From: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste in images
SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 2013
Some of our News Dispatch readers wanted to know the function of the Roman Curia and whether it contributed to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. The Curia is a big operation. It maintains contact with all the bishops of the world, more than 3,000, in 110 countries. It oversees the hundreds of thousands of priests who care for the world’s 1.2?billion Catholics.
The Roman Curia can be loosely compared to cabinets in governments of countries supervised by Vicar General of Rome, traditionally a Cardinal, and his deputy the Vicegerent, who holds the personal title of Archbishop.
Due to corruption allegations in the Curia, last autumn Benedict ordered three trusted high-ranking cardinals to investigate the state of the Curia. This was the report that was delivered to him just weeks ago.
Although it was meant for Benedict’s ‘eyes only’ but details of a sex ring and money-laundering scams last week reached the Italian weekly Panorama. Then the daily La Repubblica ran the story.
Although the Vatican has denied that this might have led to Pope’s resignation, in the weeks following Benedict’s shock decision to resign, Italian newspapers have run many stories about a secret report prepared for the pope by three cardinals who investigated the so-called “Vatileaks” scandal last year.
Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, was convicted of stealing personal papal documents and leaking them to the media. He was jailed and later pardoned by the pope.
The documents alleged corruption in the Vatican and infighting over the running of its bank, which has been at the heart of a series of scandals in past decades.
According to one unsourced report, the secret report also touched on homosexual activity by some Vatican monsignors, leaving them and the Vatican open to blackmail.
The Vatican has accused the Italian media of spreading “false and damaging” reports, condemning some as deplorable attempts to influence the cardinal electors.
But on Thursday, the day the pope resigned, the Vatican acknowledged that some parts of an Italian magazine report about wiretapping in the Vatican were true. It said “a few” phones had been tapped by magistrates investigating the leaks scandal but that the tapping was not as widespread as the magazine suggested.
The secret report on the leaks was given to Benedict, who decided to make it available only to his successor. But it is expected to be a topic of discussions at pre-conclave meetings that begin on Monday March 4, 2013.
One Vatican official said the three elderly cardinals who wrote it “will use their discernment to give any necessary guidance” to fellow cardinals without violating their pact of secrecy about its specific contents.
Apart from the scandals, the Curia has been blamed for not protecting the pope from several mishaps and bad decisions, not foreseeing negative reaction to some of his pronouncements and not giving him enough information to make the right decision.
In 2006, it failed to predict the fallout from a papal speech in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor equating Islam with violence. That speech led to violent protests among Muslims around the world.
In 2009, the Curia failed to do its homework before the pope let an excommunicated traditionalist bishop, Richard Williamson, be re-admitted to the church. He was a known Holocaust denier and the episode badly damaged ties with Jews around the world.
Critics such as leading Italian Vatican expert and author Sandro Magister say Benedict put people in positions of administrative power because he knew them and felt comfortable with them rather than for their abilities.
One Vatican official said he believed the Curia “let the pope down” by not preventing many problems. In particular, some Vatican insiders criticize Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict’s number two.
“Bertone will probably be remembered as one of the worst secretaries of state in history,” one official said, adding that Bertone travelled too much and did not run a tight ship.
Bertone who had no diplomatic experience when he was chosen, and was seen as alienating the monsignors of the career civil service in the Vatican, many of whom owed their allegiance and jobs to his efficient predecessor, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.
La Repubblica also reported that there was a secret network of gay Vatican officials and that the group met for sexual encounters at various places including a sauna in Rome and a home outside the city.
The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called “Vatileaks” affair.
In March 2010, a 29-year-old chorister in St Peter’s was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes, one of them a seminarian, for a papal gentleman-in-waiting who was also a senior adviser in the Curial department that oversees the church’s worldwide missionary activities.
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.
La Repubblica’s report was the latest in a string of claims that a gay network exists in the Vatican. In 2007 a senior official was suspended from the congregation, or department, for the priesthood, after he was filmed in a “sting” organised by an Italian television programme while apparently making sexual overtures to a younger man.
In 2010 a chorister was dismissed for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. A few months later a weekly news magazine used hidden cameras to record priests visiting gay clubs and bars and having sex. Read La Repubblica for more information. Also read Vatican hit by gay sex scandal | World news | The Guardian.
This is not the first time allegations have been made on corruption and scandals in the Roman Curia. In September 1978 only a month after his election to the Papacy, Pope John Paul I was found dead in his bed room.
According to David Yallop’s book, In God’s Name proposed the theory that the pope was in “potential danger” because of corruption in the Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR, Institute of Religious Works, the Vatican’s most powerful financial institution, commonly known as the Vatican Bank), which owned many shares in Banco Ambrosiano. The Vatican Bank lost about a quarter of a billion dollars.
This corruption was real and is known to have involved the bank’s head, Paul Marcinkus, along with Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi was a member of P2, an illegal Italian Masonic lodge.
Calvi was found dead in London, after disappearing just before the corruption became public. His death was initially ruled suicide, and a second inquest – ordered by his family – then returned an “open verdict”.
One of the names believed to be on the paper was that of bishop Paul Marcinkus, who was later promoted by Pope John Paul II to Pro-President of Vatican City, making him the third most powerful person in the Vatican, after the pope and the secretary of state.
None of Yallop’s claims have thus far been acknowledged by the Vatican due to there being no proof for the conjectures, although Yallop disclosed the Masonic Lodge numbers of the Curia members who he alleged to be Freemasons in his book (it is forbidden by Church law for a Roman Catholic to be a Freemason).
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.com
Facebook-omolo beste
Twitter-@8000accomole
Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ UN Disarmament Conference, 2002