Sandro Magister at his blog Chiesa has brief reports on various stories swirling about the Vatican:
When Sant’Egidio upstages the secretariat of state
On Saturday, February 21, German chancellor Angela Merkel spent 40 minutes with Pope Francis and a full hour with cardinal secretary of state Pietro Parolin, accompanied by the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher. She talked with them about the next G7, Ukraine, and more.
Afterward Angela Merkel went to the headquarters of Sant’Egidio, and in this case as well the visit lasted a little more than an hour. But thanks to the effective management of communications for the event, the meeting with the organization founded by Andrea Riccardi trounced the one with the heads of Vatican diplomacy, media-wise. Suffice it to say that “Corriere della Sera,” the major Italian newspaper read in all the corridors of power, gave much more space to Merkel’s visit with Sant’Egidio than to the one at the Vatican, not even making reference to the meeting with Parolin and Gallagher. No small letdown for the heads of Vatican diplomacy, who traditionally see as a smokescreen the encroachments of the lauded “parallel diplomacy” of Sant’Egidio:
> Vatican Diary / Sant’Egidio in supervised freedom (20.12.2011)
On the other hand, however, this coveted media exposure of their competitors may not be unwelcome to the churchmen who work with the pope on his diplomatic initiatives, seeing how the pontiff himself stigmatized this in the homily on Ash Wednesday:
“When something good is achieved, almost instinctively the desire is born within us to be esteemed and admired for this good action, to get some sort of satisfaction out of it. Jesus invites us to perform these works without any ostentation, and to confide solely in the recompense of the Father ‘who sees in secret.’”
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Malleus (aliquorum) cardinalium
Hard times for the cardinals who are seen as”dissenters” with respect to the guidelines of the current pontificate. An example of this are the three beatings that the ultra-Bergoglian portal “Vatican Insider” has handed out to three cardinals on its blacklist, in the span of a few days.
On February 14 it featured, emphasizing the name of the target, a post from the blog of Washington cardinal Donald Wuerl in which, without naming him, he blasted his fellow cardinal Raymond L. Burke for lèse-majesté toward the pope:
> Cardinal Wuerl’s response to Burke (and dissenters)
On February 16 it reported, with an abundance of exclusive details, on the moves that the pontifical council for legislative texts, with pontifical mandate, has put into action to limit the powers that Cardinal George Pell would like to attribute to himself as prefect of the secretariat for the economy, in the statutes that they are preparing:
> Ma sopra Pell c’è uno “zar” più potente di lui
On February 19, finally, it gave great emphasis to the criticisms, even sarcastic, that a Chinese priest and blogger has lodged against Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, accusing him of boycotting every hypothesis of “appeasement” between Beijing and the Holy See:
> “Cardinal Zen, don’t you believe in miracles?”
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Big hunt for the “kangaroo” Pell
After the pontifical council for legislative texts (see above), the Vatican pension fund has also taken the field against Australian cardinal George Pell. It has done so with a statement on February 20 in which it offers reassuring data on the situation of the fund itself, to oppose the “alarming data” circulating “for several months” and “even amplified by news in the press”:
The statement delves into the figures to demonstrate this assumption. But beyond the accounting aspects, what is important is the “political” side. For some time, in fact, Cardinal Pell has been sounding the alarm on the stability of the medium-term accounts of the Vatican pension fund. He did so in July of 2014, when he announced the creation of a committee of experts – crammed with big names – to study the question. The announcement came in an article published in the “Catholic Herald” in December, and was picked up on February 13 by the website “Crux” of the “Boston Globe”:
Go here to read the rest.
