All the Pope's Men (22 page)

Second, the nature of Italian journalism exacerbates the reluctance of many in the Vatican to deal with the press. “They’re just going to make it up anyway" is the attitude one often hears from curial officials who feel that there’s little to be gained from greater openness. Understandably, Vatican officials who have had bad experiences of being misrepresented, or being the objects of unfounded speculation, will be reluctant to engage the media. In truth, most Vatican officials just laugh when they see the more outlandish instances of this sort of thing and are capable of distinguishing between journalists who are serious and those who are not. Yet the cumulative effect of the way the Italian press covers the Vatican is to deepen a sense that the media is unreliable, which is the last thing likely to be helpful for an institution struggling to emerge from its historical shell.

A final example of the impact of Italian culture on the Vatican concerns attitudes toward criminal justice. This point played an important role in Vatican reactions to the American sexual abuse crisis, especially in the way curial officials reacted to proposals to require bishops to report allegations of sexual abuse against priests to the police. Most Americans regard this as a “no-brainer." Sexual abuse of a minor is a crime, so when a bishop receives an accusation against a priest, he should turn it over. Yet some in the Vatican blink at such a requirement. In part, the concern is to protect a zone of intimacy in a bishop’s relationship with his priests, so a priest does not have to worry that every time he discusses a problem with his bishop, the police will be involved. This reflects the traditional theology of the bishop’s office, in which a bishop is understood as a paterfamilias, a head of the family, and his priests are both his brothers and his sons. But there’s another factor, more sociological than theological, which is Italian skepticism about the impartiality of secular justice.

An episode from 2002 makes the point. On November 17, a bombshell verdict was delivered against seven-time former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison by an appeals court for allegedly instigating the murder of a muckraking journalist in 1979. Andreotti was first charged in the slaying in 1995 on the basis of testimony from a turncoat mob member and, after a long legal process, was exonerated in September 1999. Under Italian law, however, prosecutors as well as the defense can appeal a verdict, so the case went before an appeals court. Against all expectations, that panel found Andreotti guilty, even though it acquitted the men who were supposed to have actually done the killing. Andreotti is an avatar of the old Christian Democratic political order linked to the Church. He directs the influential Catholic journal
30 Giorni
and is a daily communicant at the church of San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini. His supporters believed that leftist magistrates were engaged in a campaign of political persecution using trumped-up allegations.

This view was widespread in Vatican circles. Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, a key player in the Roman Curia in the years that Andreotti was in power, called the lower court ruling “incredible." Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini compared Andreotti to Jesus Christ, another victim of an unjust verdict, and hoped for a “resurrection" from the Supreme Court. L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, expressed “full solidarity" with Andreotti, saying the verdict “can only be rejected by good sense." Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of the Italian bishops conference and a key advisor to the Pope, took the occasion of an address to the Italian bishops to express his “intact personal esteem" for Andreotti. Conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi minced no words, charging that Andreotti was the victim of “politicized sectors of the magistrates that have tried to change the course of democratic politics." Berlusconi, who has made attacking the alleged bias of the judicial system a staple of his rhetoric, was elected in a landslide to the prime minister’s job on May 13, 2001, despite the fact that he faces several rather serious criminal indictments himself. Many Italian voters simply assumed the charges were politically motivated and looked past them.

The point is not whether Andreotti is guilty or innocent. (In the end, the case was heard by Italy’s highest court, which reversed the appeals court and absolved Andreotti on all charges.) Most Italians assumed the courts didn’t really care about guilt or innocence. The episode confirmed for them how criminal trials are often an extention of politics by other means. Liberal judges will convict conservative defendants, and vice-versa. As one writer in
La Repubblica
, a major Roman daily, put it November 20, 2002, “Practically every high-profile case in Italy is ‘instrumentalized’ and transformed into a new Dreyfus affair."

The result is deep ambivalence inside the Vatican about automatic referral of accusations against priests to the police. What about situations, Vatican officials wonder, in which the civil authorities are out to get us? It is a question that strikes many Americans as paranoid, but not so in Rome. Americans will insist that this is not our experience, that by and large our district attorneys and judges are fair and independent, and their involvement is needed to correct the Church’s tendency to protect its own. Why can’t the Vatican trust the American church to craft policy that makes sense for its situation? There’s merit to that question, and in the end the Vatican did not block U.S. policies requiring credible allegations to be relayed to civil authorities. Yet in a globalized world, nothing remains local for very long. The Vatican is keenly aware that the United States is the world’s leading culture and that whatever American Catholics do will be watched and imitated. The Vatican was convinced that the American bishops were setting a global precedent, and they worried about what that precedent might mean in cultures with different experiences of the trustworthiness of the legal system.

Layer Four: Europe

During the diplomatic wrangling over the war in Iraq, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous distinction between “old" and “new" Europe, suggesting that opposition to the U.S. position was coming from a superannuated old guard. Whatever the merits of Rumsfeld’s analysis, there is no place that’s more “old Europe" than the Holy See, since it is both Europe’s oldest state and its oldest continually functioning institution of any sort. On many contemporary issues, from Church/state relations to gay marriage, the Holy See embodies a sort of antique European tradition that stands over against the present secularized European consensus. At the same time, many of the officials who call the shots in the Holy See have grown up in the same prominent families, attended the same schools, and move in the same cultural circles as Europe’s political, industrial, and intellectual leaders. They cannot help but be, in many ways, cut from the same cloth.

When I arrived in Rome in July 2000, one of the first things I did was to make the rounds of English-speaking ambassadors accredited to the Holy See. The ambassadors can be good sources of insight on the Vatican, because in some ways they have an insider’s knowledge, but at the same time they are not part of the Holy See and can maintain a critical distance. One of the ambassadors gave me the following advice in trying to make sense of Vatican diplomacy: “Never forget that the Holy See is located in Europe, and most of its key decision-makers are European. If all else fails, ask yourself how European governments see a particular issue, and nine times out of ten that will end up being the stand of the Holy See."

Not everyone, it should be said, buys this bit of analysis. I once asked Cardinal Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Pontifical Council for the Laity, if he believed the Vatican thinks like other European governments. He laughed, asking: “European governments of what century?" Stafford has a point—the Holy See and, say, the post-revolutionary government of France have some deep philosophical differences. Yet the ambassador’s comment also reflects a genuine insight, which is that the sociological reality of European upbringing and a primarily European circle of discourse cannot help but exercise a tug on the way the personnel in the Vatican think. Here we’ll take two examples of the point: Vatican attitudes toward the Middle East and toward the United Nations.

MIDDLE EAST

European governments tilt toward the Palestinians on the Israeli/Palestinian problem, driven in part by a widespread European sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people, in part (at least in Britain and France) by the legacy of colonial pro-Arab policies. The European left, for whom colonialism is akin to original sin, has watched as the Israeli government repeats what they regard as the classic oppressive behavior of a colonial power, and it has fueled a severe political reaction. This tendency has been especially pronounced since the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps carried out by Israel’s Lebanese allies. The election of Ariel Sharon, widely regarded as the author of that atrocity, as Israel’s prime minister brought European sympathy for the Palestinians to a new level. For those in search of a more crass explanation, there is also a long history of trade relations between Europe and Arab nations.

Whatever the reason, the Palestinians generally see Europe and the EU as a major beachhead of international support. For much of the 1990s, the European Union was a principal source of financial backing for the Palestinian National Authority. In March 1999, the European Council affirmed the Palestinians’ “unqualified" right to self-determination, “including the option of a state." Some observers sympathetic to the Israelis say that at times European governments have veered dangerously close to tacitly endorsing terrorism. On April 15, 2002, Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden supported a UN Human Rights Commission resolution that approved the use of “all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. It is difficult to imagine the United States, especially in the post-9/11 era, voting to accept such language.

These policy choices reflect popular sentiment. A May 2002 survey conducted by First International Resources for the Anti-Defamation League found that by a two-to-one margin Europeans are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis on the conflict in the Middle East. The survey also found that the more closely Europeans follow their media, the more likely they are to support the Palestinians, which reflects the pro-Palestinian tilt of much of the European press. In 2003, for example, Israel’s Foreign Ministry briefly refused to speak with the BBC after it aired a documentary comparing Israel to Iraq, implying that Israel is not a democracy and suggesting that Israel had used nerve gas against the Palestinians. The film employed concentration camp imagery, drawing jailed nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu clutching at and peering through a barbed wire fence. It also juxtaposed America’s refusal to discuss Israel’s nuclear capability with Bush saying “the greatest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."

This wide European sympathy for the Palestinians has long been reflected in the Holy See. The Vatican has vocally supported the Palestinian right to self-determination. John Paul II repeated the point in March 2003, when he received the credentials of Oded Ben-Hur as Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See. “The Holy See is convinced that the present conflict will be resolved only when there are two independent and sovereign states," the Pope said. Sometimes the rhetoric can be much sharper. In April 2002, Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls issued a statement saying that the Pope “rejects the unjust and humiliating conditions imposed on the Palestinian people as well as reprisals and revenge attacks which do nothing but feed the sense of frustration and hatred." During the 2002 crisis at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, when Palestinian gunmen forcibly entered the basilica and refused to leave, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, regularly referred to the standoff as an Israeli “siege," even accusing the Israelis of trying to “exterminate" the Palestinian people.

In terms of specific policy proposals, the Vatican has long supported the deployment of international observers, meaning some kind of peacekeeping force, to the region and a special international status for Jerusalem—both proposals anathema to Israel’s conception of its own sovereignty. The Vatican’s affection for the Palestinians is visible in ways large and small. In the chapel just off the main hall used for meetings of the Synod of Bishops, for example, the walls are lined with a set of pearl-white Stations of the Cross, a gift to John Paul from Yasser Arafat. The Pope personally instructed that Arafat’s gift be placed in this high-profile spot.

The European cultural matrix of the Holy See is, of course, only one factor shaping this stance. Vatican diplomats are genuinely convinced that the current state of affairs amounts to a serious injustice against the Palestinians. Beyond that, there is also the realpolitik concern for the fate of the 300,000 Christians in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, of whom a little under half are Catholic. These Christians are almost entirely Palestinian Arabs, and their welfare is linked to the general situation of the Palestinian community. Under the weight of the second Intifadah, the occupation, and the general economic malaise, Christians have been abandoning the “Holy Land" in large numbers. In the town of Bethlehem, for example, the proportion of the population which is Christian has dropped from 80 percent before 1948 to less than 33 percent today. The Holy See’s nightmare scenario is that the holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and elsewhere will become museums without living Christian populations. More broadly, the Holy See is concerned about its dialogue with Islam, especially given post-9/11 concerns about a clash of civilizations. The Holy See’s perceived support for the Palestinian cause is obviously of value in fostering good relations with Islam, at both the global and local levels.