All the Pope's Men (9 page)

MYTH THREE: VATICAN SECRECY

No myth about the Vatican is more enduring or widespread than the belief that it is an ultrasecret closed world, impermeable to the outsider. A cluster of adjectives expresses the idea:
Byzantine
,
mysterious
,
occult
. Here’s how one major American daily newspaper packaged the image in the lead paragraph of a feature splashed across page A1, just ahead of Cardinal Bernard Law’s December 13, 2002, resignation:

The sense of impenetrability begins at the Vatican gate just beyond
St. Peter’s Square. Swiss Guards . . . lift their pikes to allow passage only after receiving orders. Farther inside, a gatekeeper checks
his list before giving a reluctant nod for a visitor to enter a 12-foot
door reinforced with steel and iron spikes to repel invaders. . . . Inside the fortress-like building, an air of secrecy and monarchical
power wafts through elegant, marble halls like a thick plume of incense.

It’s a classic version of what most people believe the Vatican is like. It is also enormously misleading. For one thing, there are far more security checks to enter the White House than to enter the Vatican, despite the absence of iron spikes and Swiss Guards at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let’s unpack the mythology. Does the Vatican have secrets? Yes, as every government, corporation, NGO, and other institution does. Moreover, for those things it really wants to keep under wraps—such as the files of theologians under investigation or correspondence from American bishops about sexually abusive priests—the Vatican is far more insulated from pressures for disclosure than secular democracies. There are no sunshine laws that compel the Vatican to release case files, no civil judges who can order the institution to turn over records. After the Swiss Guard murders of 1998, for example, the Vatican judiciary conducted its own investigation, the results of which have never been released even to the families of those who died. Unlike corporations, the Vatican does not have to file audited financial statements or release environmental impact studies. Further, the internal culture of the Vatican often resists putting materials in the public realm, for reasons to be discussed later. At an individual level, Vatican officials can range from dismissive to unhelpful when pressed for information. Every journalist I know in Rome has a story of being told, more or less gently, to “buzz off" by a Vatican official when they asked for some insight or data.

The relevant question, however, is this: Granted all the above, is the Vatican more successful than anyone else at keeping things quiet? Not from anything I can tell. To put the point as clearly as possible: the Vatican may try to be secretive, but for the most part, it doesn’t succeed. If you are determined and capable, there’s very little about the Vatican you can’t discover.

For example, each time the Synod of Bishops concludes its business, it produces a set of propositions for the Pope. These proposals, designed to reflect the consensus of the synod, are supposed to be for the Pope’s eyes only, so that he won’t be influenced by public pressure either for or against particular propositions. The final set of propositions is distributed to participants only on the date of the vote itself, in a stamped and numbered copy, and then collected in an attempt to prevent its circulation. Yet an Italian news agency called Adista obtains the propositions and publishes them within a matter of days after the close of the synod every time. How? They do what reporters do—they gather news from their sources, without getting an engraved invitation from officialdom to do so.

Another example. Roughly a year into my stint as a Vatican correspondent, my newspaper, the
National Catholic Reporter
, broke a story regarding the sexual abuse of nuns, often by priests, in Africa and elsewhere. In some cases the priests looked to these nuns, who were often very young, as safe targets of sexual activity in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In at least one case, a priest had actually arranged to abort the child he had fathered with a nun. The disclosures, as shocking as they were in the court of public opinion, were nothing new to the Vatican. In fact, our story was based on five documents that had been submitted to the Vatican as early as 1994. We had been working on the story over a number of months and decided to go forward when I managed to obtain the fifth and final document from a Roman source. The story became a blockbuster, and pushed the Congregation for Religious, working in combination with the major umbrella groups for men and women’s religious communities, to take steps to be sure that religious women in Africa, especially in communities that depend entirely on the local bishop, are less vulnerable. At no stage in the reporting of this story did we have any official assistance from the Vatican. In fact, I provided the Vatican press office with a one-page summary of the story several days in advance of publication, seeking comment. There was no response until after we published, when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls indicated the Holy See was aware of what he called a “geographically limited" problem.

The point of the episode is that “Vatican secrecy" did not prevent the
National Catholic Reporter
from doing this story, any more than “corporate secrecy" allowed Enron to block stories about the financial scandals that eventually made that company a symbol of fiscal meltdown in the United States. The lack of sunshine laws and court orders to unseal documents did not, in the end, stop reporters from getting their hands on the incriminating materials. Is the Vatican going to bend over backward to help out when a news agency wishes to do a story that will not paint it in a flattering light? Probably not anymore than Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street rushed to open its files to British journalists investigating the death of David Kelly or than the Clinton White House made its files available to reporters working the Whitewater investments story. But the bottom line is that, in my experience, the Vatican is no more successful than other major bureaucracies in controlling the information flow.

Comparing it to other centers of global power, the Vatican is actually a great deal less secretive, because it has no off-the-books budgets for spy agencies, no classified weapons programs, no “eyes only" intelligence from satellite intercepts and wiretaps. It has, in short, no secrets of state. Moreover, despite the ominous-sounding names of some of the Vatican’s official storehouses of information, such as the Secret Archives, most documentary records are open to any researcher who is willing to buy a
tessera
, the equivalent of a library card. The Vatican policy of unsealing records by pontificate, usually seventy years after the death of the Pope, compares favorably with similar policies for releasing official government records in the United States and Great Britain. Indeed, some historians say the Holy See has been more forthcoming with critical records from World War II, for example, than either British or American intelligence agencies. Moreover, part of the reason that the Vatican can’t just throw open its archives is not a penchant for secrecy, but simply logistics: documents have to be sorted, stamped, registered, and bound. That’s expert work requiring a specialized knowledge of languages, church history, and Vatican systems, and at one stage the Holy See had only two full-time archivists on the job. Today that number is larger, but there are still under ten, because this kind of specialization doesn’t grow on trees.

It certainly is true that the Holy See imposes an official obligation of secrecy upon employees. The
Regolamento generale
, or employee handbook, distinguishes in article 38 between two types of secrecy. The first is the
segreto d’ufficio
, or secret of the office. It stipulates that no employee may give information about decisions or other news that they may know because of their work to anyone who does not have a right to that information. It might be called routine secrecy, a more acceptable-sounding word for which to Western ears would be “confidentiality." The second is the segreto pontificio, or pontifical secret, which is more rigorous, historically replacing the old “secret of the Holy Office." It calls for swearing an oath to protect the confidentiality of major decisions that concern the life of the Church. Matters that fall under pontifical secrecy are listed below. Violations can be punished with excommunication.

Every employee, from the moment he or she assumes an office in the Roman Curia, is expected to observe the rules on secrecy in both the general
Regolamento
as well as in the specific handbook for their dicastery. Personnel are also obliged to swear a profession of faith, an oath of fidelity, and a pledge to observe the
segreto d’ufficio
before the head of the dicastery or another superior, according to a formula set out in article 16 and appendix 1 of the
Regolamento
. The rules of pontifical secrecy are further spelled out in an instruction of February 4, 1974,
Secreta continere
. Falling under pontifical secrecy are: 1) the preparation and redaction of pontifical documents for which pontifical secrecy is expressly anticipated; 2) affairs that have to be dealt with by the Secretariat of State under pontifical secrecy; 3) doctrinal denunciations and publications of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as the investigations leading up to these acts; 4) extrajudicial denunciations of crimes
contra fidem
or
contra mores
, meaning against the faith or against morals, and crimes against the sacrament of penance, as well as the procedures leading to these denunciations; 5) acts of representatives of the Holy See relative to matters covered by the pontifical secret; 6) the creation of cardinals; 7) the nomination of bishops, apostolic administrators, and other ordinaries with episcopal power, including vicars, apostolic prefects, and pontifical legates, and all the informational procedures related to these appointments; 8) the nomination of superiors and other major officials of the Roman Curia; 9) anything that refers to codes and coded correspondence; 10) the affairs and practices of the Supreme Pontiff, of the chief cardinal or archbishop of a dicastery, and of pontifical representatives of sufficient importance to be covered by the pontifical secret.

These obligations may sound sweeping, but for the most part they boil down to, “Don’t give out the office’s business before it’s finished." It’s an expectation that most bureaucratic systems impose. It should also be noted that the Holy See sometimes has good reasons for insisting upon confidentiality. In canon law cases involving allegations against priests or lay employees, for example, secrecy is designed to allow witnesses and other parties to speak freely, the accused party to protect his good name until guilt is established, and victims to come forward without exposing themselves to unwanted publicity. Absolute transparency would not necessarily serve the interests of justice.

Three other values have traditionally supported secrecy in the Church. First is a certain view of law. Law, from a Roman point of view, is the expression of a human ideal, a descriptor of a perfect state of affairs. This view carries with it a realism that most people, most of the time, will fall short of the law’s ideal. It is important to uphold that ideal, however, to point people beyond themselves. Too much focus on violations could lead people to question the wisdom, or the feasibility, of the law. The public forum is for discussion of the ideal; the private forum, behind closed doors, is where individual failures are addressed. Second, there is a respect for authority. If the working assumption of democracies is that power corrupts, within the ecclesiastical system it’s precisely the opposite—power ennobles, because it flows from Holy Orders and draws on the grace of the sacrament. Secrecy thus carves out a space in which Church authorities can use discretion, finding a solution that best fits a particular set of circumstances, without fear that it will become swept up in broader public debates. The third value is objectivity. It drives some people crazy that the Vatican will not hand over its case files even to interested parties. The logic, however, is to protect the independence of the one giving judgment by not making public the input he or she has received, thus subjecting it to “spin." (This point will be further developed in chapter 3.)

There is also a spiritual logic for a certain parsimony when it comes to public disclosure. Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, former master general of the Dominican order, puts it this way: “At the heart of Catholicism and indeed of the Jewish and Christian tradition, is a belief in the immense power of words. Creation is the fruit of God’s word, and the Incarnation is a Word made flesh. The sacraments are also an instance of the trans-formative power of words in our faith. So it follows that one cannot bandy words around irresponsibly. They can give life, but they can also kill. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that one of the most serious sins was to destroy another person’s reputation by what one says. This is something that the press does frequently. I believe that this reverence for words is at least implicitly there in the traditional concern for secrecy."

While it’s true that the Vatican is hard for outsiders to grasp, this is less because it’s secretive than because it’s unique. It takes time to become familiar with the system and its personnel. Once that’s accomplished, however, there’s very little an enterprising observer can’t ferret out. For a reporter to understand the Vatican, one must master three “languages": Italian; the specialized language of the Catholic Church, meaning a knowledge of church history, scripture, theology, liturgy, and canon law; and the language of the Roman Curia, meaning its systems and culture. One doesn’t have to be a genius to crack these codes, but it requires time. One has to take Vatican officials to lunch and dinner, to attend the sometimes tedious symposia and book presentations and embassy parties where contacts are made and impressions formed, to read the theological journals and news services in several languages where intelligence on the Vatican is found. One has to have the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of theologians and church historians and diplomats handy, with the understanding that these folks are disposed to be helpful. It’s a beat where personal contacts outside official channels make an enormous difference, and all that takes time to cultivate. It is essential, however, if journalists wish to accurately open up this world to the public.