Are These Leaks Supposed To Impress Us?

Rorate is reporting on the latest round of Vatican documents being leaked. This time, the leaker has included a bizarre letter basically proclaiming how awesome and omniscient he/they are since he/they have "hundreds of documents" that could be unleashed at any moment. The most recent leak contains a letter from Cardinal Burke to Cardinal Bertone regarding the approval of the NeoCatechumenal Way statutes that we reported on a good while back. He wasn't real happy about it.

The first is a "top secret letter" addressed to Bertone by the Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal for the Apostolic Signatura [Card. Burke], and that deals what is branded as "the shameful event of the Neocatechumenals, on which there is a long note written by hand by Benedict XVI himself."

The other letters are from the Pope's personal secretary, Msgr. Ganswein, but the actual text is deleted.

The mole explains: "We will not publish it in a complete fashion to avoid offending the Person of the Holy Father, already put under great stress by his close collaborators." And he warns: "In order to be fair, we reserve the unabridged publication in case they persist in hiding the truth of the facts". He then concludes: "Drive out of the Vatican those truly responsible for this scandal: Mons Gänswein and Card. Bertone".


So let's review what we know:

1. Our earlier theories about "the butler did it" being a sham seem to be true.
2. Cardinal Bertone is still listed as the target.
3. The leakmeister claims to be acting in the Holy Father's best interests but has a weird way of showing it.
4. Very few of these leaks seem like they contain anything that's all that damaging.

Let's consider #4 for a second. It's a bizarre thing that is even noticeable in the mainstream media coverage of all this. The very fact that such coverage is scant (at best) is a good indication of how scandalous the information is to the secular world. In fact, when it's being reported, the story seems to be more about there being leaks at all than what is actually being leaked.

So the Curia is a bunch of back-stabbers? Woo-de-damn-hoo. Cardinal Burke doesn't like the NeoCatechumenal Way? Yeah, that's a big freaking shock. Nobody saw that coming.

I'm to the point now where I am very tempted to call BS on the leakers here. What they are doing isn't something that is going to affect change, and I have to believe that, if they had any trump cards, they would have played them by now. To refrain from doing so would seem an act of tremendous injustice given their claim that the butler is being framed (which, again, I think is likely anyway). Whoever is behind this is coming off as nothing more than a rabble-rouser with no real pull who is just looking to embarrass people. And regardless of their intentions, it seems more and more like the only person really being adversely affected is the Pope. I haven't seen any signs of Cardinal Bertone scrambling around or panicking.