What a holy mess: the Vatican sinks into civil war

By Richard Cottrell
Contributing writer for End the Lie
June 3, 2012

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

There are many striking similarities between the former Soviet Kremlin and the Vatican (which has been besieged by even more scandals than usual as of late).

Consider, for example, the question of organizational bureaucracy. Commissars equal Cardinals. It is easy to swap democracy and freedom preached in the name of the people for everlasting life equally pledged to the devout and faithful by the Catholic Church.

Possession of a party card could be seen as the equivalent of obedient presence at Sunday Mass.

There are no popular elections in the Roman Church. The Pope is chosen by his own internal clique, just as Soviet leaders clambered over each other to the seat of power.

Joseph Ratzinger, alias Pope Benedict XVI, reminds me strongly of Brezhnev in his final decline. Then the corridors and chambers of the Kremlin hummed with plots, horrific acts of political treachery occurred behind closed doors as the general secretary quietly faded away, like the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat.

The communist system effectively died with Brezhnev.

That story is being repeated right now within the sacred precincts of the Holy See.

One Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, was moved to describe the commotion inside the Vatican as the “penultimate act of a medieval battle moved to the 21st century.”

This is slightly an understatement. The Vatican is gripped by a civil war of such bitterness and furious intensity it may never fully recover.

The issue, as with Leonid Brezhnev, is largely but not fully connected to the toxic issue of the succession. Ratzinger is 85 years old, increasingly infirm, and wheeled to Mass on a kind of trolley pushed by Vatican staff. He mutters wearily, “We are an old Pope.”

Benedict’s lament echoes the Pandorian plague of crises sweeping the Roman Catholic Church.

Last week, the Pope’s formerly intimately trusted valet, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and thrown into a four by four meter cell in the Vatican’s tiny prison. He languishes there, charged with pilfering highly sensitive documents from the Pope’s personal apartments.

The whole of Italy is reeling from the ‘what the butler saw’ scandal. There is a natural prurient desire among the faithful to discover exactly what might have been so incriminating in these documents as to thrust the church bureaucracy into blind panic.

Short list:

– The Vatican’s own piggy bank, the Institute of Religious Works, is back in the headlines yet again, on grounds of deep involvement in age-old money-laundering connected to narcotics and arms smuggling rings.

– The spreading global scandal over pedophilia practiced by the clergy. The US-based organization Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests (SNAP, established in 1991) has tabled a case against the church at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The leading charge being crimes against humanity.

– From the strictly internal perspective, the struggle between rival factions to bag the highest office in the Vatican government: that of Secretary of State, whose occupant is effectively the Holy See’s prime minister.

In actuality, it is probably, all of the above. This is a cipher struggle for the papacy itself, the ignition factor in the raging civil war, even as Ratzinger sinks fast into the shades.

The present Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, is an equivocal figure who has taken a leading line designing the strategy to fight off the sexual abuse claims. But he did not do himself or the Church any favors by shifting the great weight of blame to homosexuals in the ranks of the clergy.

He would not have said this without the benign consent of his patron, Ratzinger. Bertone is also responsible for the amazing statement that bishops are under no obligation to report abuse cases among the clergy “because it would infringe freedom of speech.”

Bertone is named alongside Ratzinger in the case standing before the International Court. But even so, as La Repubblica observed, “Those who live within the Walls know that the game is larger, has many more players, and has been especially hard for a long time.”

Summoned back from the everglades, the Borgias would instantly recognize the following stanza. La Repubblica does not directly attribute the quote but clearly it echoes Ratzinger directly.

“In here, as to who guides me, and helps me to understand – there’s a good amount of blackmailers, an equal amount of blackmail, a mass of employees and a small percentage of people of faith: among them the Saints, that keep the Church.”

Here is a gloomy painting of a largely secular political structure, all those jewel-encrusted gowns, bells and fancy smells amounting to little more than a deceptive pageant designed principally for entertainment. Truly, a Roman circus.

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