A hard response came from the Vatican to another case of documents leaked from the rooms of Oltretevere; this one marked by the book “Sua Santità” (His Holiness) by the Libero (an Italian newspaper) journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, in which numerous letters and reports from the desk of Pope Benedict XVI are published. It is a new episode of the so-called Vatileaks, which started with the publication of letters sent to the Pope by Mgr. Carlo Maria Viganò, in which the alleged “rampant corruption” of the Governatorate of the Vatican City State (of which Viganò was then the secretary general) was denounced. On that occasion, it was also Nuzzi who published the documents.
“The new publication of documents of the Holy See and of private documents of the Holy Father,” says the official notice diffused by the Vatican Information Services this morning, “is no longer to be considered a debatable, and objectively slanderous, journalistic initiative, but it clearly assumes the characteristics of a criminal action.”
The Vatican comment denounces that this time there has been a “violation” of the “personal rights of confidentiality and freedom of correspondence” of the Pope and of his collaborators, as well as that of the senders of the messages directed to Him.
For this reason, as it happened after the publication of Mgr. Viganò’s letters but with much more force, the Holy See announces the recourse to the law against those responsible for the leaked documents.
“The Holy See,” we read in the announcement, “will continue to examine the various implications of these acts of violation of the privacy and the dignity of the Holy Father, as a person and as the supreme Authority of the Church and of the Vatican City State, and it will take the neccessary steps so that those responsible for the theft, the receiving and the distribution of the secret news, as well as the for commercial use of private documents, obtained and held illegally, be held responsible for their actions and brought to justice.”
The Vatican announcement concludes with one meaningful annotation; if necessary, the Holy See “will ask for international collaboration to achieve such goals.” The reference is naturally to Italy, the country where the “accused” book was published and whose relationship with the Vatican is regulated by the Concordato (Treaty).
In “Sua Santità”, among other things, a letter is published in which the former director of the daily paper of the CEI Avvenire, Dino Boffo, accuses the director of the Osservatore Romano (the Vatican newspaper) Giovanni Maria Vian, to have given to Vittorio Feltri’s Giornale (an Italian newspaper) the document (later revealed to be false) which was the base for the media campaign during the summer of 2009 which brought Boffo himself to resign from Avvenire.
In a long interview given to Tv2000, the CEI television channel of which he has been the director for approximately a year, Boffo did not delve into the accusations he addressed to Vian but he used tones similar to the ones of the official Vatican notice, stigmatizing the publication of his letter by Nuzzi, calling him a “dealer” of material obtained through “theft”.
While admitting to have “benefitted” from his letter coming to light, Boffo emphasized that he was not “happy” about the disclosures “because the image of the Church was soiled”.
Indeed he invoked the participation of the Italian authorities on communications and privacy, and the introduction of laws that can “timely” block the publishing of books in cases like his, “We journalists,” declared the former director of Avvenire, “answer to the axiom that the truth should never be kept silent” but, he added, this is valid “until the fundamental rights of the persons, the rights to privacy, are affected.”