When a book is subtitled ''A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the
Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the
Catholic Church'' then the expectation raised is likely to be
of heaps of dirt and loads of tabloid innuendo. And, in part, that is true of The Vatican Diaries but tabloid muck-raking it is not.
John Thavis, a US journalist, spent the best part of 30 years in the Vatican bureau of the Catholic News Service (CNS) and, as anyone in the news business who has used the agency's services knows, it is not in the tabloid category.
CNS has always offered straight news and serious analysis of Catholic affairs. It is his talent for thoughtful analysis of people and events that lifts Thavis' book out of the muck-raking category.
Of course, in 2000 years the Vatican stables have been filled to the gables with muck: money, sex and that most Catholic of clicheś, secret societies, are big players and abound in this book.
But Thavis is more interested in looking at the wheres and whys of the muck, particularly the most damning of ''whys'': why does no-one ever clean it up?
As Thavis explains, the time-honoured ways in which the Vatican bureaucracy sweeps trouble under the carpet, through sending files to commissions and committees from which they rarely emerge again, one begins to realise that the ''advisory council'' set up by Pope Francis looks likely to be a new name for an old custom.
Popes naturally figure largely, from the ongoing fighting over the reputation of the World War 2-era pontiff, Pius XII, through the eccentricities of John Paul II to an assessment of the dismal papacy of Benedict XVI.
The analysis Thavis offers of the personality, policies and perplexities of Benedict, written before his announcement that he was quitting the papacy, is invaluable in enabling us to understand just why he made that decision. Indeed, the analysis makes Benedict's resignation appear inevitable.
What Thavis does not address is the future of the Vatican (as distinct from the future of the Catholic Church).
But the grim picture he paints of managerial fiasco and the Curia's failure to learn anything from its perpetual cycle of missteps does not leave the reader with a shred of optimism.