Photo ~ Pope Benedict offers mass in May 2012, flanked by Cardinal Tardisio Bertone, one of the central figures in the Vatileaks story. (Stefano Rellandini / Reuters)

Inside the Vatican's power struggles

The Vatican has been under intense scrutiny for almost six months now, the result of leaked correspondence — the so-called Vatileaks — that alleges financial corruption and intrigue within the internal government of the Holy See.

The subject of the leaks has sparked a media frenzy in Rome and even among some of the world's financial press, but it is no surprise to church historians who have seen all this before.

"The Vatican is in a sense almost perpetually enmeshed in scandals, because it continues to act like a kingdom," says John Stackhouse, professor of theology and culture at the University of British Columbia's Regent College.

"It might have made sense at one point in history for the pope to also be a prince, but whenever you're involved in politics or business, things get messy."

Just a week ago the president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was ousted after receiving a unanimous vote of no confidence from bank overseers.

Since then, Vatican authorities arrested the Pope's own butler, Paolo Gabriele, on the suspicion that he had been leaking private letters to Gianluigi Nuzzi, a local investigative journalist looking into the corruption allegations.

Gabriele had been the Pope's personal attendant since 2006 and was discovered to have had a large number of the Pope's personal papers in his apartment, investigators said.

He has agreed to cooperate fully with Vatican officials, raising the spectre that other, senior churchmen might yet be named in the probe, Associated Press reported.
Paolo Gabriele, the Pope's long-serving butler, seen here in a 2008 photo with Benedict at the Rome airport. (Domenico Stinellis / Associated Press)

That's the kind of action — putting whistleblowers under house arrest, or transferring them safely away — that raises questions about administrative transparency, says Daniel Cere, professor of religious studies at McGill University.

"The kinds of standards that are expected of secular organizations," he says, "are standards and expectations that have to be built into faith-based organizations as well."

At the same time, Randy Boyagoda, incoming chairman of the English department at Ryerson University and author of an upcoming biography of Roman Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, says that church teaching and policies should be understood as separate from these more localized scandals in Vatican City.

As he sees it, scandals like these should be considered the unfortunate actions of individuals, not evidence of systemic problems inherent to the Vatican or the universal church.

It is important that observers "make a distinction between Vatican governance and church governance," says Boyagoda. "It's a very big difference."

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