morning, Benedict rode in his white popemobile through the Arch of the Bells into St Peter’s Square to start his weekly audience. Gabriele was in his usual place, to the right of the driver, and his stony face showed no emotion.

It was the last ride he would take in the iconic vehicle that carries the man world diplomacy recognizes not only as leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics but as “The Sovereign of the State of Vatican City.”

That afternoon, agents led by Domenico Giani, 49, the shaven-headed Vatican police chief who is known by the diminutive “Mimmo” to his friends, rang the buzzer on the Gabriele family apartment and entered.

Giani was formerly a member of the Italian secret service.

“It’s not a fancy place – four rooms, a bath and a kitchen, if I remember correctly,” someone who has been inside told Reuters.

Inside, they found what the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano – which waited nearly a week before writing about the arrest – called “a large number of confidential documents” belonging to the pope.

“A sense of tension, disorientation, stupor and sadness fell over the whole place like a thick fog after news of Paolo’s arrest spread,” said one Vatican worker describing the mood of employees from priests to postmen in the following days.

Because the Vatican does not have a jail, Gabriele is being held in a simple “safe room” with a bed and small table in the Vatican police station.

But the question on many people’s minds and lips, including Gabriele’s friends, was “Why? What is the motive?”

If he is guilty, why would Paoletto (little Paul, as he known), a devout Catholic and devoted father, betray the man whose official titles include “Successor of the Prince of the Apostles” and “Servant of the Servants of God”?

People who know Gabriele, now called “the defendant” in Vatican statements, exclude money as a motive.

They say the butler, who still attends Mass each day in the police station, would not have been able to spend it anywhere without raising suspicion; unless he left his job and probably even Italy.

And why, at 46 with three small children, would he leave a simple but comfortable life in the Vatican? While Vatican employees do not receive large salaries, they do enjoy benefits such as low rent, no income tax and cheap food and petrol at the commissaries of the 108-acre city state.

NO CHECKBOOK JOURNALISM, SAYS AUTHOR

Gianluigi Nuzzi, the Italian journalist who revealed many of the documents alleging corruption in the Vatican and internal conflict over the role of the Vatican bank, declines to reveal his sources but insists he did not pay anyone.

Nuzzi, a respected journalist with a good track record whose book “His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI,” contains some of the allegations, says his sources were simple, devout people “genuinely concerned about the Catholic Church” who wanted to expose corruption.

People who know Gabriele, who started out as a humble cleaning person in the Vatican, said there was no indication either that he could have been blackmailed over his private life to force him to leak the documents.

Apart from Gabriele, the few other people who could go directly into the papal apartments via the reserved private elevator at the base of the Sixtus V courtyard include the pope’s two priest secretaries, Ganswein and Maltese Monsignor Alfred Xuereb, and four consecrated women of “Memores Domini”.

Memores Domini is an association of lay women, similar to nuns, who take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience within the Catholic organization Communion and Liberation. Their names are Carmela, Loredana, Cristiana and Rossella.

The fact that Gabriele was part of a tightly knit group known as “the papal family” explains the sadness and bitterness in the pope’s words when he first spoke about the crisis in public on Wednesday, exactly one week after the butler’s arrest.

“Our life and our Christian path are often marked by difficulties, incomprehension and suffering,” he said, adding that all people must persevere in the face of “conflicts in human relations, often within one’s own family”.

While the pope’s secretaries and the four women who help him run the simple household live in the papal residence, Gabriele stayed in his own apartment nearby with his family.

“He lived in the Vatican but not in the papal apartment,” one Church official who knows Gabriele told Reuters. “He could have met with anyone in the Vatican or outside the Vatican”.

In an interview with Reuters, Nuzzi would not say if any of the documents he had received came from Gabriele.

His book contains a treasure trove of private Vatican correspondence, including documents alleging cronyism and corruption in contracts with Italian companies, conspiracies among cardinals and clashes over management at the Vatican’s own bank, the Institute for Works of Religion, or IOR.

He said the book, which hit the stands last week and is already sold out in Rome, is based on confidential conversations with more than 10 Vatican whistleblowers.

LOOKING FOR THE CROWS

The Vatican has not contested the authenticity of the documents but says their leak was part of a “brutal” personal attack on the pope and their publication “a criminal act”.

The Italian media have dubbed the people who have leaked the documents “Corvi” (crows), a pejorative Italian term for an informant.

“They are not crows, they are doves who wanted to shed light, clean their air,” Nuzzi told Reuters. “If the image of the Vatican that emerges is negative, it is not my fault, it is because of what is written in the documents.”

The leaks began in January when an investigative television show hosted by Nuzzi broadcast private letters to Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and the pope from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former deputy governor of the Vatican City, who has been moved to Washington as the Vatican’s ambassador.

The letters showed Vigano was transferred after he exposed what he said was a web of corruption and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts at inflated prices to Italian contractors.

Bertone responded by removing Vigano from his position three years before the end of his tenure and sending him to the United States, despite his strong resistance.

Bertone, whose job is to keep the Vatican’s central administration, or Curia, running smoothly for the pope, now looks weakened after the leaks scandal and other failures.

They include the abrupt departure last week of the Vatican bank’s Italian chief Ettore Gotti Tedeschi – who was recruited by Bertone from Spanish bank Santander – after a no-confidence vote by its board.

At his position in the papal apartments, Gabriele was in a prime position to see at least some of the disarray and tension in the Curia. But it remains to be seen whether he really was a pawn used by others to undermine Bertone, as some sources say.

“This is a strategy of tension, an orgy of vendettas and pre-emptive vendettas that has now spun out of the control of those who thought they could orchestrate it,” said Alberto Melloni, a prominent Italian Church historian.

After his arrest Gabriele called an old school friend and devout catholic, Carlo Fusco, and asked him to be his defense lawyer. Fusco, a civil advocate, called in criminal lawyer Cristiana Arru to help with Gabriele’s defense.

Gabriele’s fate is now in the hands of Piero Antonio Bonnet, the Vatican’s public prosecutor.

He will decide if the man who once was trusted with the keys to the papal elevator should stand trial for aggravated theft, or even worse, disclosing the documents of a head of state or breaking a special pontifical law protecting papal confidentiality.

The pope has tried to end talk of conflict under his roof.

Breaking his silence on the scandal on Wednesday, he expressed full confidence in his staff, including those who he said work “in silence” to help him carry out his ministry.

But that group no longer includes Gabriele, who only a few days ago was one of the closest men to Pope Benedict but now sits in a lonely room in the Vatican awaiting his fate.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican has long history of intrigue and controversy

Pope Benedict is fighting the worst crisis of his papacy, but his problems are only the latest in a long history of controversies and intrigue in the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

The “Vatileaks” scandal, in which the pope’s private papers are alleged to have been pilfered by his own butler, pales in comparison to the scandals of centuries past when popes were accused of violence, nepotism and sexual excesses.

Pope Benedict has angrily charged that “totally gratuitous” accounts in the media “offer an image of the Holy See which does not correspond to reality.”

Archbishop Angelo Becciu, the third-ranking official in the world’s smallest state, bemoaned the “distorted image” presented of the Vatican and said the internal debates revealed by the documents were perfectly normal in any organization.

“We are not mummies,” he said with the kind of historical allusion that seems to come naturally in the corridors of the world’s oldest continually operating institution.

But the allegations have caused a sensation round the world and defied Vatican attempts to play down their importance.

Italian newspapers have devoted pages and pages to the crisis, often with graphics showing the exact layout of the pope’s apartment or a bird’s-eye view of Vatican City, although written reports have often been highly speculative in the face of the Holy See’s deep secrecy.

Although it is rare, leaking confidential documents is nothing new. Secret papers from the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870, which defined the doctrine of papal infallibility, ended up in German newspapers.

A highly sensitive papal commission report approving artificial birth control was leaked in 1967, a year before Pope Paul VI rejected its findings and issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae upholding an earlier ban on contraception.

The privacy of the pope’s own apartment has also been violated before. In 1958, papal doctor Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi managed to snap pictures of Pope Pius XII on his deathbed and sell them to gossip magazines in Italy.

“I was not surprised at all when I heard about it,” Frank Coppa, a Church historian at St John’s University in New York, said about the “Vatileaks” scandal.

INTRIGUE ENCOURAGED BY VATICAN STRUCTURE

Intrigue seems encouraged by the Vatican’s organizational model, which borrowed from Renaissance royal courts and shields its inner workings from outside scrutiny.

A remnant of the time when the popes were also temporal rulers over Rome and parts of Italy, the tiny city-state is headquarters for the 1.2-billion-strong Roman Catholic Church, the world’s largest. As the Catholic saying goes, “the Church is not a democracy.”

“The Vatican has an unmatched capacity to draw a veil of secrecy over its doings,” said Thomas F.X. Noble, a papal history expert at Notre Dame University in Indiana.

“It lacks the kind of transparency that we associate with government and corporations in the modern world.”

A case in point is the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which – despite recent progress in embracing the Internet and livening up its drab format – waited almost a week before mentioning that papal butler Paolo Gabriele had been arrested for stealing documents that allege corruption in awarding infrastructure contracts.

In recent decades, the culture of secrecy helped mask the clerical sexual abuse of minors and the quiet reassignment of predator priests. It has also prompted charges that the Vatican bank laundered money and secretly funded projects abroad.

But all this is nothing compared to more ancient scandals.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Renaissance popes bribed their way into office, openly kept mistresses and families and appointed young nephews as cardinals.

Alexander VI, whose pontificate from 1492 to 1503 is generally agreed to have been the worst ever, was said to have presided over more orgies than Masses.

He came from the notorious Borgia family, who have been accused of adultery, rape, incest and murder. Alexander is said to have died from eating a poisoned apple.

Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican archives during his 1471-1484 pontificate, but also made six of his nephews cardinals and was involved in a murder plot.

One of the nephews, Julius II, was patron to renowned artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael between 1503 and 1513 and commissioned St Peter’s Basilica.

But the budgetary wizardry he used to finance it backfired disastrously. He raised funds by selling indulgences to reduce punishment for sinners, a practice that so shocked Martin Luther that he broke with Rome and launched the Protestant Reformation.

Complete Article HERE!