The Vatican

National
Paolo Gabriele, untied the scandal
The Vatican
By: Carlos Damián June 11, 2012
The Catholic Church should “recover the trust in the faithful ones"
México. - In so far in this year, like in a European museum it shakes the powder the oldest religious institution in West, the Vatican has been seen shocked by filtrations of confidential documents that make reference to matters as sordid as corruption and bad handling of funds or complots to poison the current pontiff. As a result of such scandals, the previous week Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was dismissed (EGT), until then president of the Institute for the Works of the Religion (IWR), known popularly as “The Vatican Bank"; XVI Benedicto's butler, Paolo Gabriele (PG), it is detained as suspect of having filtered the documents.

In this context cardinal Tarcisio Bertone political position, Ministry of House from the Vatican, it has been severely weakened of face to Joseph Ratzinger's succession, as long as they go a long way rumors on an eventual renouncement from the pontiff, 85 years old, to their position. XVI Benedict’s butler, PG 46 years old was accused formally on Saturday (6/26/12), of stealing confidential documents of the Pope who didn't make reference to the scandal or the detention during his two appearances in public place of this Sunday (6/27/12), facts that he left it according to his assistants “harmed and saddened."

The steward of the Pope of the sharp teeth
This character is known as Paoleto, Gabriele at the moment is in a security’s cell of four for four in a barracks of the Vatican Gendarmerie. There it has spent the last four nights, dedicating great part from his time to the prayer. A book had published for one week in Italy contains numerous confidential documents of the Pope that illustrate many internal debates, for example, the fiscal situation of the Church or the scandals of Christ's legionaries. The scandal is linked with the filtration from a series of documents to the Italian means in passed January and February, included personal letters directed to the Pope.

Among the filtered documents they figure letters written by an archbishop that was transferred Washington after accusations about a net of corruption, a report that stained the image of several cardinal, and texts that they reveal presumed conflicts in the Vatican’s Bank. Cardinal Maria Martini, former archbishop of Milan and in some moment candidate to become Pope, seemed to speak for many people when he said that the scandal should impel to the Church “to recover the trust of the faithful ones urgently". The butler is suspicious of filtering documents of “high sensibility", some of which he has to do with accusations of nepotism and corruption in contracts of the Vatican with Italian companies.

The fight for the power
In the twilights of the papal administration we can see that the filtrations are one inflamed dispute by the power before the next papal succession, for which the strongest candidate seems to be Bertone, impelled by the current Pope; on the other hand it is clear that the millennial opacity of the Catholic matters in the Vatican, the suffocating authoritarianism, as well as the not hidden estrangement of Benedict XVI of the contemporary social realities, they have converged in a crisis of uncertain consequences for the Vatican.

Suddenly the palatine matters of Rome seem to experience a regression to the sordidness that characterized the Vatican in their cloudier historical periods, as the ‘Saeculum obscurum’ or also call this pornocracy’s era that lapsed in the X century, or when the families Borgia and Medici were alternated in San Pedro's throne (XV and XVI centuries), in those that the palatine intrigue was the habitual way to implant and to destroy pontificates. But perhaps this regression it is apparent and the high clerical society of the Catholicism has not modernized in centuries its institutional logics neither its mechanisms of formation of authority, simply in this century it has been devoted to apply seemingly in decorous form the antique trunk of the rotten tree.

The rotten tree
However few to the interior of the Church they believe that Gabriele, a shy and private man, he made it without accompaniment and some say that he could be an involuntary peon in a fight of power in the Vatican. Some say that the silence that seems to have the periodic ‘Roman L'Osservatore’ in the history has become an instrument in a fight of power that implies allies and enemies of the “first minister” from the Vatican, cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. The basic structures of the Vatican power constitute an anachronism that enters in conflict, forcedly with a contemporary ethics dominated by the values of the democracy, the plurality, the diversity, the tolerance and the rendition of balances, among others. In this circumstance the papacy is been, in the context of the XXI century, a haven of the Medieval that is fertile field for the buried plots, the bitchy rumors and the palatine blows.

The current crisis marked by a leak of confidential documents toward the public opinion, with a chaos perception and with out of control, shows the pressing modernization necessity and bring up to date that the Vatican experiences, not only in its access mechanism to the power, of succession and of resolution of conflicts, but in that it makes to the conceptions and anachronisms theological, arbitrary, misogynic and reactionary pastorals whose persistence has been translated in a serious loss of congregations under way of recent decades. (La Jornada, politica, p. 2, June 4, 2012).