`This book wasn't written from an anti-clerical bias but rather out of a profound love for the Church. Nor was it written for the sake of scandal but rather in the interests of transparency as the Church enters the third millennium."
The speaker is Lorenzo Ruggero, head of the Milan publishing house Kaos Edizioni, and publisher of the controversial book, Gone With The Wind In The Vatican (Via Col Vento In Vaticano). Originally published last February, the book passed almost unnoticed by the wider public and might well have remained so were it not for the recent decision of the Holy See's highest appeals court, the Rota Sacra Romana (the Sacred Roman Rota), to summon one of the book's various authors, Monsignor Luigi Marinelli, to a special hearing scheduled for next Friday.
It was the news that 77-year-old Monsignor Marinelli had been summoned to the Sacra Romana which shone an unexpected spotlight on a book loosely described by Italian media this week as an account of "careerism and sex" in the Vatican. In truth, this book would appear to be much more. Indeed, its contents are serious enough for Monsignor Marinelli to run the risk of being suspended "a divinis" (i.e banned from celebrating mass and other sacraments) at the Vatican Appeals Court hearing.
The now retired Monsignor Marinelli, who worked for 35 years in the Vatican's Congregation for Oriental Churches, will face charges of defamation and slander brought against him by a relative of a cleric allegedly libelled in the book. We do not know who the cleric in question is but we do know that he is not alone, since the book is not short on less than flattering stories of life in the Holy See.
There is the Curia prelate who boasts that he has taken "a vow of homosexuality so that he would not sin by chasing after women". There is the unnamed womanising cardinal whose weaknesses are soon forgotten when he comes up with more than half a million dollars for "Solidarnosc", the Polish trade union and freedom movement.
There is the Canadian cardinal, Edoard Gagnon, called in by Paul VI to look into Curia shortcomings but soon sent packing by the Curia, without having concluded any investigation and having, in the meantime, been relieved of various dossiers. There is the story of how rival cardinals foiled Cardinal Giuseppe Siri's chances of becoming pope at the August 1978 conclave which saw John Paul I elected by planting a false and unflattering "interview" with him in a daily paper.
Homosexual encounters under the guise of "working suppers" are described as the order of the Vatican day. There is the story of a priest surprised by Israeli secret services in the arms of a nun in the Vatican's Apostolic Delegation in Jerusalem. Worse still, there is the constant insinuation that, no matter what your shortcomings or sins, all is forgiven if you have the right in-Curia connections.
Monsignor Marinelli has been notably media-shy in the last week but his publisher, Lorenzo Ruggero, insists that this book is not a collection of Vatican tittle-tattle but rather a serious analysis of how "the nature of the Catholic church has been changed" by a combination of careerism and power broking (mainly by Italian cardinals).
Furthermore, he claims that Gone With The Wind In The Vatican illustrates with painful clarity just how this process of manipulation of Church institutions has been accelerated in recent years by the all too obvious physical frailty of Pope John Paul II. Put simply, the book suggests that the old man has lost the run of the Church and that, in his absence, ruthless Italian clerics are dividing up the spoils, promoting their own people and preparing to elect one of their own as his successor.
Theories of this nature have been aired before and it would be easy to dismiss this latest book as banal cliche, were it not for some intriguing sticking points. First, the book is 300 densely printed pages long and written not only by Monsignor Marinelli but also by a number of "anonymous" clerics still working in the Curia.
Second, even if the book escaped the attention of the wider public until now, it did not go unnoticed in Rome. Some 3,000 of the 5,000 copies of the book's initial print run were sold in Rome in the weeks immediately after publication. Given the quiet nature of the book's launch and also that it was sold mainly in shops specialising in religious books, it would seem certain that senior Vatican figures bought the book and, what is more, read it with attention.
What is true is that in the months subsequent to publication, concern was expressed in the highest of Vatican places about one of the book's major themes, namely rampant careerism within both the Holy See and the Church. In an article in the Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, on March 27th, Cardinal Vincenzo Fagiolo called for an end to "the idea of promotion or transfer" relative to a bishop's appointment to a diocese or Vatican congregation, adding: "A bishop is not an official, a dignitary, a passing bureaucrat making ready for a more prestigious post".
That theme was subsequently taken up by Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, the former prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, who in a lengthy interview with the April issue of the influential religious affairs magazine, 30 Days, argued: "A diocese is not a civil administration but is part of the reality of the Church's mystery . . . and so a bishop, once appointed to a certain see, must remain there always, in general and in principle . . . The new bishop must not make other personal plans . . . he cannot say: I'll be here for two or three years and then I'll be promoted because of my skills, my talents, my gifts . . ."
Another reason for sitting up and taking notice of this book concerns its publishing house, Kaos Edizioni. For 10 years now, this small, independently run house has produced books (at an average rate of seven per year) that cannot be easily dismissed as muck-raking froth.
For example, there was Giovanni Ruggeri's Berlusconi, The Prime Minister's Business Interests ( Berlusconi, Gli Affari Del Presidente), a book which came out in the summer of 1994, shortly after media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi had taken government office. In painstaking detail, that book illustrated many of the controversial incidents along Berlusconi's rise to fame, wealth and power.
At the time, Berlusconi's supporters decried the book as libelous nonsense. Since its publication, however, Berlusconi has been convicted (at first level) in three different cases relative or similar to issues discussed in the book - namely, payment of bribes to tax inspectors, fraud in relation to the Medusa film company and illegal payments to the Italian Socialist Party via the "All Iberian" off-shore account.
More recently, Kaos has published two books on religious matters - The Vatican Merchants by Mario Guerrino, a lengthy analysis of potential fraud and corruption linked to the Church's preparations for the Jubilee Year, and The Genocide Archbishop by Marco Aurelio Rivelli, an investigation into the controversial figure of Croat Archbishop Stepinac, accused of collaboration with the SS-style Croat militia, the Ustase.
This latest Kaos publication seems set to outstrip the above mentioned, given that it will soon be topping the Italian bestseller list and is currently undergoing a 50,000-plus reprint run, and has been impossible to get hold of in Rome in the last week. Furthermore, a German translation is already under way while negotiations are ongoing for a translation into English, which should be in the shops in time for Christmas.
In the meantime, it may be worth reflecting on the saying currently going the rounds of the Vatican: "30 per cent of this book is probably true while the remaining 70 per cent is definitely true."