‘Pope Benedict was a teaching Pope, a theologian and intellectual’ a Vatican insider told BBC’s Mark Dowd. ‘His misfortune was to accede to the papacy at a time that there was a power vacuum, in which a number of middle-ranking members of the Roman Curia had turned into “little Borgias” as another clerical official put it’, reported Dowd. Pope Francis would himself refer to the Curia as the “leprosy of the papacy”, filled with clerics who were both narcissistic and self-referential. Over a period of time dating back to the final years of Pope John Paul 11, the heart of the HQ of the Roman Church had become dominated by in-fighting cliques. This was what the man responsible for Vatileaks, the Pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele, said he wanted to expose by photocopying and leaking documents.
(Quote from “Francis, Pope of Good Promise” by Jimmy Burns.
So this is what was going on when they were writing those pompous, dogmatic, unsigned documents to me!!
