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Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries

By Jason Horowitz,February 16, 2013

(Page 3 of 6)

Angelo Sodano, John Paul II’s secretary of state and Bertone’s predecessor, has not hidden his disregard. “It was quite visible,” said a former ambassador to the Vatican. “Sodano was a real insider, and you could tell that he thought Bertone was a real outsider and that he had no legitimacy in that position.”

But Bertone worked diligently to consolidate power. His allies control the church’s main financial institutions, prompting one official to write in a leaked document that traditional checks and balances had been ignored. “They say that our principal point of reference is the Secretary of State,” the letter read, “yet in many cases he’s precisely the problem.” Bertone’s position also meant he presided over the Vatican Bank, a post he appeared to use to impede Benedict’s financial reforms.

Benedict, for example, had issued a decree for the Vatican to adopt international money-laundering norms to combat the financing of terrorism. This initiative would allow outside auditors to examine the Vatican’s financial books. For an institution historically allergic to scrutiny, this constituted a revolution. He subsequently created a Vatican watchdog to oversee a whole swath of financial activities, from the Vatican Bank to the Vatican pharmacy and supermarket. But the leaked documents depicted Bertone’s efforts to defang Benedict’s watchdog and to keep power for himself.

“Bertone wanted to have a monopoly on relations with Italy,” an Italian official with close ties to the Vatican said.

But there is a pervasive view among some of the Vatican’s top cardinals that, despite the breadth of Bertone’s involvement in church affairs, he is out of his depth. A confidant of many cardinals said that Bertone has personally acknowledged his limitations. According to the insider, many of the Vatican’s highest-ranking prelates have reported that Bertone had tendered his resignation but was turned down by the pope. Few of them foresaw that Benedict would be the first to leave.

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The next pope will inherit a government with a rather Byzantine approach to cleaning house, a place where demotions are peddled as promotions. Like the U.S.-bound Carlo Maria Viganò, many insiders believed the butler’s supervisor, James Michael Harvey, would be shunted aside in royal fashion.

One morning last November, Harvey stepped inside a curtained-off nook of St. Peter’s Basilica to pray at the tomb of John Paul II. For nearly 15 years, Harvey, a tall and gaunt Wisconsin native and comparatively youthful at 63, enjoyed close proximity to John Paul II and then Benedict as head of the papal household. On this day, he would join a handful of other prelates in kneeling down before Benedict, who would bestow birettas upon their heads and elevate them to the exclusive college of cardinals. As horns blasted from high above the basilica’s bronze doors, Harvey, clad in scarlet, led a small and internationally diverse procession down the nave. Lebanese and Nigerian flags waved in the packed pews. A roar went up as Benedict appeared in a gold stole, coasting over the buffed marble on a rolling platform.

With the exception of Gabriele, the butler, then locked up in a Vatican jail, all the major players in the leak drama attended. The gendarmes who had raided Gabriele’s top-floor apartment patrolled the floor in blue uniforms with flat-topped caps. Cardinal Bertone prayed in the front row. Among the 97 cardinals illuminated in a shaft of white light behind Bertone, potential “crows” perched.

Benedict appointed Harvey to a new job as titular cardinal priest of the St. Paul Outside the Walls basilica. It seemed like the honor of a lifetime, but for Vatican insiders and officials, the move amounted to an exquisite eviction. As the head of the papal household, Harvey had overseen Gabriele, and his new assignment seemed a classic example of promoveatur ut amoveatur — promote to remove. (Benedict later banished his former butler to a silence-encouraging sinecure at a hospital adjoining Harvey’s church.)

After the ceremony, Vatican officials charged with running the church shrugged off the scandal.

“They are little things, pebbles in the shoe that hurt so much and seem to prevent you from going forward,” said Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who supervised Viganò during the height of VatiLeaks. “If one looks at the act of betrayal, it is in itself a grave act, even more so because it is near the apex of the church. But what does this tell us? It tells us only about the fragility of a person or of some people.”

A few hours after the ceremony, the Vatican offered the public a rare chance to enter the Apostolic Palace, where the pope lives and Gabriele had worked as butler. Inside the palace, Harvey accepted congratulations at the end of the barrel-vaulted Sala Regia.

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