Gone with the Wind in the Vatican, the book exposing alleged corruption and immorality at the highest levels of the Catholic Church, was top of the best-seller list in Italy last week. Its publisher is struggling to meet orders for 100,000 copies.
Negotiations are currently under way for an English-language edition and the first translation is due to be published in Spain this autumn.
The astonishing success of this densely written chronicle of vice and careerism in the Curia is largely the result of the Vatican's botched attempt to suppress it.
The decision to summon one of the book's authors, Mgr Luigi Marinelli, for trial in an ecclesiastical court last month generated enormous publicity, while the Roman Rota's order that the book be withdrawn and the authors refrain from having it translated carries no weight outside the Vatican.
Mgr Marinelli, the retired official from the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches who has admitted to being one of the co-authors, said the decision to involve the Vatican court was a huge mistake.
The Rota, which normally deals with the annulment of Catholic marriages, was asked to intervene by the relative of a deceased prelate allegedly defamed by the book.
Mgr Marinelli, whose surname is an anagram of the pseudonym used by the authors, I Millenari (The Millenarians), refused to attend the opening session of the court.
"The Rota has no jurisdiction in a dispute between Italian citizens," he said. "At the most it could have ordered its confiscation from the Vatican bookshop. It's been a gaffe, an own goal." He said the purpose of the Roman Rota was to uphold the authority of the church in spiritual matters, something he has never questioned. If the Vatican wanted to proceed against the authors - believed to number around 10 - it should have summoned them all and be ready to identify who was responsible for which chapters, he said.
"They have summoned me before the wrong court. What they really wanted was the confiscation of the book, but they set about it in the wrong way," he said.
He said there was a move afoot to deprive him of his pension, the fruit of 45 years of work in the Vatican.
"Anything is possible here. One realises that when one has an absolute regime, justice is administered in the same way as it was administered by Hitler and Stalin," he said.
But he is unrepentant about his decision to go public with his denunciation and is encouraged that several cardinals have recently acknowledged the problem of careerism in the church.
"It's always a mistake to cover up a gangrenous wound with bandages," he said. "If we all remain silent the evil won't be cured. Sometimes there has to be scandal so that evil can be removed. Christ himself said so."
The book alleges that one senior Vatican official narrowly missed becoming a cardinal after being stopped at the Swiss-Italian border with a suitcase full of bank-notes.
It claims that homosexual relations among senior clergy have frequently been hushed up and suggests that the top echelons of the Vatican have been infiltrated by freemasons. "Sometimes those who offer themselves from the belt down have more chance of promotion that those who, from the belt upwards, use heart and brain in the service of God," the book says, highlighting the influence of homosexual favouritism on professional advancement.
"In Italy, the press has talked a lot about homosexuality and deliberately not mentioned freemasonry," Mgr Marinelli said. "They don't want people to know that freemasonry is ensconced inside the Vatican.
"It has a strong hold on the Curia and can condition the government of the church."
The book quotes an Italian freemason who claims that over 100 cardinals, bishops and monsignors from the Curia belong to a secret lodge established in 1971.
It's called the Ecclesia Lodge and is in direct contact with the grand master of the United Lodge of England, the mason claimed.
Freemasonry has traditionally been hostile to the Catholic Church and until the 1980s Catholics who joined faced excommunication.
One of the most sensational claims made in the book is that Pope Paul VI may have contributed to the death of the Bishop of Novara by writing him a fiercely worded letter of reprimand. The bishop allegedly died of a heart attack shortly after reading the missive from Giovanni Battista Montini, then Archbishop of Milan.
The book claims the future Pope persuaded the auxiliary bishop of Novara to recover the letter and prevent it from falling into the hands of investigators, later rewarding the man with a cardinal's red hat.
"Paul VI is the most prominent figure whose reputation is directly attacked. I can't imagine the plan to make him a saint can survive a million copies of Gone with the Wind in the Vatican," said Farley Clinton, an American Vaticanologist.
"Some of these things I heard a long time ago and a number of them I know to be true. Allegations about freemasonry in the Vatican have been around for more than 100 years."