If it’s true that the only thing worse than negative publicity is no
publicity, then 2010 was a banner year for the Vatican.
It opened with a
sexual abuse crisis in Ireland that would sweep across Europe and put
the personal record of Benedict XVI under a spotlight, and it ended with
frenzy over the pope’s comments on condoms and various Vatican efforts
to explain what Benedict did, and didn’t, mean.
The Religion Newswriters Association, made up of beat reporters in
the United States, ranked the sexual abuse crisis the third-biggest
religion story of the year, behind the New York mosque controversy and
faith-based relief efforts in Haiti.
That’s quite something, given that
the crisis of 2010 wasn’t even primarily an American story.
To be fair, the year’s news wasn’t all bad for the Holy See. Arguably
the highlight of 2010 from the pope’s point of view came in September,
when his improbably triumphant trip to the United Kingdom also drew wide
international interest.
As is always the case when a few massive narratives dominate
coverage, other storylines tend to slip through the cracks. Herewith, my
annual run-down of the “Top Five Under-Reported Vatican Stories of the
Year” – five stories with important implications for the Vatican and the
way it thinks about the world, which didn’t get the traction they
deserve.
5. The Boffo Case
What Italians call the giallo, literally meaning “yellow”
but used to refer to a mystery, surrounding Italian Catholic journalist
Dino Boffo first erupted in 2009.
Facing accusations that he had
harassed a woman because he wanted to pursue a gay affair with her
lover, Boffo resigned as editor of L’Avvenire, the newspaper of
the Italian bishops, in September 2009.
Boffo denied the charges, but
said he stepped down to spare the bishops the embarrassment.
In mid-January 2010, the case reignited after revelations that a
purported police document about Boffo was a fake. Speculation ensued in
the Italian press about who was behind it, which congealed into the
following hypothesis: The Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, wanted to get rid of Boffo because he was associated
with Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the former president of the Italian bishops
and Bertone’s rival for preeminence in Italy.
Bertone supposedly
enlisted the editor of the Vatican newspaper and the head of the Vatican
gendarmes in the plot. A fake document was cooked up and passed to
allies in the secular press, who proceeded to smear Boffo and ensure his
demise.
In reality, that reconstruction never passed the “smell test” – to
begin with, the Secretary of State has far less complicated ways of
sacking the editor of L’Avvenire – but it captivated the
country for a full 18 days before the Vatican made any comment.
Under
the rubric of silence signifies consent, many Italians concluded that it
must all be true.
When the Vatican spokesperson was finally authorized
to reject the accusations, one Italian paper carried the following
banner headline, which seemed to capture the moment: “The Vatican Denies
Everything, No One Believes It.”
Aside from exercising a kind of macabre fascination, like train
wrecks and NASCAR pile-ups, the Boffo case confirmed that the Vatican
remains remarkably slow and ambivalent with regard to the dynamics of
public opinion in the 21st century.
Especially among Italians, the fact
that the Vatican let the Boffo case spin so far out of control also
cemented impressions of a crisis of governance under Bertone. Remedying
that crisis may figure prominently on the “to-do” list of many cardinals
the next time they gather to elect a pope.
As a footnote, Boffo has been more or less rehabilitated. In October,
he was named the director of TV2000, the official television network of
the Italian bishops.
4. Scandals at Propaganda Fide and the Vatican Bank
In 2010, two venerable Vatican institutions, the Congregation for the
Evangelization of Peoples (the department for missionary activity still
known by its old name, Propaganda Fide) and the Institute for the Works
of Religion (popularly called the Vatican Bank), faced accusations of
financial shenanigans.
For centuries, Propaganda Fide has been a financial empire all to
itself, owning scads of prime real estate and managing large bank
accounts in order to fund overseas missions. The cardinal-prefect is
informally dubbed the “Red Pope,” a reference to the power and influence
those resources generate.
(The Italian newspaper Libero has
estimated the market value of the congregation’s real estate holdings,
which reportedly include 761 buildings, 445 sets of grounds, and 2,325
apartments, at roughly $1.7 billion.)
Many observers have long believed
that the wealth of Propaganda Fide, coupled with its near-total
autonomy, made it ripe for a financial scandal, and 2010 turned out to
be the year those chickens came home to roost.
In June, Italian prosecutors announced that Italian Cardinal
Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, who headed Propaganda Fide from 2001 to 2006,
is the target of an anti-corruption probe.
The theory is that Sepe gave
Italian politicians sweetheart deals on apartments at the same time
that millions of Euros in state funds were allocated for remodeling
projects at Propaganda Fide, including its headquarters in Rome’s Piazza
di Spagna.
In effect, the suggestion is that Sepe bribed public
officials to fund work that in some instances was never completed.
As of this writing, an investigation by Italian prosecutors is
on-going. Sepe has declared his innocence, saying, “I acted solely for
the good of the church.”
At the Vatican Bank, meanwhile, some $30 million in assets was seized
by civil authorities in September for violations of European anti-money
laundering laws.
Although bank officials have described the case as a
“misunderstanding”, recently released court documents show prosecutors
suspect that clergy with accounts at the bank may be involved in
laundering money for corrupt businessmen and even the Italian mob.
One
brief filed by prosecutors in November states that while the bank has
expressed a “generic will” to conform to international standards, “there
is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic church are moving in
that direction.”
In an effort to combat those impressions, the Vatican yesterday
announced the creation of a new financial watchdog, the “Authority for
Financial Information,” to supervise all transactions, including those
of the Vatican Bank.
Benedict XVI issued a motu proprio, or
legal document, creating the new authority, which is designed to put the
Vatican in compliance with international standards against
money-laundering, financing terrorism, insider trading and market abuse.
The new authority reportedly will be headed by Cardinal Attilio
Nicora, a financial expert who negotiated a 1984 revision to the
concordat between the Vatican and Italy.
The lay president of the Vatican Bank, Italian economist Ettore Gotti
Tedeschi, has repeatedly expressed his commitment to transparency;
indeed, most Vatican-watchers saw his appointment in 2009 as a signal
that Benedict XVI wanted a “glasnost” in Vatican finances.
Both the Propaganda Fide and the Vatican Bank scandals illustrate two broad points.
First, the era of broad civil deference to ecclesiastical authority
is over.
These days, police and prosecutors aren’t reluctant at all to
target the church, a point also brought home in June by police raids
against the Catholic church in Belgium as part of a sex abuse probe,
which included drilling holes in the tombs of two former archbishops of
Brussels.
Second, the Vatican finds itself between a rock and a hard place when
it comes to cooperation with secular authorities.
On the one hand, it
faces a 21st century world in which the Vatican is expected to be
accountable before the law like any other institution.
On the other, it
has an internal culture shaped by centuries of battles to resist civil
interference, and an evangelical ethos resistant to being co-opted by
secularism.
Some old Vatican hands are skeptical of Gotti Tedeschi’s
“glasnost” precisely on the grounds that it risks surrendering the
independence for which popes in previous centuries struggled so
mightily. That rock-and-hard-place dynamic would seem to augur more
church/state battles to come.
Finally, the eruption of these financial scandals is also likely to
increase pressure for good governance in the church, not only in the
Vatican but in dioceses, parishes, and other Catholic institutions
around the world.
In the States, groups such as the Leadership
Roundtable on Church Management have a new card to play in their
conversations with bishops and pastors: “Do you want to be the next
Sepe?”
3. Europe and the Crucifix
Speaking of church/state battles, in November the European Court of
Human Rights ruled that the display of crucifixes in Italian public
schools is a violation of “confessional neutrality” and ordered the
Italian government to pay a complaining parent roughly $6,500 in
damages.
If upheld on appeal, the ruling could establish a broad
European standard against the display of religious (mostly, to be
honest, Christian) symbols in public spaces.
The decision galvanized wide opposition in Italy, where the crucifix
is generally seen as a symbol of national identity.
It also fueled
resentment about faceless European bureaucrats imposing their will on
member states. Italy filed an appeal, which has been joined by Armenia,
Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Monaco, Romania, Russia and
San Marino.
A final decision is expected in early 2011, though observers
caution against expecting a dramatic reversal, given that many of the
same judges from the first round also sit on the court of appeals.
Seen through Vatican eyes, the crucifix case has cemented two broad impressions.
First, it’s strengthened a conviction that the European Union is in
the grip of a runaway secularism hostile to the Catholic church.
Among
other things, that’s accelerated the demise of antique anti-Americanism
in the Vatican; today, most senior personnel in the Vatican, including
Pope Benedict XVI himself, look longingly across the water at what they
regard as a more religion-friendly culture in the United States.
Second, it’s contributed to the transition from “inter-religious” to
“inter-cultural” dialogue as the primary model for engaging other
religions.
The idea is that while different religions cannot come to
theological agreement, they face many of the same social, cultural and
political pressures, especially vis-à-vis secular efforts to drive
religion from the public square.
On that front, it’s telling that the
lawyer representing the Vatican before the European Court of Human
Rights is actually Jewish: Joseph Weiler, who was born in South Africa
and who now teaches at the NYU School of Law.
2. The Synod for the Middle East
Granted, synods of bishops are rarely the stuff of high drama. More
often than not, they’re reminiscent of what Oscar Wilde once said about
the problem with Socialism: “It takes up too many evenings.”
In some ways, the Oct. 1-24 Synod for the Middle East was a case in
point.
The assembly produced 44 propositions, a 5,000-word final
message, and a tidal wave of speeches, without any appreciable impact on
the situation on the ground.
Christians were an endangered species in
the Middle East before the bishops gathered in Rome, and they remain so
afterwards.
In fact, the only development with any bite as a news story was
actually a distraction.
In a concluding news conference, a Greek Melkite
archbishop from Massachusetts told reporters that Christ had
“nullified” the notion of Israel as a “promised land” for Jews,
triggering accusations of both theological and political anti-Semitism.
While those comments made for good news copy, they hardly represented
the dominant thrust of discussion.
As a result, the synod was largely a missed opportunity to tell the
most dramatic Christian story anywhere in the world.
In the Middle East,
Christians have shrunk from 20 percent of the population a century ago
to maybe five percent today, yet they’re desperately trying to punch
above their weight.
Their great dream is to catalyze a democratic
revolution across the region – pressing Israel to better integrate its
Arab minority, and Islamic societies to make their peace with modernity.
It’s a vision that unites Catholics with an ecumenical smorgasbord of
other Christians, not to mention like-minded Muslims and Jews.
If that vision fails, not only will Christianity face extinction in
the land of its birth, but the most natural human bridge between the
West and the Muslim world will collapse.
The synod actually generated some interesting ideas toward that great
dream. They included concrete ways of overcoming the traditional turf
wars among the seven Catholic rites of the Middle East (Armenian,
Chaldean, Coptic, Latin, Maronite, Melkite and Syrian), empowering the
local patriarchs, and strengthening ties between local Christians and
their diaspora communities abroad.
The bishops of the Middle East,
typically known for a soft approach to Islam, also flirted with a more
realistic line, pushing beyond the “tea and cookies” stage of dialogue
into blunt talk about pluralism, reciprocity and the perils of
Islamization.
Bottom line: If there’s any Christian community on the planet that
merits the concern of Catholics in the West, especially in America given
the influence of the United States in the region, it’s in the Middle
East.
An opportunity to build that awareness was all but missed this
year, as the synod flew below radar until the very end, and then drew
notice only for a sideshow.
1. Christianophobia
Strictly speaking, “Christianophobia,” referring to anti-Christian
intolerance and persecution around the world, isn’t really a Vatican
story.
After all, the 108 acres of the Vatican city-state are probably
the safest bit of real estate for Christians on the planet.
Yet what
many experts regard as a rising global tide of anti-Christian animus
carries enormous, and often under-appreciated, consequences for the
Vatican’s priorities and the way it thinks about the world.
The term “Christophobia” was coined by Weiler to refer to the growing
marginalization of Christians in secular Europe. Modified into
“Christianophobia,” it entered the European lexicon in 2004 when Italian
politician Rocco Buttiglione was blackballed as European Commission of
Justice over his orthodox Catholic views on abortion and homosexuality.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission now recognizes
“anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Christianophobia” as forms of religious
intolerance.
“Christianophobia” has since become a broader concept, referring to
anti-Christian oppression wherever it occurs, including its violent
forms – and around the world, it occurs with stunning frequency.
Aid to the Church in Need, a German-based Catholic aid agency,
produces a widely trusted annual report on global threats to religious
freedom.
It estimates that somewhere between 75 percent and 85 percent
of all acts of religious persecution are directed against Christians.
In
a report to the European Parliament last month, the Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life said that while Muslims and Jews face
significant persecution, “Christians faced some sort of harassment in
two-thirds of all countries,” or 133 states.
Those statistics are fleshed out by headlines almost every day.
This Christmas season alone, scores of Catholic Masses were cancelled
in Iraq due to threats from extremist groups. Since the first Gulf War
in 1991, Iraq has lost two-thirds of what was once among the largest
Christian populations in the Middle East.
In China, a new crackdown on
the church is in full swing, as the government has orchestrated
elections for a rump bishops’ conference and an assembly of Catholics
calculated to preserve state control.
Some clergy were herded into those
elections virtually at gunpoint.
In Vietnam, a Catholic bishop was banned from celebrating Christmas
Mass in the country’s mountain region, reportedly because of his success
in converting the Montagnards, a cluster of ethnic groups often
stigmatized and seen as potential threats by other Vietnamese.
In the
Philippines, Muslim extremists attacked a Catholic chapel on the island
of Jolo on Christmas Day. It was merely the latest assault on Jolo,
where a bomb exploded inside the local cathedral in July 2009, killing
six and wounding forty.
In Nigeria, fighting between Christians and
Muslims in the northern city of Jos over the Christmas period has
reportedly left at least 80 people dead.
Christianophobia is on the rise for a whole cocktail of reasons.
Part
of it is simple math: There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world,
the largest following of any religion, so in terms of raw numbers there
are simply more Christians to oppress. That’s especially true as
Christianity’s center of gravity shifts to the developing world, where
democracy and the rule of law are sometimes conspicuous by their
absence.
Because of the historical association between Christianity and the
West, Christians are often convenient targets for individuals and groups
expressing anti-Western rage. In some cases, too, the logic is
exquisitely local.
In India, a disproportionate share of Christian
converts come from the “untouchable” Dalit community, so it’s often
difficult to disentangle specifically Christian persecution from older
caste prejudice. (A similar point could be made about the Montagnards in
Vietnam).
A spike in anti-Christian backlash shapes Vatican attitudes in three ways.
First, it eats up an increasing share of time and attention.
To
explain why the Vatican isn’t in a full, upright and locked position on
the sex abuse crisis, the priest shortage, the health care debate in the
States, or whatever the issue du jour is, part of the logic is
straight out of Maslow: When there’s a perceived threat to survival,
it’s tough to move on to higher-order aims.
Second, it’s become a prism through which Vatican personnel see
everything else.
For instance, if you want to know why Pope Benedict XVI
has not imposed a uniform global policy of cooperation with civil
authorities on sex abuse cases, it’s partly because such a requirement
would be a death sentence in parts of the world where police and
prosecutors are quite openly out to get the church.
Third, Christianophobia is a primary reason that reciprocity and
religious freedom have claimed pride of place among the Vatican’s
geopolitical priorities.
In recent years, diplomats accredited to the
Holy See say their opposite numbers in the Vatican seem focused like a
laser beam on religious freedom, sometimes leading them to slow down on
other fronts, such as anti-poverty efforts, conflict resolution, etc.
That’s been a source of concern in diplomatic circles, and it’s
sometimes perceived as part of the crisis of governance under Bertone.
Yet it’s also related to the point made above: when survival is
perceived to be on the line, at least in some parts of the world, it
tends to blot other priorities out of the sky.
While individual anti-Christian incidents often attracted wide
coverage in 2010, both the scope of the phenomenon and its impact on
Vatican psychology were often left out of the picture.
SIC: NCR/USA-INT'L