Vatican secret
In this book, Loup Besmond de Senneville, deputy editor of the French daily newspaper La Croix, takes us with him into the heart of the Holy See, where he spent four years as the newspaper’s Permanent Special Envoy from August 2020. The author, who completed a work placement with us at Agence Europe as part of his studies, nearly 15 years ago now, sets out various highs and lows of Pope Francis’ pontificate, to which he was a front-row spectator, without ever departing from his notable objectivity when discussing the system he refers to as “the Machine”.
The machine is equally fascinating and unreadable. The head and heart of an exclusively male hierarchical power that has seen human ambition and vanity play out quite shamelessly, far removed from the values of the gospel, with the sole aim of domination that culminated in an unfortunate attempt at creating a theocracy in the 13th century. 700 years, and many revolutions, later, Besmond de Senneville’s work shows us – not in his words, but in how we interpret them – how much this power-hungriness remains, ignoring the warnings and remonstrations Jesus Christ himself made to his disciples: “you are not to be called Rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven”, to cite just one passage from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 23. A seat of power, the machine is also the site of a permanent battle between conservatives, nostalgic for the days of a feudal and sacrosanct institution sitting above the lay proletariat of the Church, and progressives, who are still trying to enact the reform launched by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s.
“When Francis arrived from Buenos Aires in 2013, with the stated manifesto of putting the apparatus of government of the universal Church into order, the resistance was enormous. How many times have I heard men or women from the dicasteries complaining about the ‘chaos’ and ‘confusion’ caused by reforms undertaken or even just considered by the Pope? It has to be said that since his election, Francis has never wavered from his focus on the ‘15 ailments’ of the Curia, including that of ‘believing oneself indispensable’, ‘mental petrification’, ‘divinizing directors’ and ‘worldly profit’. In response, the members of the Roman Curia set to work ‘burying’ dossiers, not out of ideological opposition to Pope Francis, but out of a beyond conservative instinct. ‘We’ve always done it like that’ can be heard several times every hour in the corridors of Rome. I once interviewed a lay insider who told me that ‘incompetence and arrogance are killing the Vatican’, and he is actually a member of the Machine. ‘The priests firmly believe that they know everything and never question themselves’, the interviewee went on to state. As for the instincts of the Curia, it is that the Curia is always right and therefore never to reflect on its practices”, Besmond de Senneville reveals.
“At the Vatican and elsewhere, in any States in which secrecy is a rule for life and work, rumours will always fill in the gaps. In such places, journalism is the art of interpreting not just the things people say, but in very many cases, the things they do not say. In this situation, rumours endlessly doing the rounds eventually acquire an inestimable value. Partly because they are impossible to verify, partly because they feed the myth of an inaccessible Vatican, and partly because… they add to the prestige of those peddling them”, Besmond de Senneville observes, going on to note that “the Pope, like all his predecessors, is perfectly well aware of this: the rumour mill is synonymous with the Vatican. It is a logical consequence of a system in which, fundamentally, there is no such thing as freedom of thought. In an elective monarchy ruling by divine right, in which the very idea of a counter-power seems ludicrous, every road leads to the pontiff. Executive, legislative and judiciary powers. The man in white cannot, by his very nature, ever be wrong. Nor can he be judged by anybody. Down here, anyway”.
“In the Vatican, avoiding meeting journalists is a national sport. In the world’s smallest State, reporters fascinate and repel in equal measure. As soon as you tell anybody that you’re a journalist, an invisible, but very real, iron curtain drops down between you (…). Here, there is the same rule for everyone: no contact with the press without prior authorisation. The rule is strict; anybody who wishes to speak needs permission from their ‘superiors’, a category comprised of senior directors of the dicasteries. If they agree to it, questions have to be sent in advance and the responses given during the interview must be re-read before they are published. Formidable machinery, aiming to discourage anybody wanting to ask questions about what goes on at the heart of the Machine. On the very few occasions when this happens, however, there is another cast-iron rule: in Rome, you never receive anybody in your office. It’s a question of confidentiality. ‘It’s exactly like Beijing. In China, the civil servants of the ministry always receive you in a separate room’, an ambassador commented. I have lost count of the number of cardinals who spot me in St Peter’s Square and speed up, pretending not to recognise me. We do in fact know each other, but the fear of being seen in public with a journalist is stronger than any other consideration. Around here, it is said that telling somebody the time is tantamount to revealing a pontifical secret”, the author writes.
“The world’s smallest State has diplomatic relations with 188 states” and that there is a nuncio in every country, whose job is to identify individuals with the potential to be appointed to the head of a dioceses or appointed Auxiliary Bishop or Coadjutor Bishop, as well as to act as the Pope’s ambassador to the local government, Besmond de Senneville explains. “The nuncio feeds the information he receives from all over the country back to Rome. It should be noted that he has a network of informants that is the only one of its kind on the planet: religious communities scattered throughout the country. In the event of the slightest issue, priests, nuns and monks inform their nuncio. The sheer amount of information that reaches Rome is the envy of most of the world’s diplomatic services. The extent is such that around a hundred of them send their representative to the Holy See – who may not be the same person that they have sent to the Italian government, or the Vatican will refuse accreditation for that individual. Papal democracy insists upon its own specific nature and has no intention of playing second fiddle to its Italian big sister”. The envy of diplomats everywhere, this mine of information on the state of the world’s also the object of frequent attempts at espionage. For instance, “during the pandemic, the Chinese breached our information systems fairly deeply”, the journalist was told by one source, who went on to say that “at the time, the Vatican appealed to several countries of the West for help to secure its networks as an emergency measure, a European ambassador confirmed a few days later. These acts of infiltration will never be publicly acknowledged by the Vatican. I have also failed to uncover the exact scale of the damage”.
The book also describes the Pope’s travels abroad, starting with his trip to Iraq. Before devoting several pages to the reduced status of women in this essentially male microcosm, he writes that “in the Roman Curia, priests can spend entire weeks without speaking to a single woman or layperson. This rather limits the vision of the individuals who are supposed to deal with such sensitive issues as diplomacy, family and even sexual morality”, the author writes, following a reference to women who “don’t really count” but who can always be found “in the apartments of the cardinals”, where they “serve as cleaners, cooks and housekeepers”. Many of them are nuns, “given a home for free, in exchange for providing a service and never-ending days”. These cardinals usually have the benefit of a home that goes with the job, that can “extend to several hundred square metres” and a monthly salary, which Pope Francis reduced from 5000 euros to 4500 euros.
Other chapters cover the expulsion of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu following the unlikely financial scandal linked to disastrous real property investments in London, or the Rupnik case, from the name of the Jesuit priest “accused of abusing dozens of nuns, exercising psychological abuse, in some cases accompanied by sexual assaults alleged to have gone as far as rape”. The plaintiffs were quickly dismissed as consenting by certain Catholics, the same ones who turn a blind eye to matters of sexual abuse in the Church, when not going so far as to accuse the media of carrying out a campaign to blacken the holy catholic, apostolic and Roman church, with seemingly no awareness – at least, one would hope – that their denial of facts and refusal to assume a duty of vigilance is precisely what gives predators the perfect environment in which to thrive. “Given the scale of the scandal, particularly the distressing accounts of the victims, Rupnik, ended up being suspended and then expelled by his fellow Jesuits. But then a bishop from Slovenia, his home country, immediately accepted him back into his diagnoses, allowing him back into the priesthood”. Somebody must answer for this impunity! (Olivier Jehin)
Loup Besmond de Senneville. Vatican secret – Quatre années au cœur du plus petit État du monde (available in French only). Stock. ISBN: 978-2-2340-9783-4. 234 pages. €20,00
Contre l’OTAN
The title of this book, which translates as ‘Against NATO’, tells you everything you need to know about the author. With surface pacifism, she builds an argument out of anything she can use to discredit the Atlantic Alliance and defence in general. Leaving objectivity far behind, German MEP of Kurdish origin Sevim Dagdelen (49), a member of the radical left-wing party Die Linke for North Rhine-Westphalia, who has been a member of the Bundestag since 2005, attempts to show that NATO alone is the source of all the planet’s ills, without the slightest criticism of Russia or China, just a reactionary response to the Alliance and its alleged aggression.
The French translation of the book enjoys the patronage of the former president of the SPD and Die Linke, Oskar Lafontaine. In more measured tones, he states in his preface that “NATO, which was created mainly to impose the interests of the United States on Europe [which is unquestionably true: Ed], is facing its litmus test [equally true]”. He explains that “whilst the European heads of state or government, particularly those of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, subscribe to the dangerous illusion that a coalition of the willing [to provide Ukraine with security guarantees in the context of a ceasefire or a peace agreement] could force Russia, a nuclear power, to bend, the United States is moving in the opposite direction, in the hope that peace with Russia could drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing”. “Warmongers hope to be able to use NATO support their policy of confrontation”, he adds, going on to say that “our enemy is not in Moscow or Beijing. Our enemy is among us, here, on the inside. Preparations for war are looming and increasingly compromise the democratic solidity of Europe. Those who will principally profit from the policy of confrontation with Russia are American investment funds such as BlackRock, which control the principal arms manufacturers in Europe and the United States and which have ‘gained’ the support of many politicians. We must defend our democracy from warmongers and war profiteers”. However, very much unlike Dagdelen, whose essay suggests that she would like to see a completely demilitarised Europe, Lafontaine argues that “Europe needs its own defence capabilities”, modelled on the “sovereignist policy” of the late French president Charles de Gaulle who, Lafontaine stresses, “showed us the path of an alternative to the transatlantic NATO”. He concludes that “De Gaulle and [former German Social Democrat Chancellor Willy] Brandt coherently defended the interests of their countries and those of Europe. It is this heritage that provides us with our foundation today. It will be the responsibility of France and Germany to prevent a suicidal war with Russia. Winning back democratic sovereignty is the condition that will stop the fall of Europe”.
In her case “against NATO”, the German MEP does not scruple to argue that the organisation was involved in the Iraq war 2003 or the 2011 or against Libya, on the grounds that member countries of the Alliance were involved in them. Unsurprisingly, she adds to her list the intervention against Yugoslavia and the deployment of the ISAF, the NATO forces in Afghanistan, to prove that NATO is not a defensive alliance. She also, with some justification, takes NATO to task over its claimed democratic values, on the basis of historical facts: the Portugal of Salazar, a founder country; maintaining the member statuses of Turkey under a military regime and the grease of the colonels. “NATO is an umbrella to protect the violations of human rights committed by its members. This does not apply only to the violation of social rights under the dictatorship of mass stockpiling weapons. On the contrary, NATO’s user policy of total impunity for any war crime committed by its members. Anybody who dares to speak out against war crimes, such as the Australian journalist Julian Assange, risks being tortured and threatened with 175 years of imprisonment in the United States. There was no serious intervention by the other NATO governments to free Julian Assange. Like sheep, the other members refrained from any criticism of American hegemony”, she adds.
In a book that combines playing down a number of certain facts, militant and, by their nature, contestable interpretations (such as the deployment of the anti-missile defence system Aegis, which was presented as a hostile act against Russia), unconfirmed rumours and manifest errors (two provide just one example of this, you can read on page 56 that the German government paid NATO 73.41 billion euros in 2023), the author goes on to criticise the work and independence of journalists, in itself nothing unusual, on the far left as well as the far right.
Elsewhere in the book, NATO is also accused of being complicit in the Israeli war in Gaza. Leading up to a conclusion that at least has the merit of acknowledging that “nobody should hope for the alliance to dissolve itself, because NATO might then bring everything else down with it” and that “at this moment in time, any form of NATO dissolution, together with the creation of an alternative collective security system, seems more or less out of reach”. Dagdelen provides five recipes to “contain the danger of a further escalation”: (1) returning to diplomatic approaches; (2) referring to international law; (3) imposing the neutrality of Ukraine as a “way of breaking the conflict with Russia”; “if we take account of the domination of the United States in its relationship with NATO and its members, we will realise that neutrality is not only a peace guarantee, it also paves the way to re-establish the sovereign democracy of countries that are now part of NATO”, she adds; (4) a return to disarmament; (5) ending the economic war, with a “disarmament treaty prohibiting unilateral economic sanctions as an illegal instrument of war principally affecting the civilian population”. (OJ)
Sevim Dagdelen. Contre l’OTAN – Pourquoi l’Alliance atlantique doit disparaître (the version we reviewed was translated from the original English by Diane Gilliard). Éditions critiques. ISBN: 978-2-4872-3208-2. 158 pages. €15,00