Litany of secrets after papal retirement bombshell

By VICTOR L. SIMPSON

Asso­ci­ated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — For an insti­tu­tion devoted to eter­nal light, the Vat­i­can has shown itself to be a mas­ter of smoke­screens since Pope Bene­dict XVI’s shock res­ig­na­tion announcement.

On Thurs­day, the Vat­i­can spokesman acknowl­edged that Bene­dict hit his head and bled pro­fusely while vis­it­ing Mex­ico in July. Two days ear­lier the same man acknowl­edged that Bene­dict has had a pace­maker for years, and under­went a secret oper­a­tion to replace its bat­tery three months ago.

And as the Catholic world reeled from shock over the abdi­ca­tion, it soon became clear that Benedict’s post-papacy lodg­ings have been under con­struc­tion since at least the fall. That in turn put holes in the Holy See’s early claims that Bene­dict kept his deci­sion to him­self until he revealed it.

Vat­i­can secrecy is leg­endary and can have tragic con­se­quences — as the world learned through the church sex abuse scan­dal in which bish­ops qui­etly moved abu­sive priests with­out report­ing their crimes.

And the secrecy is insti­tu­tion­al­ized from such weighty mat­ters to the most triv­ial aspects of Vat­i­can life.

“You have to under­stand that actu­ally every Vat­i­can employee and offi­cial takes an oath of secrecy when they assume their job,” said John Thavis, author of the Vat­i­can Diaries, an inves­ti­ga­tion into the work­ings of the Holy See. “And this isn’t some­thing that is taken lightly. They swear to keep secret any office mat­ters and any­thing per­tain­ing to the pope.”

One of the most famous cases of Vat­i­can secrecy was the Holy See’s efforts to cover up the fact that Pope John Paul I’s dead body was dis­cov­ered by a nun. The even­tual rev­e­la­tion helped fuel con­spir­acy the­o­ries over the death of the pope who ruled for only 33 days in 1978.

The Vat­i­can is so obsessed with secrecy that the first and only offi­cial con­fir­ma­tion that John Paul II had Parkinson’s dis­ease was in his death certificate.

The Vat­i­can jus­ti­fies itself by argu­ing that its offi­cials are hold­ers of the divine truth, unac­count­able to worldly laws. In par­tic­u­lar, the pope’s word is the final say on any issue — infal­li­ble on some doc­tri­nal mat­ters. But groups rep­re­sent­ing sex abuse vic­tims, and other Catholics angered by the scan­dal, have been demand­ing mod­ern stan­dards of account­abil­ity and call­ing for reforms.

The Vat­i­can brushed aside crit­i­cism for keep­ing quiet about the pope’s Decem­ber pace­maker pro­ce­dure, on grounds it was “rou­tine.” One Vat­i­can offi­cial said mak­ing the oper­a­tion pub­lic would sim­ply have led to a big and unnec­es­sary com­mo­tion about the pope’s health. “You can imag­ine the satel­lite dishes in St. Peter’s square,” said the offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity because he is not autho­rized to speak to the media.

The front-man for the church’s dance of con­ceal­ment and dis­clo­sure: Vat­i­can spokesman The Rev. Fed­erico Lom­bardi. In his brief­ings, Lom­bardi has been forced into the uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tion of keep­ing silent on aspects of the pope’s health and future, only to backpedal when con­fronted with reports in Ital­ian newspapers.

In the lat­est dis­clo­sure, Turin’s La Stampa news­pa­per reported Thurs­day that Bene­dict hit his head on a sink and bled pro­fusely when he got up in the mid­dle of the night in an unfa­mil­iar bed­room in Leon, Mex­ico. The report said papal blood stained Benedict’s hair, his pil­low and the floor.

Lom­bardi con­firmed the inci­dent but denied it played any role in the pope’s res­ig­na­tion. Still, sus­pi­cions are bound to be whet­ted, since the Vat­i­can news­pa­per L’Osservatore Romano reported this week that Bene­dict had taken the deci­sion to resign after the Mexico-Cuba trip, which was phys­i­cally exhaust­ing for the 85-year-old pope.

Then there’s the ques­tion of how many peo­ple knew of Benedict’s deci­sion to retire.

On the day of the announce­ment the Vat­i­can cast it as a bolt from the blue, say­ing almost nobody knew but Bene­dict him­self. Soon, how­ever, promi­nent cler­gy­men — one not even Catholic — began chang­ing the tone and say­ing they were not surprised.

“Know­ing the pope well, there was some­thing in the air that this deci­sion of the pope was pos­si­ble,” said Arch­bishop Piero Marini, mas­ter of papal cer­e­monies under Pope John Paul II. “So it was not a shock.”

Even the retired Arcbishop of Can­ter­bury, Bishop Rowan Williams, says that based on his last meet­ing with Bene­dict a year ago he was not sur­prise at the deci­sion to step down.

“Because of our last con­ver­sa­tion I was very con­scious that he was rec­og­niz­ing his own frailty and it did cross my mind to won­der whether this was a step he might think about,” Williams told Vat­i­can Radio.

Ren­o­va­tion work on a con­vent pre­vi­ously occu­pied by clois­tered nuns has been going on in secret since at least last fall, an issue appar­ently caus­ing grum­bling among car­di­nals about the choice of arrange­ments and whether Benedict’s pres­ence on Vat­i­can grounds will allow the retired pope to wield too much influ­ence on his successor.

“I don’t think there was a con­sul­ta­tion of the Col­lege of the Car­di­nals about this,” Lom­bardi said Wednes­day, deflect­ing ques­tions about Benedict’s liv­ing arrange­ments. “The deci­sion and the process of the deci­sion was very lim­ited in the num­ber of per­sons involved.”

That points to another aspect of Vat­i­can secrecy: The habit of dif­fer­ent wings of the Holy See jeal­ously con­ceal­ing infor­ma­tion from one another.

“There is very lit­tle cross com­mu­ni­ca­tion within Vat­i­can depart­ments,” Thavis said, “so one depart­ment may know some­thing but that does not mean that the Curia office down the hall knows about it as well.”

Posted by Becky Brooks on Feb 15 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.